bloodaxe books ltd tyne and wear (Over 1,300 results)

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

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2008, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise. Her first book, "Almanacs", was a traveller's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. "Nigh-No-Place" is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world. Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across Canada with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway line from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of gravel road, ending in the Arctic oiltowns of Inuvik and Tuktoyuktuk. But it is in Shetland that she becomes acutely aware of her own voice - her fluency and tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath. "Nigh-No-Place" reflects the breadth of ground she's covered. 'Ten-minute Break Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory. 'Paternoster' is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse. 'Prenatal Polar Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded by tundra. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. "Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by celebrated contemporary poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places. The anthology opens with a series of poems on human life and spiritual sustenance, starting with Rumi: 'This being human is a guest house./Each morning a new arrival.'. The poems which follow explore many ways of keeping body and soul together, offering food for thought on knowing yourself, living with nature, who or what is God.All are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to searchers and non-believers. "Soul Food" shows how poetry can help feed our hunger for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "Extreme of Things" is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present "how things work" at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, "Ghosts and Other Company" (1995) and "All the Things I See" (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The "'Season Songs' from Persephone" (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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

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

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Poetry has always been bound up with ideas of endurance, redemption, consolation, and survival, and it is one of the best antidotes to depression. We Have Come Through brings together 100 poems celebrating individual courage in resisting the ravages of psychological trauma, induced by both external events and mental breakdown. The book moves through sections covering intimations of alienation, the causes of madness, the individuals experience at the nadir, through to healing and redemption. The final section has poems that can function as a charm against adversity and as part of our emotional repair kit. Especially powerful are those poems charting the emergence of hope after despair. Poems like George Herberts The Flower convince the reader that both the despair and the alleviation were real for the writer and they hold out the promise that relief does come. Peter Forbes has chosen poems that range in time and scope from Shakespeare, Clare and Blake, through Hardy, Auden, MacNeice and Stevie Smith, to John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and many contemporary poets. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by celebrated contemporary poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places. The anthology opens with a series of poems on human life and spiritual sustenance, starting with Rumi: 'This being human is a guest house./Each morning a new arrival.'. The poems which follow explore many ways of keeping body and soul together, offering food for thought on knowing yourself, living with nature, who or what is God.All are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to searchers and non-believers. "Soul Food" shows how poetry can help feed our hunger for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paperback. Condition: Good. Too Black Too Strong is Benjamin Zephaniah's third collection from Bloodaxe. It addresses the struggles of black Britain more forcefully than all his previous books. With poems like 'Chant of a Homesick Nigga' and 'Kill Them Before Ramadan', he shows that he's a poet who won't stay silent, who doesn't pull any punches, writing out of a sense of urgency and a commitment to social justice. He opens this hard-hitting and blackly funny book of poems with an outspoken comment on where he's coming from, setting his poetry against the political landscape of Britain. The book includes poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Moniza Alvi's new book is unified by birds. Her creations 'Motherbird' and 'Fatherbird' are inspired by her parents, and by the loss of her father and by his emigration from Pakistan. Among the many bird-related poems are versions of the French poets Jules Supervielle and Saint-John Perse, and poems 'after' the paintings of the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo. Blackbird, Bye Bye is Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection At the Time of Partition, published in 2013.

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

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

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: Dr Who meets Paradise Lost. The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill? Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Many of the poems in Moniza Alvi's "Europa" relate to ancient and modern traumas, including enforced exile, alienation, rape and 'honour killing'. Its centre-piece is a re-imagining of the story of the rape of Europa by Jupiter as a bull. Her latest collection also includes a series of poems exploring post-traumatic stress disorder, and further versions of the French poet Jules Supervielle with their Second World War background. "Europa" is a dark, unified book whose poems move towards regeneration. It is published at the same time as "Moniza Alvi's Split World: Poems 1990-2005". The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In The Queen of Sheba, the traveller comes home. These are poems of Scotland and beyond. Kathleen Jamie celebrates the good and challenges the outdated, exploring new mixes of culture and language. There are poems about landscape and nationhood, sex and politics, love and exasperation, hope and poverty. At times darker than her earlier work, The Queen of Sheba is rich with life and boldly self-aware. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The poems from The Queen of Sheba were later reprinted in Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-1994. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to someone who knew something about it.' That's exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this judicious and comprehensive selection of British, Irish and American manifestos by some of modern poetry's finest practitioners. Opening the 20th century account with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the book moves through key later figures including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Dylan Thomas. America is richly represented too, from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to the influential New England poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. Strong Words then brings the issues fully up to date with over 30 specially commissioned statements from contemporary writers including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Selima Hill, Paul Muldoon and Douglas Dunn, amounting to a new overview of the poetry being written at the start of the 21st century. For poets and readers, for critics, teachers and students of creative writing and contemporary poetry, this is essential reading. As well as representing many of the most important poets of the last hundred years, Strong Words also charts many different stances and movements, from Modernism to Postmodernism, from Futurism to the future theories of poetry. This landmark book champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the poem. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. City Psalms was Benjamin Zephaniah's first collection from Bloodaxe back in 1992. It includes some of his best-known poems, including 'Dis Poetry', 'Money' and 'Us and Dem'. Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults and his poetry with attitude for children Zephaniah has his own rap/reggae band. He has produced numerous recordings, including Dub Ranting (1982), Rasta (1983), Us and Dem (1990), Back to Roots (1995), Belly of de Beast (1996) and Naked (2004). He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the Presidents Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. Benjamin Zephaniahs poetry for adults has been brought together in Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics (Bloodaxe Books, April 2025). This posthumous retrospective includes all the poems from his three Bloodaxe collections, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black Too Strong (2001), as well as some from The Dread Affair (Arena, 1985), along with previously unpublished work and lyrics from various recordings. A QR code printed in Dis Poetry links to Pamela Robertson-Pearces film portrait of Benjamin Zephaniah from the DVD-book To Do Wid Me (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Propa Propaganda was Benjamin Zephaniahs second collection from Bloodaxe. First published in 1996, it includes some of his classic poems, such as I Have a Scheme, The Death of Joy Gardner, White Comedy and The Angry Black Poet. Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults and his poetry with attitude for children he was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. He has published three other poetry books with Bloodaxe, City Psalms, Too Black Too Strong and To Do Wid Me (a DVD-book including a film portrait by Pamela Robertson-Pearce). His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, was published by Scribner in 2018. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The official elegy for Princess Margaret was the last straw. There had to be an antidote: a poet who would stalk the powerful, the pretentious and the sycophantic. The socialist magazine Red Pepper invited Adrian Mitchell to don the dreaded costume of The Shadow Poet Laureate and write regular people's republican poems for their columns. At a secret midnight ceremony he was decked in the cloak, fedora and blue suede shoes which are the garb of the Shadow. Then he kept popping his head up where he was least wanted by some but most needed by the rest of us, appearing on radio and TV and other platforms to speak for the other side, restoring a radical, subversive voice to the public face of British poetry. Now Adrian Mitchell - in his first new book of poems for four years - tells us not just what the Shadow knows about poetry and politics, peace and war, but what the Man behind the Shadow feels about love and death, and everything else in life from parents and children to dogs, asteroids and the Tellytubbies. Adrian Mitchell is one of Europe's bestselling poets. His poetry's simplicity, clarity, passion and humour show his allegiance to a vital, popular tradition embracing William Blake as well as the ballads and the blues. His most nakedly political poems - about war, Vietnam, prisons and racism - have become part of the folklore of the Left, sung and recited at demonstrations and mass rallies. Now out of print, the whole collection is included in Come On Everybody: Poems 1953-2008. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Blood Wedding by Federico Garca Lorca is a classic of Spanish literature, the tragedy of a woman loved by two men. The man she has loved since childhood is hot-blooded Leonardo, but his family are hated by her own folk, and he marries someone else. Then, on her wedding-night, Leonardo carries her off on horseback, pursued by the men of the two shamed families. The two rivals meet in the moonlight in a ?ght to the death.Lorca said the only hope for happiness lies in 'living one's instinctual life to the full'. And: 'To burn with desire and to remain silent is the greatest punishment we can in?ict on ourselves.' Blood Wedding explores the tragic intensity of lived, instinctual passion. For Brendan Kennelly, this involves a return to the very origins of drama: 'The pure pulsing sense of the mysterious nature of life before we learn to explain things almost out of existence . Blood Wedding is a drama of agonised and bewildering revelation.'Lorca has a searing realisation of the power of desire. Brendan Kennelly rises to the challenge of how to convey this in an English translation. In language at once soaring and accurate, wild and precise, he does justice to Lorca's tragic vision of the nature and consequences of lived desire. His version of Blood Wedding reveals the mysterious, intricate, passionate and truly astonishing nature of Lorca's masterpiece.Brendan Kennelly's versions of Euripides' The Trojan Women and Medea, and Sophocles' Antigone, are published by Bloodaxe Books in his drama trilogy When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies (2006). His version of Lorca's Blood Wedding was premiered by Northern Stage in Newcastle and Derby in autumn 1996. His Antigone and The Trojan Women were both first performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 1986 and 1993 respectively; Medea premiered in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1988, toured in England in 1989 and was broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

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