Poetry
Always subjective, we have tried to add here some of our local poets, and some collections which will appeal to a broad audience. Please contact us if you would like an emailed sample of any of the collections, like a virtual 'dip' into the book:)
100 Poems, by Seamus Heaney (hardback and paperback available)
£18.99
An intimate curated set of poems from throughout Heaney’s life, chosen by his family.
Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, and no other edition exists which has such a broad range, drawing from first to last of his prize-winning collections. But now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family, curated some time after Heaney's death in 2013.
In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, as well as discovering new favourites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching out far and wide, now and for years to come.
Essential for the fan, or those discovering him for the first time.
The Poetry Pharmacy, edited by William Sieghart ( clothbound hardback)
£14.99
Not just poems, but words of wisdom and solace for a whole range of spiritual ailments. A lovely thing indeed.
'Truly a marvellous collection ... There is balm for the soul, fire for the belly, a cooling compress for the fevered brow, solace for the wounded, an arm around the lonely shoulder - the whole collection is a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss' Stephen FrySometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and that precious realization - I'm not the only one who feels like this.
In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary: those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.
New volume available from September 2019 'The Poetry Pharmacy Returns' with new reader chosen options and most popular requests.
A Poem for Every Day of the Year (hardback)
£19.99
A Poem For Every Day of the Year is a magnificent collection of 366 poems compiled by Allie Esiri, one to share on every day of the year. Reflecting the changing seasons and linking to events on key dates - funny for April Fool's Day, festive for Christmas - these poems are thoughtful, inspiring, humbling, informative, quiet, loud, small, epic, peaceful, energetic, upbeat, motivating, and empowering! Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with all the family, it is bursting at the seams with familiar favourites and exciting new discoveries. T.S.Eliot, John Betjeman, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti sit alongside Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, and Kate Tempest.This soul-enhancing book is the perfect gift that will last the whole year, with a little bit of magic to read every day.
Let The Light Pour In, Lemn Sissay ( poetry, hardback Sept 2023)
£12.99
For the past decade, Lemn Sissay has composed a short poem as dawn breaks each morning. Life-affirming, witty and full of wonder, these poems chronicle his own battle with the dark and are fuelled by resilience and defiant joy. Let the Light Pour In is a collection of the best of these poems, and a book celebrating this morning practice.'How do you do it?' said night'How do you wake up and shine?''I keep it simple,' said light'One day at a time'
Dancing by the Light of the Moon, edited by Giles Brandreth (Paperback March 2021)
£10.99
Now in paperback - featured Hardback not currently available. Paperback has same cover.
250’of the nation’s best loved poems... what better time than to learn something by heart?!
Improve memory, boost brain power and beat cognitive decline. How many people in old age can still remember poems they learned by heart in childhood ?
The Cat Prince, Michael Pederson ( hardback July 2023)
£12.99
Open-hearted, gut-wrenching and yet elegiac, these poems pack a hefty emotional punch. Michael Pederson's poems display a huge vocabulary for love, love in all its many forms and guises. These poems chart the journey from boyhood to manhood, the highs and the lows, the losses and the gains, always working their way towards an essential, emotional truth' Jackie Kay'If the alphabet is a piano keyboard then Michael Pedersen plays it with the confidence and panache of a jazz improviser who knows that every note can have the potential to change someone's life.Be amazed by this book' Ian McMillan'Michael's poems are so physical you can almost touch the images in them. Fabulously sensual and alive. I adore poetry like this' Stephen FryThe Cat Prince & Other Poems is the third collection from prize-winning poet, and author of Boy Friends, Michael Pedersen.
The Wild Verses : Nature poems on love, hope and healing - Helen Mort
£16.99
In a fast-paced world, The Wild Verses invites you to slow down, reflect and to seek solace through poetry and nature. From consoling words of hope and healing to meditations on love and friendship, this beautiful collection has a poem for every feeling. Accompanied by emotive illustrations of animals in the wild, this is a poetry collection to be returned to again and again.
With original words from acclaimed poet and writer Helen Mort ( The Illustrated Woman) plus some inspirational borrowings from other poetry. This is a lovely book.
Orisons In the Dark, Pallavi Parma-Uday ( hardback May 2023)
£10.00
A beautifully produced collection of poems, recognising what it is to be a woman, a daughter, a traveller, an immigrant, a creative in today's multi cultural world.
Pallavi is now living in Belfast, having grown up in various parts of India and worked in London before moving here.
She is a graduate of LSE and is currently an economic historian in Queens University Belfast.
( www.econhistorienne.com)
Tiger Tiger Burning Bright (hardback, Sept 2020)
£25.00
A glorious and ambitious sequel to I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree - winner of Waterstones Children's Gift of the Year 2018 and Red Magazine's Children's Illustrated Book of the Year 2019, and described by Julia Donaldson as "An absolutely beautiful book."
This lavishly illustrated gift book treasury of 366 animal poems - one for every day of the year - ranges from unforgettable classics to contemporary works from around the world, including poetry in translation. The spectacular range of poems for children includes work by Roger McGough, William Blake, Dick King-Smith, Ted Hughes, Grace Nichols, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson. Britta Teckentrup's breathtaking illustrations bring together all the richness and wonder of the animal kingdom, making this poetry anthology a perfect gift that will be treasured by generations.
With sumptuous finishes including cloth binding, full colour illustrations throughout, textured paper jacket, ribbon marker, and head and tail bands. The perfect gift for any child or adult to treasure.
A Poem for Every Night of the Year, ed Allie Esri ( hardback 2016)
£19.99
A Poem For Every Night of the Year is a magnificent collection of 366 poems compiled by Allie Esiri, one to share for every night of the year. The poems - together with introductory paragraphs - have a link to the date on which they appear. Shakespeare celebrates midsummer night, Maya Angelou International Women's Day and Lewis Carroll April Fool's day.Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with all the family, it contains a full spectrum of poetry from familiar favourites to exciting contemporary voices. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B.
Yeats, A. A. Milne and Christina Rossetti sit alongside Roger McGough, Carol Ann Duffy and Benjamin Zephaniah.
This soul-enhancing book is the perfect gift that will last the whole year, with a little bit of magic to read every evening.
The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, by John Burnside (pb, April 2021)
£12.99
A Financial Times Book of the YearThough we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire.
This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry.
Michael Longley, The Candlelight Master ( poetry, 2020)
£10.00
The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter.Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures.
His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'.
Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun.
The Carrying, by Ada Limón ( paperback Feb 2019)
£10.99
WINNER
US NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019
This is Ada Limon's most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance.
A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility - 'What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?' - and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: 'Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.' And still Limon shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.
Poetry Unbound, Padraig O'Tuama ( paperback Feb 2024)
£12.99
This inspiring collection, curated by the host of the Poetry Unbound podcast, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig's illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn't necessarily know how to do so.Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more.
The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy ( paperback)
£10.99
This unique collection of poems from the Poet Laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology. Who? Him. The Husband.Hero. Hunk. The Boy Next Door.
The Paramour. The Je t'adore. Behind every famous man is a great woman, and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.
Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World's Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best. A perfect, humorous little gift for Valentine's Day.
Find Peace in a Poem ( hardback Jan 2024)
£12.99
This is a book of poetry for everyone. Inside is a treasure trove of writing celebrating mindfulness. Read the poems aloud or curl up with them in a quiet corner.
Begin your journey into a lifelong love of poetry. This beautifully illustrated collection features powerful poems written by a wide range of contemporary voices. They share their unique perspectives on the topic of mindfulness, from listening for silence and living in the moment to the colour of our dreams and what the trees can teach us.
Showcasing original poems alongside existing works, this is a book to share and treasure forever. Featuring brilliant poetry by:Mandy Coe,Jack Prelutsky,Pat Mora,Kate Wakeling,James Carter,Nikita Gill,Joseph Coelho,Valerie Bloom,Amina Jama,Michael Rosen,Sue Hardy-Dawson,Mary Ann Hoberman,Georgia Heard,Sophia Thakur,Sanah Ahsan,Elizabeth Acevedo,Kit Wright,Naomi Shihab, NyeZaro Weil, alongside beautiful artwork.
Windfall : Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect by Jane Clarke
£20.99
What does Ireland's nature poetry say about us as a people? How does it speak to us of our past, our inheritance, the values to which we aspire? What clues lie within its language that connect us to our deeper selves and our place within our communities and environments?As varied as our plants, animals and habitats, Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect presents a portrait of an ever-changing vista. Jane Carkill's captivating original illustrations of Ireland's rich and diverse natural world add to the sense of enchantment and wonder. Each poem pays attention to nature while also reflecting on the loves and losses of our everyday lives.Award-winning poet Jane Clarke's selection includes some of our best-known poets, from Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Paula Meehan, Nuala Ni Dhomhnail, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Paul Muldoon. There are poems here to make us laugh and cry, to help us celebrate and grieve; poems to put words on what can seem inexpressible as we connect to the other living beings with which we share this island.
What You Need to Be Warm, Neil Gaiman ( hardback Oct 23)
£12.99
In 2019, Neil Gaiman asked his Twitter followers: What reminds you of warmth? Over 1,000 responses later, Neil began to weave replies from across the world into a poem in aid of the UNHCR's winter appeal.It revealed our shared desire to feel safe, welcome and warm in a world that can often feel frightening and lonely. Now publishing in hardback and illustrated by a group of artists from around the world, What You Need to Be Warm is an exploration of displacement and flight from conflict through the objects and memories that represent warmth. It is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from.
It is about holding out a hand to welcome those who find themselves far from home. Featuring new, original illustrations from Chris Riddell, Benji Davies and others with a thought-provoking cover from Oliver Jeffers. Sales of every copy of this book will help support the work of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, which helps forcibly displaced communities and stateless people across the world.
The Poetry Pharmacy Forever, William Sieghart ( hardback Sept 2023)
£14.99
The Poetry Pharmacy Forever : New Prescriptions to Soothe, Revive and Inspire
The powerful final instalment in the hugely beloved series. After the tumult of the last years, William Sieghart is back to prescribe the perfect poem for a variety of life's ailments, offering hope and comfort to readers in need. Here, he draws on the emails he received from the public during multiple lockdowns, as well as tried-and-true classics from his in-person pharmacies, to create an essential anthology of poetry for our times. Through his expert curation and insightful commentary, he reminds us of the power of words to help us heal, to reconnect us with the world and to recover what has been lost.
From weathering sorrow and sudden loss, to dealing with environmental despair and burnout, this new selection speaks directly to a society in urgent need of comfort and compassion. Whether you're searching for guidance, hope, or simply a moment of beauty, The Poetry Pharmacy Forever is here to provide solace, joy and inspiration, one verse at a time.
365 Poems for Life, Allie Esiri ( hardback Oct 2023)
£22.00
Discover 365 Poems for Life, an uplifting poem-a-day collection from award-winning curator Allie Esiri. This nourishing poem-a-day collection offers readers a brief moment of escape from daily life through some of the warmest words in the English language. Whether you're searching for wisdom or looking to boost your wellbeing, dip into this anthology to share with others or enjoy a quiet moment of calm every day of the year.Explore a wide range of poets, including Maya Angelou, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest, Dylan Thomas, Ocean Vuong and many more. The perfect gift for poetry lovers and newbies alike, this beautiful anthology brings a moment of solace every day of the year.
ISDAL, Susannah Dickey ( paperback Sept 2023)
£10.99
The much-anticipated debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey, on the subject of our cultural obsession with true crime. ISDAL is a timely interrogation of the true crime genre. In the first of its three parts, we follow the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about the mystery of 'Isdal Woman', whose burnt remains were discovered in Norway in 1970 and who has never been identified.At the centre of the book is an inquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, sexiness, and death: 'The death in question has already occurred', the poet observes, 'has occurred to someone sufficiently abstract as to allow us to romp gainfully, guilelessly, guiltlessly through a simulacrum of death's corridors'. The free verse poems in the final section both explore and - perhaps inevitably - enact the ethical ambiguities of the genre. Witty, excoriating, formally ingenious, ISDAL marks the arrival of a thrilling talent in contemporary poetry.
Taking liberties, Leontia Flynn ( paperback August 2023)
£12.00
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world.
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all that: to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song.
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.
Everyone should be reading her' OBSERVER
UP LATE, Nick Laird ( hardback July 2023)
£14.99
Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden.
There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, 'the darkness under the cattle grid'.
Nick is orginally from Northern Ireland and is married to novelist Zadie Smith.
The Sun Is Open, Gail McConnell (paperback 2021)
£9.99
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters.This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.
In Her Jaws, Rosamund Taylor ( paperback 2022)
£8.99
In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we've never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love. Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy.These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground. Praise for In Her Jaws:"A book of astonishments whose poems gaze towards the night sky and all that stirs in the dark below, swooping the reader through mysteries of desire and discovery.
Taylor's voice is by turns tender, sharp, luminous; her poems are wondrous." - Doireann Ni Ghriofa"In these haunting, simmering metamorphoses, Rosamund Taylor's imagination is both intrepid and tender. Spanning the erotic and the traumatic, these poems root through the fibrous dark of our psyche. In Her Jaws is a breath-taking debut." - Sean Hewitt"
This, Also, Is Mercy by Teresa Godfrey ( paperback, 2021, SIGNED)
£10.99
This, Also, Is Mercy begins with a moving and wonderfully detailed poem about the Titanic. One thinks one knows where that particular journey will end up, but Teresa Godfrey’s poems are never predictable, and ‘Omen’ sets us off on a voyage into the surprising and marvellous.
Before the book ends with ‘Covid Planting’, a poem that perfectly sums up 2020, we’re offered hard-hitting pieces, followed by a sequence of superb love poems and some treks through northern dreamscapes that move with cinematic deftness. There’s also a self-portrait that might not even be of the author, a little masterpiece of ekphrastic art. Energetic, caring, and wildly inventive, these are poems of a high order indeed. Theodore Deppe This, Also, Is Mercy is a meditation on connections. Teresa Godfrey knows that it is details that bring meaning to moments, and she describes them in elegant, musical language. The collection arcs through time, beginning with a (fortunately) failed emigration, and becomes a meditation on what stays.
A Poem For Every Summer Day, edited by Allie Esiri ( paperback March 2023)
£16.99
From June - August, a treasure trove of new and old
* temporarily out of stock April 2024, due soon but please check before ordering *
Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with all the family, this book dazzles with an array of familiar favourites and remarkable new discoveries.
These seasonal poems - together with introductory paragraphs - have a link to the date on which they appear. Includes poems by Lord Byron, Sylvia Plath, Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats and Langston Hughes who sit alongside Brian Bilston, Michael Rosen, John Agard and Kae Tempest.
This soul-enhancing book will keep you company for every day of Winter. Enjoy more seasonal poetry collections with A Poem for Every Spring Day and A Poem for Every Autumn Day.
Super-Infinite : The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell ( paperback March 2023)
£10.99
John Donne lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language.
In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell shows us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.
Reviews for Katherine Rundell are outstanding : -
*A Sunday Times top ten bestseller****Winner Baillie Gifford Prize 2022****Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction 2023****Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize 2023**'Masterly.' Observer 'Wonderful, joyous.' Maggie O'Farrell' Frankly brilliant.' Sunday Times' Unmissable.' Simon Jenkins'Every page sparkles.' Claire Tomalin.
Poetry Unbound, Padraig O’Tuama ( hardback October 2022)
£20.00
An immersive collection of poetry to open your world, curated by the host of Poetry Unbound. This inspiring collection, edited by Padraig O Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Padraig's illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn't necessarily know how to do so.
Poetry Unbound contains expanded reflections on poems as heard on the podcast, as well as exclusive new selections. Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limon, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more
Moving to paperback, Feb 2024, for £12.99 - email to preorder.
linda@bookspaperscissors.co.uk
The Hurting Kind : Ada Limon ( paperback August 2022)
£12.99
The new collection from the US Poet Laureate.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness - between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves - from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limon. 'I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,' writes Limon. 'I am the hurting kind.' What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings - and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they 'do not / care to be seen as symbols'?With Limon's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions - incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.
These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honour parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.
The Slain Birds, Michael Longley ( paperback Sept 2022)
£12.00
Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'.The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'.
'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today.
Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery.
This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.
Poems for When You Can't Find the Words : A comforting collection from Irish Hospice Foundation.
£15.99
From Irish Hospice Foundation, who so compassionately provide end-of-life and bereavement care, this collection provides the gift of words at a time when words can be hard to find and is designed to speak to the fears and concerns that illness and approaching death awaken. Created in conjunction with Poetry Ireland and including poems from Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Emily Dickinson and Paul Durcan, this is a collection of words to comfort in the most troubled times. Whether you or a loved one are facing the end of life, or if you're grieving the loss of someone close, you will find solace and refuge here.
The Fire of Joy , Clive James (paperback Sept 2022)
£12.99
Clive James read, learned and recited poetry aloud for most of his life. In the last book he completed before he died, he offers a selection of his favourite poems and a personal commentary on each. In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn't just remember them, he found them impossible to forget.The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration. Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud.
In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem's construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life. Whether you're familiar with a poem or not - whether you're familiar with poetry in general or not - these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James's enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved.
This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight.
Eat or We Both Starve, Victoria Kennefick ( 2021)
£10.99
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022. Awarded the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022.Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021.
An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A Guardian Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021.
A Sunday Independent (Dublin) Book of the Year 2021. A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.
Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry.
She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details.
Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.'
Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong ( paperback June 2023)
£12.00
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit. Vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicentre of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment.
Vinegar Hill, poetry by Colm Toibin ( paperback March 2022)
£12.99
From the highly acclaimed author of Brooklyn, Colm Toibin's first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion and belonging through a modern lens. Fans of Colm Toibin's novels, including The Magician, The Master and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Toibin in verse.Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Toibin examines a wide range of subjects - politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, memory and a fading past, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-travelled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Toibin's unique lens. Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion and humour, Toibin offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder and cherish.
How to Fly : (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), Barbara Kingsolver ( pb, Aug 2021)
£10.99
This edition gathers together Barbara Kingsolver's vibrant and various poems, revealing an intimate side to her creative practice as yet unseen. Almost resembling a Collected or Selected Poems, the book is divided into thematically linked sections: a series of 'How to' poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek guides with revelatory wisdom; a complicated family pilgrimage to Italy; cherished childhood memories; the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer; elegies to lost loved ones; and elegies to the planet. Sharing the natural fluidity and compassionate humanity of her prose, How to Fly will both delight Kingsolver's devoted readership and welcome a host of new readers to her luminous poetry.
A Poet For Every Day of the Year, ed Allie Esiri ( hardback Sept 2021)
£20.00
Allie Esiri's beautiful gift anthology, A Poet for Every Day of the Year, is the perfect introduction to 366 of the world's greatest ever verse writers. Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with all the family, it is bursting at the seams with familiar favourites and exciting new discoveries. Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti and Emily Bronte sit alongside Roger McGough, Wendy Cope, Imtiaz Dharker, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath and Ocean Vuong.Each of the 366 poems features a small introduction that gives a sense of who the writer was, and not just the greatness of their work. Some offer insightful biographical details or key historical context, while others may provide quirky, humorous anecdotes. The day-to-day format of the anthology invites readers to make poetry a part of their daily routine, and makes sure that they discover something inspirational, life affirming, provocative, moving or entertaining each and every day.
Slug, Hollie McNish (paperback May 2022)
£10.99
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight' SCOTSMAN
From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between. 'The inimitable words of poet/goddess Hollie McNish once again hold up honest, damn funny and refreshing takes on the everydayness of our lives .
This book is an uplifting and outrageous delight. A great introduction to the joys of poetry too.
( Now in paperback - visual is of hardback )
Wedding Readings & Poems ( hardback, April 2021)
£9.99
Offering indispensable inspiration for wedding readings, this gorgeous compilation of writing on love and marriage is also the perfect gift for couples and wedding guests alike. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
This edition is edited by Becky Brown. This beautiful anthology is filled with readings to light up every kind of wedding ceremony. There are poems about falling in love, joyful prose celebrating marriage and wise words about commitment from some of our greatest writers and poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E.E. Cummings and Katherine Mansfield. It's a book brimming with inspiration that solves the dilemma of choosing what to read at weddings and marriage celebrations.
Also handy enough to be in your pocket as you step up to read!
