Carcanet Collection

When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic.

Elegy turns into affirmation, ‘binding the pulse / back into the body’, in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, ‘written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows’. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that ‘he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman’s to his craft’.

The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends — pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record — they forced the people to forget. Against such injunctions, Paul Batchelor's poems rebel.

After the Hurricane is the first book from this major Welsh poet since Selected Poems. It is a wonderful collection of vibrant poems that showcase his affinity with the human and natural calamities that influence our environmental and mental ecologies.

A 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019. Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible.

Featured in the TLS Books of the Year 2018

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael’s acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author’s eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. ‘Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written,’ as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid.

In The Alexandra Sequence John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the ‘mummers play’, a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door.

Featured in The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018

Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry.

The Anarchist Banker, which starts in the nineteenth century, and the second volume, Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companion, present English readers for the first time with a generous sampling of the best classic and new Portuguese writing.

Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces.

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021

This first anthology of 'Apocalyptic' or neo-romantic poetry since the nineteen-forties includes over 150 poets, many well known (Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham), and others quite forgotten (Ernest Frost, Paul Potts).

Tim Liardet’s Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: New and Selected Poems spans nine of his ten award-winning collections and adds new poems, fresh produce, reconfiguring his life’s work to date.

Arguing with Malarchy is full of voices. Tender, sinister, sad or cantankerous, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled.

A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020). Among Mina Gorji's poems in New Poetries V (2011) was one about Houdini entitled 'The Art of Escape' which returns here as the title poem.

As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work.

An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. Here, birth paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after long labour, the baby's heart gives out. However, just as grief is not linear, so too the book follows an emotional rather than a chronological arc.

Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Ned Denny's baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet's version – in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope – is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime.

Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the monstrous.

Edwin Morgan's Beowulf has been a popular standard translation for half a century. His version is a vigorous, spoken English and conveys the heroism, violence and pathos of the first English epic.

Bevel is William Letford’s first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet’s New Poetries V anthology.

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020.

Winner of an English PEN Award.

The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense.

Oli Hazzard’s Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed.

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) once described herself as the most famous unknown writer, and although her novel, Nightwood is celebrated, her poetry has been a well-kept secret until now. This selection, the only one currently available, contains work written between 1914 and the 1970s.

A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021

Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents,' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The struggle is intensified by the presence of a third element, something that made Catullus come alive, his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'.

The Border Ballads are rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland, a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird, and only then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh.

John Clare was a defining voice of the rural poetic tradition. His story was first set down more than two centuries ago and has captured the imagination of the reading public ever since. it is told most vividly and poignantly in Clare's own words. This volume brings together, in definitive form, all Clare's important autobiographical writing.

In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another.

Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2020. Spain’s greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. His earliest writings appeared in Spanish. In 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated between the two languages since (with occasional forays into French and Italian).

Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents,' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.'

The thirteenth-century Tuscan poet Guido Cavalcanti helped to create a new poetry that belonged to the city rather than the court, and through his use of Tuscan vernacular gave an extraordinary intensity and craft to his explorations of the social and psychological dimensions of love. Peter Hughes has taken Cavalcanti’s groundbreaking poems and used them as springboards for his own creative versions.

Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019.

Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2018.

This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety.

Charles Olson (1910-70) believed that poetry exists in an 'open field' through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense.

C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems.

Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection. City of Departures is Helen Tookey’s second Carcanet collection, following her 2014 Missel-Child, an ‘exceptional volume... from a powerful and intelligent imagination’ (Jeffrey Wainwright). City of Departures is a collection of uncanny spaces and fleeting encounters, an urban patchwork of glimpsed moments and chance affiliations.

Jane Duran's new book of two striking sequences takes readers into other worlds – 'gridlines', in which the life and paintings of Agnes Martin are interwoven, and 'miniatures of al-Andalus' inspired by the illuminated Cantigas de Santa María and the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia.

Elaine Feinstein’s poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems.

In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era.

The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime.

Austin Clarke's first book of poetry was published in 1917, his last in 1971. In a writing life spanning much of the twentieth century, Clarke created from his early, Yeatsian immersion in Gaelic myth and literature a poetry of passionate, idiosyncratic modernity, rooted in place and time, universal in its resonance.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick.

Collected Poems contains the previously published poetry of Rowan Williams, together with a significant body of new work. Also included are his celebrated translations from Welsh, German and Russian poetry.

P.J. Kavanagh's 1982 edition of the Collected Poems established Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) as one of the most original poets of the early twentieth century. His experiences in the First World War, his love of his native Gloucestershire countryside were sources of a unique poetic voice: Vigorous, lyrical and passionate.

This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet’s trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and languages of the USA and then Europe.

‘Nonsense’, wrote Mervyn Peake, ‘can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It’s magic.’ Peake (1911–68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses lead the reader into places where cause is cut free of effect and language takes on a giddy life of its own.

In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, ‘Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write “poetic” prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.'

The Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021

In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer.

The Creation of the World is the autobiography of one of Portugal's most celebrated modern writers, Miguel Torga. Six days comprise The Creation, published in English in its entirety for the first time.

In 1911 some of D.H. Lawrence's poems and his story Odour of Chrysanthemums found their way, without his knowledge, to the desk of the editor of the English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). Ford was astonished and invited Lawrence to meet him, which the poet did with superb reluctance.

The Culture of My Stuff is a collection of sonnets, prose and political nonsense rhymes. Light-footed and light-fingered, the poems piece the stuff of their culture into surreal polemic and elegy, compressing and exploding their 'various  vocabularies'.

With ‘Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption.

After early acclaim as a lyric poet and dramatist, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) began Death's Jest-Book in 1825, as he moved to Germany to study medicine. Initially conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, the Jest-Book was the counterpart of Beddoe's anatomical researches.

Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020

Dharmakaya: ‘Truth-body', a beautiful and evocative word from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In her new book, Paula Meehan looks at how memory is lodged in the body, in physical consciousness, as much as in the old movies we run inside our heads.

Wales Book of the Year 2018

Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions.

Billy Letford’s Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings.

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation

The acclaimed poet Christopher Reid distils Charles Boyle's six books of poems into The Disguise: Poems 1977-2001, recovering a notable one-time poet, now known as a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, from poetic neglect.

This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place – a house in northern Aberdeenshire – and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten.

Victor Hugo, the most prolific and versatile of the French Romantics, is one of the greatest nineteenth-century writers. Partly because of its enormous range and variety, his poetry has remained comparatively little known outside France.

In its completed form, Dithyrambs of Dionysus was Nietzsche’s last book. The nine poems of this cycle were composed during 1883–8 and assembled for publication shortly before his breakdown in 1889.

In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine – never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be.

This sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware.

‘I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in ‘Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity.

The first tale in this classic collection evokes, not Portugal, but turn-of-century Amsterdam, a city bound up in its wealth and its moral paradoxes. These are the paradoxes of Manuel Teixeira-Gomes' characters, too, the gap between seeming and being, between desire and its various objects.

Errant, Gabriel Levin’s sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book’s day takes us on a three-part planetary journey.

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a ‘barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz’. Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country.

For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.

The Extasie is a compelling book of love poems with its lyrical roots deep in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rural traditions of the nineteenth. Among New Zealand poet John Gallas's spirit guides are John Clare and, in particular, Wyatt and Donne, writers from our poetry's wittiest and most ecstatic age.

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, Undertones of War, and his early edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems were just two examples of the ways in which he sought to convey his war experience, and to keep faith with his comrades in arms.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award

Full of playful glitches and malfunctions, this debut collection from an alumnus of Carcanet’s New Poetries series and a recent favourite in the pages of PN Review is a poetry of misses and near-misses, distortions and uncertainties.

A Book of the Year 2019 in The Morning Star. This is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a small, ambitious press over a period of radical transformation in publishing. Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters - handwritten, typed, and now emailed - between an author and the editor.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century.

In 1878, in London, a woman served a prison sentence for deserting two of her children, a charge she denied. Almost nothing else is known of her life or that of her husband, a dealer in 'foreign birds and curiosities', who was himself a migrant. The two children vanished from the record.

We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture.

A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021

A White Review Book of the Year 2021

Sinéad Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017).

A Full Cone is Miles Champion’s second Carcanet volume. It features a substantial body of new work as well as a selection of earlier writing hitherto unavailable in the UK.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Wales Poetry Book of the Year

FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre.

With pinpoint accuracy, virtuosity and humour, Caoilinn Hughes aligns scientific and poetic venturing. In this striking debut collection she focuses on moments of discovery, from the first controlled nuclear reaction to the shape of an avalanche as witnessed from its catchment area. These are epiphanies with consequences.

What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways.

The poems in The Gifts of Fortune, Peter McDonald's seventh book of poems, cover a spectrum of personal history. They go to Belfast, Oxford, and further afield; in time they visit the poet's pasts, his now, his possible futures.

Featured in the New Statesman Best Books of 2018

Shortlisted for the 2019 East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award. In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them.

Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, ‘Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire.

This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or émigrés displaced from their cultural and geographical origins.

In The Good European Iain Bamforth's reports on fifteen years of 'experimental living' during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in Tristram Shandy.

Grand Larcenies features generous selections from the work of ten classic modern Dutch poets: Eva Gerlach, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Hester Knibbe, Hans R. Vlek, Rob Schouten, Willem van Toorn, J. Eijkelboom, H.H ter Balkt, K. Michel, and Esther Jansma.

Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats.

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021

Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural.

In this essential guide to one of the most difficult yet rewarding poems of the twentieth century, William Cookson (who began corresponding with Pound as a schoolboy in 1957) draws on a deep and intimate knowledge of Pound’s life and work.

Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird’s protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands.

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances.

Herne the Hunter is the sixth collection from one of Ireland’s most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore.

Shortlisted for The 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Translation

Shortlisted for the 2017 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize For Second Collections

A 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight…’ With these words Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through – Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast – in the spirit of a flâneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety and mystery of human experience

Shortlisted for The Premio Valle Inclán Award for Spanish Translation 2020.

In his poems Darío Jaramillo relentlessly interrogates time, ecstatically celebrates life lived, and mourns its transience.

Shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021

Fawzi Karim's poetry has been widely translated, among other languages into French, Swedish, Italian and English. Carcanet published Plague Lands and Other Poems (2011), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

In Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, ‘Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and ‘Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond.

A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection. At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix taamarbuta, ‘the tied circle’ – a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign.

The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of Anthony Burgess's reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020. Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet – the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award

John Birtwhistle has said that 'one writes each poem just to learn how to write it', and insists that he 'doesn’t care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One's Own Voice'. The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice comes through.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

Before she published her distinguished novels, Muriel Spark first made her name as a critic and poet. Her discerning study of the poet and novelist John Masfield will therefore be doubly welcome, as an example of her earlier work, and as one of the best introductions to Masefield.

Keats Lives is Moya Cannon’s fifth collection of poems. Characteristically rich in the moods and rhythms of the poet’s western Irish homeland, it is also drawn farther afield, towards contemplation of the disasters of previous centuries, their ‘many victories, many collars, little grace’.

A Kingdom of Love is a lyrical interrogation of the place of the sacred and profane in a demythologised world from poet and Anglican parish priest, Rachel Mann.

Later Emperors is four poems, each of which approaches Roman history from a very different perspective. It is also four voices, each one concerned with the living and the dead: voices of historians and moralists, voices of great (and not so great) emperors. Jones has written a book which is all the more for our time because it looks so clearly at other times and identifies in them familiar patterns, difficulties, ambitions and desires.

Leaf Graffiti, Lucy Burnett’s first collection, is restless, the poems always moving, playfully exploring the interface between words and things, rural and urban, nature and the human world.

In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation.

The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it.

‘Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this …’ In Long Pass, Joey Connolly’s first collection, the poet – in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy – keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say things simply. But nothing is as simple as it seems at first.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was, as T.S. Eliot recognised, a supreme ballad-maker, a storyteller who relished the adventures and characters encountered in the wide world, and a man whose sympathies lay with those whose work and dedication sustained civic and political institutions.

Featured in the TLS Books of the Year 2018

Lisbon: some years on from the bloodless revolution of 1974. A sculptor in the prime of life has rediscovered love and reviews the many women that have shaped the man he is today.

In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. ‘Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in ‘After a Song by Gustav Mahler’.

Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021

A Map Towards Fluency, Lisa Kelly's first collection, considers words, the power they impart, the power their absence withholds. Forgetting, mis-hearing, mis-remembering all challenge the imagination to find ways round and ways through.

The true haunts of the poetic powers,’ Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, ‘are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation'.

Winner of the 2016 Poetry Book Society Choice

Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection

Short-listed for the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize

Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017

Commendation for The Met Office Advises Caution: Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Financial Times Best Books of 2016

Guardian Best Books of 2016

The Poetry School Books of the Year 2016

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English prose writers, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, each one sparkling with urbane wit and gossip.

Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop.

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry.

Cosmopolitan, hybrid and eloquent, modern Canadian poetry is still, for many readers outside Canada, one of the great undiscovered terrains of world literature. Modern Canadian Poets sets out to end that neglect, redefining the connections between Canada and the international poetry world.

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism - American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of Modernism in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum. (1957)

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award

Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.

Theophilus Kwek's first UK collection is concerned with the individual and the collective stories that become history. The poems set out from formative moments in the poet's memory, to pivotal moments in the colonial past of Southeast Asia, and finally the political upheavals of the present.

An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

In Collected Poems one of Ireland's best-loved contemporary poets brings together poems from her six principal collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (1907), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019) - more than three decades' work - a poetry of individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery.

Featured on The Spectator's Books of the Year List

In 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan’s Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson’s childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in My Reef My Manifest Array.

Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur ‘A.C.’ Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK.

The poems in Naming of the Bones touch on Christian values and work towards a significant faith, at the same time focusing on the wonders of an evolving cosmos. The poems delight in the things of the earth, suggesting a secular Christianity.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), one of the greatest German-language poets, is among the key figures in modern Western literature. The Neue Gedichte (New Poems of 1907-8 are some of the freshest and most accessible of his works.

Dennis O’Driscoll is among the finest and most popular poets of his generation. New and Selected Poems shows him to be a poet of humanity and wit whose observant, rhythmically supple poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary life.

The Caribbean is producing some of the most innovative and sophisticated poets in world literature today. This anthology turns the spotlight on eight New Caribbean poets. Between them, they represent the range of Caribbean identities and experiences: they are black, white, Indian and in between.

This rich compendium of translations is the first to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Starting with Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), it includes translations by three other American poets (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder)

From the first New Poetries anthology, published in 1994, through to this sixth volume, the series has showcased the work of some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world, many of whom have subsequently gone on to achieve notable success

From the first New Poetries anthology, published in 1994, through to this seventh volume, the series has showcased some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world.

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation.

Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world.

Since C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism and theology, she received numerous awards, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems.

Shuntarō Tanikawa has been the most inventive modern Japanese poet, ever since he published Two Billion Light Years of Solitude (1952), his first book, aged twenty one. Undamaged by Japan’s post-War trauma, he took up the language and ran with it.

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: 'the greatest lyric poet of my generation.' Dylan Thomas referred to him as: 'the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English', or, in a letter, as 'the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today.'

For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form.

William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock, Scotland, 'beside the sugar house quays' - a setting open to the sea. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruined tin-mine with its human echo.

Nineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany.

Notes from the Dream House is a ‘best of’ selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musicals – the hits and the misses, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award

Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award

Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize

Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018

Matthew Welton is a poet enchanted by form and process. Many of the Number Poems abide by subtle patterns or constraints, creating symmetries in the arrangement of sentences, lines, words, or metrical feet.

Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant.

In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections

Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize

Oracabessa is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada (‘Winter has landed’) and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica; even to the Old Testament world of Ruth and Hagar.

An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to – what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes.

The stories are familiar: family disharmony, mourning the loss of a loved one, vengeance, national tyranny, international war, a desire for justice. This new translation by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, an independent scholar and novelist, preserves the artistry of the original while deploying a clear speech that directly addresses a twenty-first century temperament. The Oresteia, first performed in Greece in 458 bce, has been celebrated as an example of the highest literary art.

Arthur Golding (1536-1606), translated the Metamorphoses of Ovid into vigorous, supple English 'fourteeners', beguiling readers with the pace and freshness of the ancient narrative.

A The Scotsman Book of the Year 2021

The series has unfolded as a record of contemporary poetry, and this sixth collection maintains the qualities of lively eclecticism, inventiveness and intelligence that have made the anthologies one of the most engaging samplers of current writing.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Irish Times/Poetry Now Award

In Parallax Sinéad Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs (‘the different people who lived in sepia’) are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a particular perspective.

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic

A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Peelin Orange is the definitive Collected Poems by one of Jamaica's leading voices, the current Poet Laureate, Mervyn Morris. These poems explore the everyday, the erotic, love and the melancholy and comedy of being.

Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018

The meteoric and turbulent career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote two masterpieces, The Illuminations and A Season in Hell, and some wonderful short poems.

Alain-Fournier’s poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914.

François Villon was born in Paris in 1431. His life was blighted by destitution and ill health, robbery and murder, torture and exile. While we do not know what became of Villon after his 32nd year, the poems he produced in just six years capture in forceful, intelligent and candid verse the low and high life of Paris.

‘He is an exquisite poet, a deliverer of nations … a father of light’, said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T.S. Eliot.

In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of parents and close friends, explores elements of ancient Celtic culture; poems are inspired by works of art, landscapes rural and urban, and historical figures from Tolstoy to Simone Weil.

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation

Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017

Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library and elsewhere.

Following his acclaimed Pandemonium, Thomas McCarthy’s Prophecy dwells on childhood memory, romantic love and the varieties of human attachment. Still embodying his distinctive voice and craft, in these poems McCarthy risks more prophetic moods and themes. There are poems on illness and recovery, ageing and creativity.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'.

In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the ‘quennet’ is reworked and refigured in response to three perimiter landscapes.

Raking Light is Eric Langley’s début collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language’s latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley’s poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of ‘raking light’, in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: they exist with the intensity of hallucinations.

In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity's engagement with the non-human. By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects - environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson - only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back. Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft's isolation and the world's irrepressible variety.

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic

Featured on The Telegraph's Christmas Books 2018

Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981).

Reynard the Fox is one of the great poems of the English countryside and rural life. The headlong dash of John Masefield's narrative carries the reader on an exhilarating chase through the meadows and copses of the landscape the poet loved, pursued by a richly characterised community.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Rondo harvests a decade’s worth of new writing by one of Australia’s foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia’s current position in a rapidly changing world.

The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing the various places the poet has lived, their histories, and his own history as he travels away from who he was. His transformations and shifts – between Britain, Guyana and the USA – are his identity: ‘Each year I travel, my passport photo / looks less like me.’

For over three decades Harry Gilonis’s poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time.

The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with 'Deposition', a harrowing elegy in five parts: the beloved endures 'her Nile of pain'; the lover attends as she is treated, the last scene postponed until the two selves are quite differently refined.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections

Second Place Winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Famed for his singular prose style as much as for his controversial aestheticist principles, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the great essayists in a century of great essayistic writing.

Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of his later work was the isolation and fragmentation of the human being adrift in a nihilistic world.

Christina Rossetti was in a sense the first poet of the Pre-Raphelites, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) having been - as if by accident - the writing from that group which first caught public attention. It contains many of her best poems.

To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders.

J.L. Gili’s selection of Lorca’s poems in Spanish, with his own unassuming prose versions as guides to the originals, first appeared in 1960. With its excellent introduction and selection it remains a perfect introductory guide to the great poet.

Apollinaire’s poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his calligrammes.

C.H. Sisson called John Heath-Stubbs ‘a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability’ – a reference to the poet’s blindness. This selection of an abundant poet restores him to a new readership with the work on which his popularity was based.

Selected Poems gathers writing from four decades of  Nancy Cunard’s life, some published here for the first time. The selection illuminates Cunard’s transnational modernist project in full, from her early years as a coterie poet on the edges of Bloomsbury and avant-garde London, to her frontline activism during the Spanish Civil War.

Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable schooling and the drudgery of apprenticeship.

Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to political satire and social commentary.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was one of English poetry’s truly distinctive stylists. Next to Tennyson and Browning, he was one of the major poets of the Victorian era; and he was almost certainly the most provocative.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Irish Times/Poetry Now Award

In Serengeti Songs Chris McCully plays poet-guide on a safari through East Africa’s abundant wild landscape. Dik-dik, topi, elephant and impala roam these pages, darting between the acacia’s ‘burnt star-dome’ and the baobab’s myth-rich shade.

Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer’s four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems.

Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017

Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017

Alex Wong's first collection, Poems Without Irony (2016), was a book that took nothing for granted, that broke through to the particularity of things and experiences, distrusting and defying generality. Elaine Feinstein celebrated the 'extraordinarily new rhetoric for his love poetry' whilst David Morley commended his 'linguistic finesse'.

Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection

Winner of a 2019 Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendation

Shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize

Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize

Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021

Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize

Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection

The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019

In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth.

The long title poem of John Greening’s The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems.

Skies is Alison Brackenbury’s ninth Carcanet collection. In these poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and love, joy and sadness, summer and winter.

Longlisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold.

Gathered from over thirty years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance - in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. Sky Burial is an immensely valuable introduction to his work.

In Slowly, As If, Karen Press looks clear-eyed at what it means to live in a complex society, a fragile world. She celebrates the connectedness that sustains us – in dance, in love, with the natural world, in cities where ‘strangers seem happy / to let you be’ – and sees it betrayed by our unreflecting complicity in poverty and violence. The death of a child who ‘barely scratched the air of the country’ resonates in her tender, devastating account: ‘When a child dies, who is responsible?’

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs!

Smoothie is Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off despair – fulfilled.

Winner of the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize

Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry 2020

The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month August 2019

Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020

Stack is a book-length poem, and the début Carcanet title of one of the UK’s rising poetry talents.

Described by its author as a document of ‘minimalist interventions’, the small descriptions that make up stack capture seemingly – and actually – everyday scenes, ‘found’ images from walks, tabletops, cafés, bus stops, and the conveyor belt of still-lives that is the poet’s imagination.

Singapore-born poet Jee Leong Koh’s first book to be published in Great Britain is rich in detail of the worlds he explores and invents as he follows his desire for an unknown other, moving tentatively, passionately, always uncertain of himself.

Sweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses.

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: ‘He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’

First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism, and served to introduce the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership.

An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

The poetry of Miles Burrows was discovered in 1966 when Tom Maschler, already an editor at Cape, heard him give a public reading in London. Cape published him. After that, Burrows continued his life in many walks, most of them medical. Having studied Greats at Oxford, he determined to become an intellectual and learned to smoke black Russian cigarettes, reviewing occasionally for the New Statesman.

‘We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,’ writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale.

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him.

John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, and to his neglect on the other.

Frank Kuppner’s The Third Mandarin contains 501 quatrains in five ‘books’. It collages an alternative Imperial China of drunk poets, grumpy sages, and sex-starved emperors. The poems riff on a variety of forms, from prophecies and love letters to drinking songs and graffiti.

The poems in Tara Bergin’s debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous energy, a troubled state of mind.

Nina Bogin’s Thousandfold is a journey through seasons and landscapes, a journal of ordinary life punctuated by extra-ordinary people and moments – the births of grandchildren, the physical decline of a husband, relationships with family and friends.

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021

Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020

This Selected celebrates Scotland's most distinctive contemporary writer, a vivid minimalist, ruralist, and experimentalist.

The poems in Through resume David Herd’s inquiry into the language of public space taken up in All Just (2012). Here, five extended texts address the ways in which contemporary public language has been rendered officially hostile.

To Fold the Evening Star gathers work from eight key collections, distilling an essence of McMillan’s diversiform poetry and short prose. Hilarity and tenderness, gravity and light, are interwoven into a bountiful poetic fibre.

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017

Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award

Features the poem 'Bride and Moth', shortlisted for the 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year Award

The memories from which Fred D’Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in which their destinies are unpredictably worked out.

Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to ‘go in fear of abstractions’. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from.

Winner of the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021

John Cornford (1915–1936) has long been held in high estimation as the outstanding English writer who fell to the Fascists in Spain.

Winner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize

The title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: 'Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?'

Featured in The Guardian's Best Books of 2018

The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice

The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month April 2018

Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection

A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Longlisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize

Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused – as lovers tend to be – by the inconstant nature of ‘the other’. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture’s Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality.

The young journalist and reformer Horace Traubel visited Whitman nearly every day at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman liked to talk, especially about the big issues, spiritual, political - all he'd learned over seven decades of peace and war.

Ford Madox Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, is recognised as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralogy.

Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry

Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Writers 'Book by the Cover' Award

Westerns is the classic account of the emergence, growth and flowering of one of the most perennially popular film genres. When it was first published thirty years ago it was welcomed by reviewers in Europe and the United States as a major work.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Arnold Bennett Book Prize

The Windows of Graceland gathers the cream of the crop from Martina Evans’s five previous collections of poetry, brought up to date by a selection of new and unpublished work.

Winter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard’s prize-winning sequence Lark & Merlin, an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of the poet’s Northern-English homeland.

Andrew McNeillie’s sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago (‘For which read a figure for my heart. / For which too read a figure for time’s hurt’), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides.

Marie-Thérèse Walter was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was forty-six. These poems - as simple and direct as quick sketches - use her voice to tell the story of the relationship with Picasso and what it meant to her from its first beginnings, until the day on which she took her own life, three years after his death.

The poems in this new collection consider questions of inheritance and identity, of what is handed down and what is lost. Boland's poems are acts of preservation: they are aware of the significance of objects, memories, words, in keeping alive what we would otherwise 'lose / without thinking'.

Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry