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Split between dark and light, this book records the dichotomy of human experience with unflinching force and clarity. It deals with break-up, depression, illness and death. But it also reveals an intense involvement with nature and a capacity for healing and love. There are intimate personal poems reflecting on relationships with people and creatures; poems which enter the lives of real and imaginary characters, Keats and Medea and Blodeuwedd, for example; and also poems which engage with paintings and political events. Set in a territory which connects child with adult, myth with reality, the personal with the universal, the book shows a poet fully open to the richness and possibilities of the world but also aware of its violence and pain, not as a remote observer but as someone who is a part of it.
The title of Vicki Feaver’s remarkable new collection derives from Blake’s illustration of a child standing with one foot on a ladder to the moon, crying ‘I want! I want!’ In the title poem it represents her childhood ambition to be a poet; in another, she rejects pressure towards achievement and longs to return to the sensual world of the earth. This startlingly honest book follows the ladder of a life for seventy-five years, in poems that show how much is connected. Unlocking the voice of a silenced, powerless girl, Feaver writes about an apparently stable childhood which, to her, was painfully insecure: tormented with parental expectations and sibling jealousy, torn between mother and grandmother. The eleven-year-old who wanted to become a poet becomes the woman ‘buried under ice with words burning inside’, who becomes the old woman still ‘searching for words’ – fearful now of memory loss and a failing body. I Want! I Want! is the work of a poet looking for a pattern in her life before it’s too late. Urgent, accessible and deeply moving, this is poetry of witness and survival: a vivid testament to the triumph of a poet’s spirit.
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'One of the best novels I've read in years: obsessive, intimate and very funny' Blake Morrison, Author of Two Sisters 'Stunning . . . it almost feels transgressive' Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail 'One of the most startling novels I've read this year' Frances Wilson, TLS 'This book is brilliant - brave, truthful and intelligent' Wendy Cope 'Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences' Claire Kilroy, Guardian 'I will break him; he will break me, and when we are broken, we will be even, and then we can be put back together again' Jane has been accustomed to clever, undemonstrative men. So when, as a young woman, she meets Ardu, she is instantly bewitched by his intellect and detachment. What starts as a crush turns into something far darker, an all-consuming obsession, from which, years later, she is still reeling. Crazy is a work of autofiction, a startling story of obsessive love, addiction, motherhood and work. It is a reckoning with fiction and with truth: how these things play out on the body; what it takes for a woman to write out her own life.
Ian Duhig has long inspired a fervent and devoted following. With The Lammas Hireling - the title poem having already won both the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Poem - Duhig has produced his most accessible and exciting volume to date, and looks set to reach a whole new audience. A poet of lightning wit and great erudition, Duhig is also a master balladeer and storyteller who shows that poetry is still the most powerful way in which our social history - our lives, loves and work - can be celebrated and commemorated.
In Their Own Words is a celebration of the variousness of contemporary poets living and writing in the UK today. 56 poets talk about their own poetic voices and their work. Essential reading for anybody who cares about poetry.A backstage peek behind the poetry of some of the best contemporary UK writers. Edited by T.S. Eliot prize winner George Szirtes and Helen Ivory — two of the UK’s most respected poets and teachers.In Their Own Words is an examination of the voices writing in the UK today – the book addresses multiculturalism, page and stage, and LBG issues, as well as traditional ‘page’ poetry.This book is not retrospective, it is a representation of the poetry world as a living, breathing developing thing.Readers will get an insight into the many ways the poetic voice can develop – it’s a behind the scenes look at the poetics of the poetry.There is nothing currently available quite like it.
The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year 600AD. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the English, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down by two medieval scribes. It is comprised of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell, and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics. Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke is the first poet to create a translation. She animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today.
A collection of essays on Elizabeth Bishop drawing on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop confrence, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-jones and Anne Stevenson.
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Sarah Jackson explores the edges of writing in this uncanny book of touch. Tender, haunting, and yet beautifully poised, the poems in Pelt get right under your skin. Composed in four parts, the collection takes you on an unsettling journey between infancy and adulthood. Veering from birds to blindness, from hides to hiding, "Pelt" uncovers the unfamiliar in the everyday. "Pelt" is written in the dark. It asks to be read through your fingertips. Striking and elegant, subtle and yet full of desire, this is a brilliant debut.