The American Night presents Morrison's previously unpublished work in its truest form. With their nightmarish images, bold associative leaps, and volcanic power of emotion, these works are the unmistakable artifacts of a great, wild voice and heart.

    In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures, even parts of the body, act out their special roles, each endowed with its own irrepressible life. With Crow, Hughes joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit.'

    Whoever did it left a mysterious clock-like symbol on the wall . . . drawn in blood.Stranger still, the killer has left a clue: the business card of an ex-cop.Corpses keep turning up in the strangest of places. Can Helen prove herself and piece together the case before the body count rises?Meet the Detective: Helen CarterDetective Sergeant Helen Carter is used to getting a rough time of it at work. As one of the few women officers around, she has heard it all before: she’s only there as a box-ticking exercise, or she only got the job because of her father, who was a detective inspector. But she can handle it. She knows she can hold her own against any man on the force. The only thing she can’t handle, however, are the constant fights with her fiancé, Ted.The SettingEdinburgh CID is on the third-floor of the ugly, modern concrete lump that is the police station. On a sunny day, you can look right out to Arthur’s Seat. And on any day, you can see spotty-faced, bored teenagers coming and going from the local high school across the road. With its historic cobbled streets and fair share of deprivation, Edinburgh police are up against every type of criminal imaginable.

    The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

    They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

    Initially, it appears to be a simple case of a girl escaping to start a new life but it soon becomes apparent that there are ominous undertones.When a woman's body is found on a nearby beach the case takes an even darker turn. Craig focuses his attention on the seedy world of escorts and their clients. A pimp with a violent history and a number of witnesses with their own secrets to protect block his investigation.He finally breaks through the wall of lies and discovers a gruesome truth that leads to a dramatic and explosive climax.