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Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Zoe Brigleys third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia OKeeffe, Thomas Hardys Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopins The Awakening. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple, from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. The Adoption Papers won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2022 The Adoption Papers was selected as one of ten books representing the 1990s in The Big Jubilee Read, a celebration of great books from across the Commonwealth to mark the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, one of only three poetry collections out of 70 books on the list. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. 'Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?' Mae Wests racy wisecrack could have been aimed at this book, which is packed with 69 high-calibre, sharp-shooting poems. Pleased to See Me bulges with boldly playful and seriously sensual treatments of everything you ever wanted to know about sex but never thought to find in a poem. Pleased to See Me is a sassy and unashamedly saucy celebration of fleshly pleasures by some of our finest poets. These are very sexy poems not just because they are about sex, says Astley, but because their luscious language is handled with wit and sureness of touch. This is the first book to show how the way poets write about sex has changed dramatically. As in so much else, the boundaries have shifted. Sex in modern poetry as in films, novels and music is treated freely and frankly, with passion, tenderness and a great sense of fun. Expect surprises and reversals as well as creepiness and unease, coupled with in-your-face exuberance. Were talking strong language and strong emotion here. Editor Neil Astley caught the zeitgeist in Staying Alive, his highly praised anthology of poems on every aspect of modern living. Now he turns to more intimate matters, bringing you a spicy selection of X-rated contemporary poems for reading in bed. Pleased to See Me covers and uncovers everything we like doing with our bodies, both women and men. These are poems to have fun with. Read them to your lover. Make this your personal pillow book. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of The Kids, the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race and their fundamental intersection with education are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach. The Kids a Poetry Book Society Choice won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Fine. What are the contours of a life? For Andrew Greig: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left, late love.they're all here in these wildly diverse, affirmative, open-hearted poems. As a poet and latterly as a novelist, Andrew Greig is one of Scotland's most esteemed writers. Each of his poetry books has been distinctively different, from the early and late poems rooted in the natural world, to the game-playing extended narratives of exultation and risk, from human love to the mountaineering poems. But this selection covering 35 years of his poetry shows how the thrust of all his work is the re-enchantment of this life.

Paperback. Zustand: Fair. This collection of Jean 'Binta' Breeze's poetry and stories, published in 1997, included poems such as 'caribbean woman', 'Song for Lara' and 'I will come'. Now out of print, much of the book is reprinted in her later retrospective, Third World Girl: Selected Poems (with live readings DVD) published in 2011. A readable copy of the book which may include some defects such as highlighting and notes. Cover and pages may be creased and show discolouration.

Paperback. Zustand: Fine. Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the worlds most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an airport for incoming translations - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

Paperback. Zustand: Fair. This book helps readers, writers and teachers to hack their way into the jungle of contemporary poetry. It informs, demystifies, illuminates and excites. It gives a realistic account of the poetry scene in Britain and Ireland, corrects common misconceptions and allows young or new writers to see themselves in context. Paul Hyland has written the book he wanted to read when he started getting into poetry. Modernists to Martians: Groups, movements, fashions and inuences. Jargon and hype: What it all means in plain English, from the ludic to the ludicrous. Key books: Which are the most important collections and the most inuential anthologies? Which are the poems of our time? Poetry readings: The circuit and the circus. The importance of the ear, the power of the spoken word versus the ego-trip turn-off. Getting into print: The editors eye view. Submitting work to magazines and publishers. How to target editors and save time, paper and money. Competitions and prizes: Winning words. Competition poems. Do prizes lead to publication? Awards and bursaries. Organisations: Poetry societies, Arts Councils, regional arts boards etc. Who your allies are. How they help and how you should approach them. Critical help: Where you can get feedback and advice. Postal services, pundits and gurus. Courses, workshops and writers-in-residence. Nice Little Earners: Jobs poets can do. Readings, writers-in-schools, residencies. Resources: A wealth of information and listings, together with provocative chapters on both Riches and Paranoia. A readable copy of the book which may include some defects such as highlighting and notes. Cover and pages may be creased and show discolouration.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies with their vast lists of poets summoned up to serve a critics argument or to illustrate a journalistic overview. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points up the connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Edna Longley draws the poetic line of the century not through culture-defining groups but through the work of the most significant poets of our time. Because her guiding principle is aesthetic precision, the poems themselves answer to their circumstances. Readers will find this book exciting and risk-taking not because her selections are surprising but because of the intensity and critical rigour of her focus, and because the poems themselves are so good. This is a vital anthology because the selection is so pared down. Edna Longley has omitted showy, noisy, ephemeral writers who drown out their contemporaries but leave later or wiser readers unimpressed. Similarly there is no place here for the poet as entertainer, cultural spokesman, feminist mythmaker or political commentator. While anthologies survive, the idea of poetic tradition survives. An anthology as rich as Edna Longleys houses intricate conversations between poets and between poems, between the living and the dead, between the present and the future. It is a book which will enrich the readers experience and understanding of modern poetry. The anthology covers the work of 70 poets: Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Edwin Muir, T.S. Eliot, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Hugh MacDiarmid, Wilfred Owen, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Robert Graves, Austin Clarke, Basil Bunting, Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Norman Cameron, William Empson, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, Henry Reed, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, W.S. Graham, Keith Douglas, Edwin Morgan, Philip Larkin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Douglas Dunn, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan, Tom Leonard, Carol Rumens, Selima Hill, Ciaran Carson, James Fenton, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Jo Shapcott, Ian Duhig, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Selected Poems draws on Jenny Joseph's first four collections of poetry, The Unlooked-for Season (1960), Rose in the Afternoon (1974), The Thinking Heart (1978) and Beyond Descartes (1983). The poems explore the duality of existence, a track that runs through all her work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. Jenny Joseph's Selected Poems includes 'Warning', her much celebrated monologue in which a young woman talks of her fantasies of old age, voted Britain's favourite modern poem in a BBC poll in 2006. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Over the Moon is her fifth book from Bloodaxe. These are poems of joy and sadness, of mourning and celebration: poems about music and feet, church bells, beds, cafe tables, bad language and sudden silence. In contrast with her previous work written amidst the hubbub of India, these new poems are mostly set in London, where she has built a new life with - and since the death of - her husband Simon Powell. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead the underworld and the human living world and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmores tenth and final poetry book, was her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, was added to all subsequent printings. Her posthumous retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 (2019), covers ten collections she published over four decades up to and including Inside the Wave. Costa Book of the Year 2017, winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Drawing on his extensive experience of poetry workshops and courses, Peter Sansom shows you not how to write but how to write better, how to write authentically, how to say genuinely what you genuinely mean to say. This practical guide is illustrated with many examples. Peter Sansom covers such areas as submitting to magazines; the small presses; analysing poems; writing techniques and procedures; and drafting. He includes brief resumes and discussions of literary history and literary fashions, the spirit of the age, and the creative process itself. Above all, his book helps you learn discrimination in your reading and writing - so that you can decide for yourself how you want your work to develop, whether that magazine was right in returning it or if they simply don't know their poetic arse from their elbow. Writing Poems includes sections on: Metre, rhyme, half-rhyme and free verse. Fixed forms and how to use them. Workshops and writing groups. Writing games and exercises. A detailed, annotated reading list. Where to go from here. Glossary of technical terms. Writing Poems has become an essential handbook for many poets and teachers: invaluable to writers just starting out, helpful to poets who need a nuts-and-bolts handbook, a godsend to anyone running poetry courses and workshops, and an inspiration to all readers and writers who want a book which re-examines the writing of poems. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple, from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. The Adoption Papers won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2022 The Adoption Papers was selected as one of ten books representing the 1990s in The Big Jubilee Read, a celebration of great books from across the Commonwealth to mark the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, one of only three poetry collections out of 70 books on the list. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who arent sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death. Grief isnt denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkins famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead the underworld and the human living world and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmores tenth and final poetry book, was her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, was added to all subsequent printings. Her posthumous retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 (2019), covers ten collections she published over four decades up to and including Inside the Wave. Costa Book of the Year 2017, winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. Jackie Kays widely acclaimed rst collection The Adoption Papers marked the emergence of an exciting new talent in contemporary poetry. In her second collection, Other Lovers, she achieves an even greater range, exploring the qualities of love in a variety of relationships, rooted in the past or present. In doing so, she looks afresh at the way we now live. The poems move from the familiar the parent, the child, the lover to the extraordinary including a sequence on the Blues singer Bessie Smith and are, by turns, poignant, bitter-sweet, joyous and funny. Other Lovers is now out of print but all the poems from the collection are included in Darling (2007). The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. "The Secret" is a book of mystery and magic. Opening on familiar ground - retelling stories from the Bible, Celtic mythology, small-town rumours and urban mythologies - it gradually moves beyond its borders to narratives of Central America, drawing on figures such as the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortes, and the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. In this unusually innovative first collection, Zoe Brigley considers many secrets - between man and woman, mother and daughter, teacher and pupil, rich and poor, North and South, familiar and strange. Using a large variety of poetic forms, her writing oscillates between global languages and minor ways of speaking. The book is split into three sections that spiral further away from ideas of home towards the discovery of gifts in other cultures. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Fine. Intimate and truthful, the poems in Sally Read's second collection move from the very earliest and most delicate stages of life, to the many adjustments of adulthood. Always startlingly honest, the pains of closeness and separation, love and mortality are dealt with in unflinching and transforming ways. "Broken Sleep" is a cycle of poems from a mother to her baby, moving from the uncertainty and awe at the discovery of a pregnancy, through the ecstasy of early motherhood. It charts, with tenderness, the child's development from fetus in the dark, to walking, talking toddler in a bewildering and exciting world. The poems comprise a hymn and an elegy to the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. The second part of the book, "The Glass Eye", moves swiftly into a world where loss, whether of a loved one, a breast, or simply innocence, is countered by extraordinary kinds of redemption. Whether conjuring angels, music, or lies these pieces offer a sometimes disturbing but always marvellous alternative to the unavoidable blackness behind the glass eye.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the worlds most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an airport for incoming translations - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Being Human is the third book in the Staying Alive series of anthologies. Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. Being Human is a companion volume to those two books a world poetry anthology offering poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 'real poems for unreal times'. It was followed by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). The range of poetry here complements that of the first two anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about being human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. There are more great poems from the 20th century as well as many recent poems of rare imaginative power from the first decade of the 21st century. But this book is also rare in reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Such has been the appeal of Staying Alive and Being Alive that many people have written not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which have been important in their own lives. Being Human draws on this highly unusual publisher's mailbag, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by our readers. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. "Modern Women Poets" is the companion anthology to Deryn Rees-Jones's pioneering critical study, "Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets". While its selections illuminate and illustrate her essays, Deryn Rees-Jones's superb anthology works in its own right as the best possible introduction to a whole century of poetry by women. The anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing, while not isolating women's writing from its intersection with the work of male contemporaries. Tracing an arc from Charlotte Mew to Stevie Smith, from Sylvia Plath to the writing emerging from the Women's Movement, and to the more recent work of Medbh McGuckian, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, the anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing. It shows important connections between the work of women poets and shows how - throughout past 100 years - they have developed strategies for engaging with a male-dominated tradition. "Modern Women Poets" allows the reader to trace women's negotiations with one another's work, as well as to reflect more generally on the politics of women's engagement with history, nature, politics, motherhood, science, religion, the body, sexuality, identity, death, love, and poetry itself. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems. A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. The first in a series, Staying Alive was followed by a sequel, Being Alive (2004), a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Good. Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems. A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. The first in a series, Staying Alive was followed by a sequel, Being Alive (2004), a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astleys Staying Alive, which became Britains most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers whove wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. Staying Alive didnt just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadnt read poetry for years because it hadnt held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. Being Alive was followed by a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. From its opening page a refugees first sight of England Changes of Address presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of home. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this book of poems is as rich and multi-layered as a novel. It brings together for the first time the whole range of Philip Grosss poetry from the 1980s and 90s a generous selection from his Bloodaxe, Faber and Peterloo collections along with uncollected poems and work from limited editions and collaborations. Changes of Address shows his development from the prize-winning Ice Factory to the Whitbread-shortlisted Wasting Game, but takes the reader also into previously unknown reaches of Philip Gross territory. It does not cover his later work. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Brendan Kennelly's Guff is both mouthpiece and mouthed off, Devil's advocate and self critic, everyman and every writer consumed by self-doubt and self-questioning. The book of Guff is about words writing the man. Words drive him into the cave of himself where he questions everything including words that seem to constitute answers and answers that question both questions and answers. Do poets write poems or do poems write poets? And consider the shape of that question-mark, like a snake twisting in its sleep: so twisting, or twisted snakes, lie beside Guff as he tries to sleep in his cave, led now by the words that the snake hisses in his old head. All through his book-length poem Guff hears both the hissing of the words he believes he loves as well as the hissing mysteries of love. Guff is prey to the ruthless continuity of one word leading to another, until these words relax and settle down into what he thinks, or hopes, is "meaning". Like Kennelly's Cromwell, The Book of Judas and Poetry My Arse, Guff is a knockabout Swiftian satire, a mischievous meditation on the human condition. It's also a powerfully expressive hymn to life with all its flaws, a snaking poem with the movement of a river in its different moods from cold anger to summer warmth for minds and bodies, which asks who or what is a genuinely noble person? Dublin is the backdrop to Guff's jabbering quest, a city where haunted men walk the streets talking to themselves, at times with passion, at times with an air of secrecy or self-accusation, at times as if seeking a friend prepared to listen. Guff is a brother to these strange wanderers. In the poem he becomes at one or at odds with them. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. 'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the 'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity. Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading? The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. 'David Scott belongs firmly to the long tradition of parson-poets that goes back at least as far as George Herbert. For all their reticence, there is a compassion in these poems and a sense of propriety' - Norman Nicholson. Springing from ordinary events, or a picture, or an aspect of the priestly life, David Scott's beautifully restrained poems work up the detail into a moment of significance. They are rooted in an English culture which is found not only in locality, but also in understatement, and the sideways look. But his poetry has wider reverberations, exploring spirituality and ways of praying as well as momentary glimpses of meaning caught in everyday life. David Scott won the National Poetry Competition in 1978, and he was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his first book A Quiet Gathering. Playing for England is illustrated by Graham Arnold of the Brotherhood of Ruralists and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.