Poetry
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Poet in New York (Penguin Modern Classics)
'There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre . . .' So wrote Conrad Aiken of Lorca's violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Born and brought up in Andalusia, Lorca's reaction to the brutality and loneliness of the vast city was one of amazement and indignation. His poetry moved away from the lyricism of the early Romanceros and became a vehicle for experimental techniques through which he expressed tortured feelings of alienation and dislocation. Based on a new edition of the original text, Greg Simon's and Steven White's new translation brings to life Lorca's arresting imagery. Christopher Maurer, a leading authority on Lorca's work, provides an enlightening introduction placing Poet in New York in context, and there are translations of Lorca's letters as well as a lecture he gave about the work. Illustrated with archive photographs, this comprehensive volume will make Lorca's masterpiece available to a whole new generation of readers.
Selected Poems: with New Supplement (Penguin Modern Classics)
The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.
W.B. Yeats (Faber 80th Anniversary Edition)
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was not only Ireland's greatest poet but one of the most influential voices in world literature in the twentieth century. His extraordinary work, in the words of this volume's editor Seamus Heaney, encourages us to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions.
Ian Hamilton Collected Poems
A professional man of letters - critic, editor, biographer - though never a professional poet, Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) referred to his poems as 'miraculous lyrical arrivals', and he bided their time with exemplary patience and humility. His widely praised first collection, "The Visit", published by Faber in 1970, was incorporated into Fifty Poems in 1988, itself expanded to Sixty Poems in 1998. In a preface to the former collection, he wrote: 'Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And in certain moods, I would agree'. Readers of Hamilton's condensed and immaculate oeuvre have felt otherwise: the poems of his youth and middle years (there was to be no opportunity for a late flowering) acquired talismanic significance for his contemporaries, and their combination of terseness and emotional intensity continues to set an example to younger poets. Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative "Collected Poems" contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.
Plan B
An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet, Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer, Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre - photometry.
Street Ballads
This collection of poetry by George Barker includes an assessment of Barker's contemporaries including descriptions of Auden and Yeats.
The Broken Word
Set in the 1950s, "The Broken Word" is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history. The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'.As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.
Complete Poems
This is the definitive edition of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognised as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, loved by readers and poets alike. This collection includes her four published volumes, fifty uncollected works, and translation of Octavio Paz, Max Jacob and others. Bishop's poems combine humour and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape (from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida where she later lived), human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. Her father died when she was one, her mother was committed to a mental hospital when Elizabeth was five, and her life was often psychologically or physically difficult. She was witty and shunned self-pity, but some poems thinly conceal her estrangements as a woman, a lesbian, an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, a frequently hospitalized asthmatic, and a sufferer of depression and alcoholism. "I'm not interested in big-scale work as such," she once told Lowell. "Something needn't be large to be good." 'When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country,' Robert Lowell. If ever there was a poet whose every scrap of writing should be in print, that poet must be Elizabeth Bishop' Christopher Reid.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
This remains one of the most celebrated books of erotic poetry published in the last 100 years. Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971.
The Collected Poems: 1956-1998
Zbigniew Herbert is one of the outstanding poets of the last century. This exceptional new translation brings together, for the first time in English in one volume, his entire poetic output - from his first book of poems, "String of Light", in 1956, to his volume, previously unpublished in English, "Epilogue of the Storm". As Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's "Selected Poems", this definitive collection is 'bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate'.
Dart
Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices, drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.
Autumn Journal: A Poem (Faber poetry)
Written between August and December 1938, this is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months; the trivia of everyday life set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. Originally published in 1996.
Collected Poems
For both readers and critics, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, and the second posthumous "Collected Poems", entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, attempts, for the first time, to print MacNeice's poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the collections published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. This makes it easier to read the poet in the published forms in which he was read by his contemporaries. In choosing to re-create the environments of MacNeice's individual volumes of poetry, moreover, this new "Collected Poems" reflects the opinion that MacNeice works best in and through those separate volumes, particularly so in the brilliant return to form - and unique kinds of return on lyric form itself - of the last three collections. The texts of the poems in the new edition are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections. The new "Collected Poems" also includes, as appendices, "The Last Ditch" - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and "The Revenant", a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from "Blind Fireworks", MacNeice's first published book of verse.
Collected Poems
This edition of Larkin's poems presents his four published books The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows in their original sequence. The text also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this collection of poems returns readers to the book Larkin might have intended if he had lived.
The Lost Leader
'No poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people's songs, the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie,' proposed Edwin Muir. Yet many of the poems in Mick Imlah's new collection do take the most over-worn of Scottish myths as their apparent starting points, spanning the Wallace and the Bruce; the Bonnie Prince (pivotal "Lost Leader" of the title), Robert Burns and Walter Scott; whisky, Clydeside and football. Imlah's approach to this folklore is brilliantly fresh, a modern, sardonic but strongly-felt rendering of Scotland: from AD 500, by way of a guided tour of Iona, to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot. And, as the chronicle reaches the twentieth century, the poems turn to friends and family - childhood reminiscences, elegies and celebrations - influenced still by sporting and military fantasy, the charm of history and the power of anachronism.
Collected Poems
The death of Michael Donaghy in 2004 at the age of fifty robbed poetry of one of its best-loved and most naturally gifted practitioners. A modern metaphysical, Donaghy wrote poetry of great wisdom, grace, charm, erudition and consummate technical accomplishment; this book gathers together all Donaghy's mature poetry, and includes the full texts of his four published volumes, as well as a number of fine uncollected pieces. As the poet-critic Sean O'Brien has remarked, Donaghy will come to be seen as one of the representative poets of the age. The publication of his "Collected Poems" is a major event in the literature of our time.
Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them. He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.
In Features
- Grist for the Mill by Chris Womersley
- Stephen Kelman
- Samantha Harvey
- Courtney Sullivan
- Lucy Caldwell
- Padgett Powell
- Umberto Eco
- Prizing Asian Literature by David Parker
- Dag Solstad
- Ellen Feldman
In Fiction
- The Suicide Room by Adam Ross
- Management by Luiza Sauma
- In the Cave by Tessa Hadley
- All Fall Down by SJ Butler
- Professor Andersen by Dag Solstad
- Kate Minola by Marius Brill
- Two Ways of Leaving by Alois Hotschnig
- A Tender Meditation by Lucy Beresford
- SOME TIME AFTER BY CHARLOTTE BEESTON
- Jenna by Andrew Kaufman
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