After the Hurricane

Robert Minhinnick

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.

The Alexandra Sequence

John Redmond

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.

An Andrew Crozier Reader

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 and Other Portuguese Stories

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.

Arguing with Malarchy

Carola Luther

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.

An Aviary of Small Birds

Karen McCarthy Woolf

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.

Beowulf

Edwin Morgan

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

William Letford

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.

Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems

Abdellatif Laabi

Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco’s greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi’s poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment.

Blotter

Oli Hazzard

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.

The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems

Djuna Barnes

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.

The Books of Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus

The Books of Catullus is the first full English translation to take the Roman poet at his word. Simon Smith’s versions are scholarly yet eccentric, mapping theme and register to contemporary equivalents.

Border Ballads

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.

By Himself

John Clare

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.

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Kei Miller

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.

Cavalcanty

Peter Hughes

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.

The Cemetery in Barnes: A Novel

Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici’s The Cemetery in Barnes is a short, intense novel that opens in elegiac mode, advances quietly towards something dark and disturbing, before ending with an eerie calm.

A Centenary Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa

This collection of the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) answers that question. It is an essential introduction to the work of one of the most original European poets of the twentieth century.

A Charles Olson Reader

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.

A C.H. Sisson Reader

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.

The Clinic, Memory

Elaine Feinstein

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.

Close to the Next Moment

Jody Allen Randolph

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.

Collected Poems

Lynette Roberts

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.

Collected Poems - Austin Clarke

Austin Clarke

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.

Collected Poems - Ivor Gurney

Ivor Gurney

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.

Collected Poems - Sujata Bhatt

Sujata Bhatt

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.

Complete Nonsense

Mervyn Peake

‘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.

Complete Poems

Muriel Spark

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 Creation of the World

Miguel Torga

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.

Critical Essays

Ford Madox Ford

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.

Crossing the Mirror Line

Judith Willson

Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness, the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician’s disorientating art that ‘makes nothing appear’. Artists’ mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar-seeming world; an estuary blurs distinctions between land and sea.

Death's Jest-Book

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

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.

Dharmakaya

Paula Meehan

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.

Diary of the Last Man

Robert Minhinnick

The opening poem sequence, ‘Diary of the Last Man’, sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick’s book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, ‘a black tonic’.

Dirt

William Letford

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.

Distance and Memory

Peter Davidson

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.

The Distance, The Shadows

Victor Hugo

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.

Dithyrambs of Dionysus

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

A Doctor's Dictionary

Iain Bamforth

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.

Erotic Stories

Manuel Teixeira-Gomes

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.

Ethiopia Boy

Chris Beckett

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.

European Hours: Collected Poems

Anthony Rudolf

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.

Fall In, Ghosts

Edmund Blunden

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.

Farm by the Shore

Thomas A. Clark

In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather.

The First Yeats

W.B. Yeats

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.

Fortune's Prisoner

Boethius

An aristocratic scholar and influential member of the court of Theodoric, Boethius (born about AD 480) was arrested for alleged treason and executed in about 524. While in prison he wrote his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, a work of mixed prose and verse in which he considers universal issues such as the nature of justice, the problem of evil in a world controlled by God’s providential plan, and the workings of Fortune and free will.

Gathering Evidence

Caoilinn Hughes

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.

God's Zoo

Marius Kociejowski

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.

The Good European

Ian Bamforth

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.

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound

William Cookson

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.

The Hat-Stand Union

Caroline Bird

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.

Herne the Hunter

Peter McDonald

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.

Holy Toledo!

John Clegg

Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade.

The Homeric Hymns

Peter McDonald

The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald’s new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry.

In Darkest Capital: Collected Poems

Drew Milne

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.

In Search of Dustie-Fute

David Kinloch

Who is Dustie-Fute? A vagrant, a hawker, a poet. A dustyfooted Scottish Orpheus. A stranger, a migrant, a ghost. In his search for Dustie-Fute, David Kinloch begins amid the Parisian floods of 1910: with the waters rising, a lonely giraffe speaks from the abandoned zoo, witness to what seems the end of the world.

In These Days of Prohibition

Caroline Bird

In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird’s fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche.

John Masefield

Muriel Spark

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.

Joy

Sasha Dugdale

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award.

Keats Lives

Moya Cannon

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’.

Leaf Graffiti

Lucy Burnett

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.

The Little Sublime Comedy

John Gallas

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.

Long Pass

Joey Connolly

‘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.

The Long Trail

Rudyard Kipling

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.

Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations

Dick Davis

In Love in Another Language Dick Davis is shown to be the outstanding formal poet of his generation, a master of rhyme and metre, a poet worthy of keeping company with the best lyric writers in our tradition.

Lucky In Love

David Mourao-Ferreira

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.

The Magic of What's There

David Morley

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’.

Mari Magno, Dipsychus, and Other Poems

Arthur Hugh Clough

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'.

Measures of Expatriation

Vahni Capildeo

In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo’s poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society.

The Met Office Advises Caution

Rebecca Watts

Rebecca Watts’s debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry.

Metropolitan Writings

William Hazlitt

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.

The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950 - 2010

Edwin Morgan

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.

Modern Canadian Poets

Todd Swift & Evan Jones

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.

Modernist Essays

Donald Davie

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)

Moon For Sale

Richard Price

The poems in Richard Price’s Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price’s lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakányová, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait.

Neue Gedichte / New Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

New and Selected Poems

Dennis O’Driscoll

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.

New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology

Kei Miller

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.

The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry

Eliot Weinberger

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)

New Poetries VI: An Anthology

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

New Poetries VII: An Anthology

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.

New Selected Poems

Vernon Watkins

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.'

New Selected Poems

Shuntaro Tanikawa

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.

The New York Poets: An Anthology

Mark Ford

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.

The Nightfisherman

W.S. Graham

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.

The Number Poems

Matthew Welton

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.

The Occupant

Jane Draycott

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.

On Trust: A Book of Lies

James Womack

On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack’s second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth.

Oracabessa

Lorna Goodison

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

Gregory Woods

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.

Over the Land and Over the Sea

Edward Lear

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun.



Ovid's Metamorphoses

Arthur Golding

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.

Oxford Poets 2010 - An Anthology

David Constantine, Robyn Marsack & Bernard O'Donoghue

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.

Pandemonium

Thomas McCarthy

Written in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy’s Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language.

Parallax

Sinead Morrissey

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.

Peelin Orange

Mervyn Morris

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.

Playing the Octopus

Mary O'Malley

In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O’Malley’s sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland’s west coast is as attuned as ever.

The Poems

Rimbaud

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.

Poems - Alain-Fournier

Alain-Fournier

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.

Poems - Francois Villon

Francois Villon

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.

Poems - Jules Laforgue

Jules LaForgue

‘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.

The Poems of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams

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.

Poems Without Irony

Alex Wong

Poems without Irony is Alex Wong’s first collection. In subject, tone and form it ranges widely. The book as a whole does not address any one particular theme, but much of it is concerned with the experience of particularity, with the bounds of moral calculation, and with the need for precision.

Posthumous Cantos

Ezra Pound

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.

The President of Planet Earth

David Wheatley

In his fifth collection of poems, David Wheatley twins his birthplace and his current home, Ireland and Scotland, to engage issues of globalism, identity, and language. He takes inspiration from the Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, self-nominated President of Planet Earth, who in a state of apocalyptic rapture envisioned a new world culture, its rise and its dramatic undoing.

Quennets

Philip Terry

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

Eric Langley

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.

The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe

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.

Reynard the Fox

John Masefield

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.

The Rose of Toulouse

Fred D’Aguiar

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.’

Rough Breathing: Selected Poems

Harry Gilonis

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.

Sarajevo Roses

Rory Waterman

Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move . On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma’s Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where ‘selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar’.

Seasonal Disturbances

Karen McCarthy Woolf

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Following her groundbreaking 2014 début An Aviary of Small Birds (‘technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak’ – Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances.

Selected Poems and Prose

Gottfried Benn

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.

Selected Poems - Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

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.

Selected Poems - Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca

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.

Selected Poems - Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

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.

Selected Poems - Nancy Cunard

Nancy Cunard

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.

Selected Poems - Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton

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.

Selected Poems - Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella

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.

Selected Verse

Algernon Swinburne

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.

Semibreve

John F. Deane

John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in Semibreve combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love.

Serengeti Songs

Chris McCully

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

Stephen Romer

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.

Several Deer

Adam Crothers

Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock ’n’ roll.

Shrines of Upper Austria

Phoebe Power

Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories.

Skies

Alison Brackenbury

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.

Slowly, As If

Karen Press

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?’

Smoothie

Claudine Toutoungi

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.

Spirit Brides

Togara Muzanenhamo

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.

Stack

James Davies

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.

Steep Tea

Jee Leong Koh

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.

The Symbolist Movement in Literature

Arthur Symons

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.

The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature and Culture 1990 - 2015

Gabriel Josipovici

‘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.

'The Vampyre' and Other Writings

John William Polidori

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.

This is Yarrow

Tara Bergin

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.

Through

David Herd

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

Ian McMillan

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.

The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

Tara Bergin

Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation.

Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: Collected Writings

John Cornford

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

Unearthly Toys: Poems and Masks

Ned Denny

Ned Denny’s Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a ‘rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about’ (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy).

Venus as a Bear

Vahni Capildeo

The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice

Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Other Poems

Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’ & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism’s vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky’s pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet.

Waiting for the Nightingale

Miles Burrows

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.

War Prose

Ford Madox Ford

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.

Was and Is

Neil Powell

There are two kinds of Collected Poems, one of which presents an author’s work exactly as it first appeared volume-by-volume. This is the other sort.

Westerns

Philip French

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.

What Must Happen

Jeffrey Wainwright

What Must Happen is Jeffrey Wainwright’s most intimate and elegiac collection of poems to date, recalling lost parents, relations and friends.

The Windows of Graceland

Martina Evans

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

Tom Pickard

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.

Winter Moorings

Andrew McNeillie

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.

A Woman Without a Country

Eavan Boland

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'.

Yellow & Blue

Thomas A. Clark

The poems in this book form a series of small acts of attention, repeated attempts to step outside the circle of human concern and into a wider responsibility to the natural world. ‘To move among / crashing pines / is spacious / and exact.’ Yellow & Blue invites us to share the spaciousness of a book-length journey, an exacting clarity of perception.

Zoology

Gillian Clarke

Zoology is Gillian Clarke’s ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose ‘heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn’, holding us ‘in the planet of its stare’.