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The Grimoire of Grimalkin was conceived during passionate affairs with French fin-de-siècle literature and Russian poets from the 1920s of the obscure kind. At the same time, the poet was conducting amorous relations with Old English fairy tales, and the English language itself, its past, present and future. Roots were plundered, whilst flirting with Plato’s notions of the thing itself versus the image conjured up by the word. There is a strong strain of the Eastern courtly love tradition, too – the wretched, tortured lover, but it is never quite clear who the object of love is. Wrapped in necromancy, invocations and references to the Devil, The Grimoire of Grimalkin is a baroque excurs...
For children seeking their first book of poetry, or adults looking to rediscover a language they have lost, this playful reimagining of an ABC book is for youngsters of all ages. Written for and dedicated to the authors' children, these poems are love letters to the English language, drawing on avant-garde poetic traditions to celebrate the sounds and imagery of letters and words as they emerge into meaning. Moving through the alphabet - each letter illustrated with a beautiful collage - this book is a journey through the foundations of our language.
Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that landscape writing need not be confined to literary tourism, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. This is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing.
In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic at times nihilistic at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived. Praise for The Fool and The Bee: "Corless-Smith has an extraordinary eye for detail and this meticu...
Landscape from a Dream is Elisabeth Bletsoe's first collection in ten years and offers startling evidence of a powerful voice that should be better known. Very much a poet of place, Elisabeth Bletsoe fuses elements of folklore, botany, literature, myth and narrative into a poetry that is at once feminist in spirit, forthright, and - to a certain extent - at odds with the prevailing British poetic styles, whether conservative or radical. Rooted in the landscape of her native Dorset, this is poetry of deep observation, but within that she also gives voice to some of Thomas Hardy's heroines - not just Tess Durbeyfield, but lesser-known female characters such as Marty South in The Woodlanders - characters who are much a part of this Dorset landscape as Bletsoe's poetry is. And the voices they gain are not the voices in Hardy's narratives, but strong, independent voices who have thrown off their creator.
microbursts is a collection of hybrid, lyric essays about the places between life and death; memoir and poetry; making and letting go. Originally written by Reeder as an intense text-based collection of lyric and experimental essays responding to the illnesses and deaths of her parents, it confronts the raw emotions of crisis, grief and creativity. Through collaboration with Thomson, the project expanded to consider how design and visual intervention might alter the nature and impact of the text. The outcome is a book which explores the subjects of illness, crisis, creativity, caring, death and grief, alongside the aesthetic and formal concerns of cross-genre writing, including how image, fo...
Simone Atangana Bekono's poems are vivid and arresting, with the feeling of letters or diary entries. In nine breath-taking streams of consciousness, the poet explore race, gender and sexuality, addressing the social stigmatization of race and gender and invoking empathy and human connection in a voice that is both confident and innovative.
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Sascha Akhtar's method-writing invites the poetry into a pre-envisaged form which is then adhered to stringently. The original manuscript was written continuously on exactly 199 pages. The poet was interested in the idea of 99 names of Divine Power in Sufi philosophy, with the 100th name being a secret. The poets imagination was captured by this idea that a whole is not complete without one of its "names," and yet the revelation of that name is not tenable in our current human incarnation. The forms on each page of the trees, sorry, poems were worked carefully. Each page has its own shape & presence. The title was pre-assigned as a philosophical & semantic conundrum that arose whilst on a wa...
Deborah Alma's poems are gloriously pungent, teeming with colours, textures and smells. In'True Tales of the Countryside,' her debut collection, Alma writes vividly about sex, love and ageing in rural Shropshre and Wales, and reflects on her experiences as a mixed-race, Anglo-Indian woman.