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Feel Free by Nick Laird


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Three Poems


Hannah Sullivan - 2018
    Eliot Prize 2018One of Bustle's 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection is a revelation – three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity, and substance. Though each poem stands apart, their inventive and looping encounters make for a compelling unity. "You, Very Young in New York" captures a great American city, in all its alluring detail. It is a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. "Repeat until Time" begins with a move to California and unfolds into an essay on repetition and returning home, at once personal and philosophical. "The Sandpit after Rain" explores the birth of a child and the loss of a father with exacting clarity. In Three Poems, readers will experience Sullivan's work with the same exhilaration as they might the great modernizing poems of Eliot and Pound, but with the unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice.

Soho


Richard Scott - 2018
    Examining how trauma becomes a part of the language we use, Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine.The collection crescendos to Scott's tour de force, 'Oh My Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps of Soho Square becomes a search for true lineage, a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves.

40 Sonnets


Don Paterson - 2015
    Some take a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has been visible in his work since his first book of poems, Nil Nil, in 1993.Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coalshed, the war, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the 'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .'In 40 Poems Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date. This is a rich and accomplished new work from one of the foremost poets writing in English today.

Seeing Things: Poems


Seamus Heaney - 1991
    Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father.

The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile


Alice Oswald - 1996
    Previously published in Anvil New Poets 2, a selection chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and winner of the 1994 Eric Gregory Award, Oswald already clearly demonstrates a distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily beautiful: intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham, a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally talented young poet.

If I Don't Know


Wendy Cope - 2001
    These are poems of well-tempered yearning, conditional idylls which sing in praise of lying fallow, the creativity of daydream, the yeast of boredom, the truths of intermediacy. Wendy Cope's formal tact is alertly present - in triolets, rondeaux, villanelles, squibs, epigrams - small forms whose power to disarm goes hand in hand with her characteristically tart ripostes to the way things (usually) are. This collection extends the variousness of her occasions.

On Balance


Sinéad Morrissey - 2017
    The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland – the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane – celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in ‘Articulation’ we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, ‘whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz’, suspended in time ‘for however long he lasts before he crumbles’.

Paper Aeroplane: Poems 1989–2014


Simon Armitage - 2014
    Now, twenty-five years on, Simon Armitage's reputation as one of the nation's most original, most respected and best-loved poets seems secure. Paper Aeroplane: Poems 1989-2014 is the author's own selection from across a quarter-century of work, from his debut to the latest, uncollected work. Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor and Seeing Stars, this generous selection provides an essential gathering of this most thrilling of poets, and is key reading for students and general readers alike.

Selected Poems


Louis MacNeice - 1944
    MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.

Ordinary Beast


Nicole Sealey - 2017
    Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.

The Remains of Elmet


Ted Hughes - 1979
    Ted Hughes, who was born and brought up in the part of the world she has captured in these atmospheric studies, was inspired by them to provide a verse text, one of the most personal things he has written.

77 Dream Songs


John Berryman - 1964
    This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

She Felt Like Feeling Nothing


R.H. Sin - 2018
    Sin pursues themes of self-discovery and retrospection. With this book, the poet intends to create a safe space where women can rest their weary hearts and focus on themselves.

The Man With Night Sweats


Thom Gunn - 1992
    Originally published in 1992, it was Thom Gunn's first book of verse in ten years.

Collected Poems


Edward Thomas - 1974
    The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.