Partial Contents: Beyond the moor and mountain crest; Her strong enchantments failing; In valleys green and still; Could man be drunk for ever; The night my father got me; The sigh that heaves the grasses; Onward led the road again; and When lads were home from labour.

    Sparrow's dream is the World Lightweight Championship. But when he finally has it in his grasp he can't deliver the finishing punch. Sparrow's life falls apart, and fifteen years later he's a bum, a loser. Then something happens that convinces him that there are still things worth fighting for ...

    A mysterious and elusive love affair haunts the lives of three women in Australia. Twenty years later, on the other side of the world, Charade Ryan sorts through story and counter-story for her father, the legendary Nicholas, and the truth about her origins.

    A globetrotting Irish travel writer, Kathleen de Burca is used to living--and loving--on the run. On the brink of fifty, she decides to leave her job and rethink her life. Intrigued by a divorce case dating back to the days of the Potato Famine, she tries hand at writing about it. The case, called "The Talbot Affair," detailed the clandestine liaison between the wife of a British landlord and an Irish servant in Ireland in the 1850s. After a bitter thirty-year absence, Kathleen returns to Ireland, the land of her troubled childhood and turbulent heritage, in search of answers to her questions about desire and lasting love.

    

    This selection offers a timely retrospective of the contemporary poetry of Simon Armitage, and is a perfect introduction to his work.

    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times