bloodaxe books ltd tyne and wear (387 Ergebnisse)

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Ann Sansom's poetry overturns the reader's expectations. Her poems often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions - what Stanley Cook called 'an authentic Northern mix of realism and imagination'. In Praise of Men and other people was her first new book for nearly a decade, a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection Romance won her many admirers. 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. John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. "Alternative Anthem" is a live album of poems from books published over three decades, including "John Agard Live!", a DVD of filmed highlights from recent performances made by filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce. It includes poetry from "We Brits" in which the Guyanese-born word magician gives an outsider-insider view of British life in poems which both challenge and cherish our peculiar culture and hallowed institutions; "Weblines" that contains three powerful Caribbean myths of transformation: the steeldrum, the limbo dancer, and Anansi, the spider trickster god; and, "From the Devil's Pulpit" that is a Devil's eye view of the world, sweeping from Genesis across time; and, other collections including "Mangoes and Bullets" and "Lovelines for a Goat-Born Lady", as well his children's books, featuring some of Agard's best-known poems - "Listen Mr Oxford don", "Palm Tree King", "Half-Caste", and "English Girl Eats Her First Mango". 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. The poems of Beyond take the reader back to the optimism Sarah Wardle found as a youth when she left home and became involved in the world. They show her venturing forth again, embracing life to find that all was never lost, as she finally overcomes obstacles to hope and allegations of disability she had almost allowed herself to think were insurmountable and true. The book traces her rediscovery of agency, direction, energy and love, and charts her course once more into the future. It chronicles her journey out of a care system into which she should never have let herself get deeper and deeper locked, and will give hope to others who wish to finance and negotiate their way out of this trap to take responsibility for their own lives. As in her previous collections, Fields Away, Score! and A Knowable World, the setting of many of these poems is London, but in these pages she gains an appreciation and understanding of the variety this city witnesses and offers as never before. Beyond is an affirming book: even as the flesh begins to age, the heart grows in courage and enthusiasm, reinvigorated by the realisation of the fresh possibilities of effort and resilience, confidence and self-belief, commitment and conviction, mutual trust and shared affection, and the work to be done before we sleep. 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. The Honey Gatherers takes its title from a phrase in Michael Ondaatjes The Cinnamon Peeler, a poem which describes the need to be marked, and marked out, by love. The search, the sweetness, the sting and the death of love, are all to be found in this anthology. Wide-ranging in its inclusiveness, The Honey Gatherers celebrates the great passions of John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, Keats, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the beloved Anon, whilst con?rming the extraordinary gift to this headlong debate of 20th century poets. Pablo Neruda, Lorna Goodison, Brian Patten, Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Parker, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Sharon Olds are just some of those who meet in these pages. Here are poems about romantic love, the ideal of love, the hurt of love, lost or unrequited love and parting all you might expect to ?nd in such a gathering but here too are poems of friendship, surprise, celebration and consolation. This is a book which explores Raymond Carvers big question And what did you want? and offers some answers: To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver: Late Fragment Most love poetry anthologies only cover the classics. This one includes modern poets and erotic poetry as well. 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. 'Hanzlik's poetry, more particularly his early poetry, is characterised by controlled savagery, by a smouldering anger, though balanced and held in check by a note of lyricism and often indeed of tenderness. He is a master of the medium-long poem: in his earlier collections were often evocations of classical or Biblical subjects (though with an entirely modern and often topical subtext), while some of the more recent ones are meditations on casual topics, such as his stamp collection, a news item about a scientist's Nobel Prize, or a flight of fighter aircraft overflying his home on Air Day. At a time when so much Czech poetry is either politically declarative or traditionally escapist, Hanzlik's unmistakable individual voice, bruising though it may be, is refreshingly new.' - Ewald Osers 'The fluency and energy are unmistakable, and at the centre of the poems there is a real and difficult subject: political violence. Killings, mutilations, stiflings, beheadings occur in poem after poem, and are connected in some way with people in authority. Hanzlik uses dramatic monologues by invented or legendary or historical personae.' - Graham Martin, from his preface. 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. Ian Duhig's witty and bizarre poems are profane and profound, often drawing on tall tales and strange episodes from history, Irish legend and colonial lore. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. 'Ian Duhig's world is an exciting blend of the old and the new, the tragic and the comic, the grave and the light-hearted. He rifles mythologies, histories, legends and folklores in a manner that is at once devastating and disarming.' - Brendan Kennelly. 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 international anthology has been assembled in a matter of days as an immediate if inadequate response to the suffering in Bosnia. What else is there to say about Bosnia? What more can anyone do? KLAONICA is the poets' attempt to do or say something. It includes poems by many leading writers, some already published in The Independent's series Bosnia Poems. The poems are baffled, helpless, heartfelt, heartbreaking, angry, tender, grieving. Useless too: except that readers should find some comfort, some hope, in this book. And the book is published to raise funds for Bosnian relief. The writers come from Britain, Ireland, Europe, North America and Bosnia. They include Annemarie Austin, Joseph Brodsky, Gillian Clarke, David Constantine, Ivor Cutler, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fisher, Linda France, Rebecca Hayes, Adrian Henri, Ted Hughes, Nicki Jackowska, Kathleen Jamie, Medbh McGuckian, Ian McMillan, Glyn Maxwell, Christopher Middleton, Czeslaw Milosz, Adrian Mitchell, Andrew Motion, Josip Osti, Ruth Padel, Brian Patten, Patricia Pogson, Peter Porter, Simon Rae, Peter Reading, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Carole Satyamurti, Jo Shapcott, Abdulah Sidran, Ken Smith, Heather Spears, Mario Susko, R.S. Thomas, Stevan Tontic and John Hartley Williams. KLAONICA is the Serbo-Croat word for slaughterhouse, abattoir, butchery, shambles, and describes conditions in that doomed country after over a year of vicious warfare that includes massacre, rape, pillage, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, the destruction of towns and villages, churches and mosques, and ultimately of a state and a whole society. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this conflict - and there are more wrongs than rights to it - it amounts to genocide, in Europe, here at the end of the twentieth century. The Bosnians are starving. They have planted no crops, they have used up all their stores and savings, they have no fat left, and winter is coming. Over and above the depredations of a three-sided war, they need food and medicines. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be given to Feed the Children and other organisations seeking to alleviate the suffering in Bosnia. 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. C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. His new collection, "Wait", finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by 'the conscience-beast, who harries me', and 'riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly'. Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Metro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candour and style. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. 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. John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new collection, he puts on the mask of Moses Maimonides (aka the Rambam), the Medieval Jewish rabbi and physician who wrote his Guide of the Perplexed in Arabic at a time when Judaism, Islam and Christianity cross-fertilised each other in Moorish Spain. Now the ghost of Maimonides returns to the contemporary world, no less perplexed, and trailed by the figure of the Jester, whose wise fool musings shadow Maimonides' discourses on a range of subjects from sectarian fanaticism to God's incorporeal lack of taste buds. In Playing the Ghost of Maimonides, the rabbinical, the parabolical, the nonsensical, are symphonically interwoven in a thought-provoking romp of metaphysical shapeshifting that resonates with the current climate of extremism. 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. Robyn Bolam's new collection, Hyem, explores what and who makes us feel at home. Both people, and creatures - from whales off Kaikoura in New Zealand, New Forest cicadas, fish in the Thames, wrens, robins and starlings, to a climbing fox - face challenges to find homes where they can thrive. Hyem lets you walk London streets with Dickens or share the last moments of a 17th-century helmsman, whose final home is Stockholm's Vasa museum. A wolves' valley becomes home to surfers and a high voltage laboratory turns into a creative home for a poet. Hyem (home in Geordie) is also about growing up on Tyneside, loving a place through changes and celebrating those who preserve its history and spirit. Hyem is Robyn Bolam's first book of poetry since her retrospective New Wings: Poems 1977-2007, which included work from two earlier collections, The Peepshow Girl (1989) and Raiding the Borders (1996). 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. 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 remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. A new child should mean new hope. But what if that's no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy's second collection unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words home and love dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, Insistence takes stock of the parent's responsibility to her child, the poet's responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. In a long poem, Darcy revisits Inger Christensen's 1981 Alphabet, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima. In Darcy's 'Alphabet', the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. Described by David Wheatley as 'boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem' with 'cunning and humour', Ailbhe Darcy's poems interrogate cosmopolitanism as much as they do rootedness, love as much as grief. Ailbhe Darcy's first collection, Imagininary Menagerie, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Insistence won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2019, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, and the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers' Week, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018. 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: Very Good. Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species - bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies - celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her London house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while other sections of the book include elegies for human beings and poems based on family wills from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as birthday greetings for old friends and for a new great-grandson. 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: Very Good. "The Blue Den" is a book of lyrical, sensuous poems which builds on the achievement of Stephanie Norgate's debut collection "Hidden River", which was shortlisted for both the Forward First Collection Prize and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In "The Blue Den", people travel along the edges of roads, landscapes and emotions. The poems give voice to a stream under ice, a flooded road, and an ant beneath the sky. Strongly visual and imaginative, these poems explore the edges of memory, the mutual dependency of man and nature. Stephanie Norgate's second collection celebrates the power of intense looking and making, whether meditating on refugees in an oarless boat or Giacometti working restlessly at the figure of a strange walker. These poems inhabit marginal, unsung and free experiences: plastic bags along a road or the return of children over a lake. The underside resonates with strange vivid beauty. 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 selection presents for the first time the thirty year trajectory of an acclaimed Irish poet who has lived and worked between the secular and the religious, Eros and history, Ireland and elsewhere, be it west Africa after civil war, south-east Asia after the Khmer Rouge or Europe at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whose extraordinary body of work has re-defined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century. Harry Clifton has published six other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley's Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction. 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. Sarah Wardle was poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur FC when many of these poems were written. Her Score! is a winning commentary on contemporary culture, shooting at the heart of consciousness, family, sport, the female voice and Darwinian science. Her second collection kicks off with her Spurs poems, tackling the common ground between goals of competition and community. Then X: A Poetry Political Broadcast presents poetry as a beacon of imagination, choice and responsibility: the still, small voice that guides us through lifes terrain. Score! is completed by Sheet Music, a medley of poems ranging from London to Stone Age man, Schrodinger's Cat to Nelsons Column. 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. The poems of Stone Milk address the way the written word preserves yet distorts the lives depending on it for fame or survival. Anne Stevensons highly engaging new collection opens with A Lament for the Makers, an experimental sequence based on medieval dream poetry that plays with a Dante-inspired yet modern, scientific vision of an underworld of poets. This is followed by a series of shorter poems, mostly related to ageing and the prospect (even the comfort) of dying. The Myth of Medea ends the book on a note both stoic and merry, despite its frank look at the reality of death. Stevenson rewrites the myth as an entertainment to be set to music her own original take on how ancient, classical stories are reinterpreted by societies that inherit and retell 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. The dog of memory, an animal more often unbiddable and capricious than it is comforting and predictable, roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Helen Farishs native Cumberland and further afield mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens and people, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days. Farishs dogged and deeply moving meditation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke. The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by liquefying high-sky heat. Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring. Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017 Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017. 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. Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutece, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure. Elsewhere, London 'licks and laps'; an anonymous man 'works his bones with a micro-plane' and translations of Baudelaire and Kojeve rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and 'Little Lord Tory-Tit'. More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pese-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end. 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. C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity - his candour, his compelling storytelling, the social conscience of his themes - while slyly reinventing himself, re-casting his voice, and in many poems examining the personal - sexual desire, the hubris of youth, the looming spectre of death - more bluntly and bravely than ever. In 'Prose', he confronts his nineteen-year-old self, who despairs of writing poetry, with the question 'How could anyone know this little?' In a poem of meditation, 'The Day Continues Lovely', he radically expands the scale of his attention: 'Meanwhile cosmos roars on with so many voices we can't hear ourselves think. Galaxy on. Galaxy off. Universe on, but another just behind this one - ' Even the poet's own purpose is questioned; in 'Draft 23' he asks, 'Between scribble and slash - are we trying to change the world by changing the words?' With this wildly vibrant collection - by turns funny, moving, and surprising - Williams proves once again that, he has, in Michael Hofmann's words, 'as much scope and truthfulness as any American poet since Lowell and Berryman'. 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: Very Good. Joanne Limburg wears comic camouflage to stalk serious subjects, from envy and guilt to bereavement and its tangled aftermath. Her often boisterous poems celebrate the de?ant vulnerability of modern women, exploring their lives as daughters, mothers, friends and rivals, as well as the never-ending struggle to keep body and soul on speaking terms, while under attack from within and without whether by boredom, depression, insomnia, indigestion, oppression, mirrors, misogyny or just other people. Her poems address the experience of being a Jew in the West at this point in history, with an awareness of the debt she owes to stubborn and resilient ancestors. This sense of a rich inheritance is reflected in her voice, which draws on English-language poetry but also on nursery rhymes and everyday speech, on hymns remembered from school and the cadences of synagogue and Jewish household ritual. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection. 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. Following his near-death from an acute brain illness, Andrew Greig has come back with a vital, life-affirming book of poems. Into You celebrates the joy of living every moment, heightened by a visceral sense of transience and mortality. These clear, passionate poems speak of final things - desire, love, loss, sex, the senses, joy, death - with a positivity and clarity uncommon in our times. 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. Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983, and comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. She received an MA in English from University College, Cork in 2006. The winner while still in her teens of several of Ireland's poetry competitions, including the Seacat, Davoren Hanna and RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam, she has since published four collections with Bloodaxe: Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), The Mining Road (2013) and A Quarter of an Hour (2018). Waiting for My Clothes, her first collection, traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorder and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness. Leanne OSullivan has been writing poetry since she was 12, and began these poems not thinking they would ever form part of a book, but writing down the reasons I should live for and then becoming addicted to looking at things to find the beauty in 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. Platinum Blonde is Phoebe Stuckes debut collection. Whether wildly or wryly funny, each poem presents an episode in the up-and-down life of the wise-cracking party girl. On the surface, this is a world of dancefloors and bathrooms, glitter and girls, love and disappointment, but beneath the laughter and antics these are self-questioning poems. Poems about self-belief, self-image, vulnerability and insecurity, loneliness, trauma and survival. Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. 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. Federico Garcia Lorca, Spains greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then an immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain. The manuscript of Lorcas last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as 'a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet's flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction'. Lorca's lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and Merryn Williams's edition of his Selected Poems was the first to include English translations of these brooding poems. Merryn Williams edition draws on the full range of Lorcas poetry, from the early poems and the gypsy ballads to the agitated Poet in New York sequence and the Arab-influenced gacelas and casidas which followed his American exile. It includes the Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, Lorcas great elegy for his bullfighter friend, as well as the full text of his famous lecture on the duende, the daemon of Spanish music, song, dance, poetry and art. In these remarkable translations, Lorcas elemental poems are reborn in English, with their stark images of blood and moon, of water and earth; of bulls, horses and fish; olives, sun and oranges; knives and snow; darkness and death. 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. The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith's first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. 'A single crow falling from the mind' of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the 'air itself' is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons. 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. The waif-like figure peering from Bonnard's The Breakfast Room instils a sense of mystery and marginality in Stewart Conn's title-poem. Among other portents of transience in his latest collection are two briefly glimpsed duck shooters. Responses to music, tinged with warmth and humour, highlight the redeeming power of art. The book concludes with a group of love poems imbued with tenderness and a treasuring of the here and now. 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. French Love Poems is about the kinds of love that puzzle, delight and af?ict us throughout our lives, from going on walks with an attractive cousin before Sunday dinner (Nerval) to indulging a granddaughter (Hugo). On the way theres the ?rst yes from lips we love (Verlaine), a sky full of stars re?ected fatally in Cleopatras eyes (Heredia), Iying awake waiting for your lover (Valery), and the defeated toys of dead children (Gautier). The selection covers ?ve centuries, from Ronsard to Valery. Other poets represented include Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, La Fontaine, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle. The 35 poems, chosen by Alistair Elliot, are printed opposite his own highly skilful verse translations. There are also helpful notes on French verse technique and on points of obscurity. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. 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. Roddy Lumsden's poems eavesdrop on a half urban, half surreal world of ladies' men and misfits, trying on roles and acting out fantasies. His second collection The Book of Love is a celebration of love in all its delightful perversity, whose characters include a randy actor, a vinegar addict and couples courting in the filing cupboard and covered with marmalade. As voyeurs sneak into one poem, naturists streak across another and there is the inevitable lurking presence of the poet's own (rich but square) alter ago. These snappy, witty poems leave tantalising echoes and reverberations that make you want to read them again and again. Now out of print in this edition, most of the poems were included in Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (2004). The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.