Poetry Books

The one-word titles of Jules Gibbs's Snakes and Babies are potentialities of immense expansion. These poems are incapable of being singular, inert, quiet. They are manifold, animated, agitated by energies of politics, dreams, and desires-systems of...

In this work, Hazo casts his eye back upon a career devoted to poetry. With works that are arranged loosely under the themes of love, family, and aging, this volume affirms Hazo's status as one of the most compelling and enduring poets of his generation...

Now considered possibly Illinois' greatest poet, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) saw himself as a bard of the working class. Chicago Poems brought him to national attention and is one of the few Chicago classics that can also be termed an American classic. It...

The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

By the author of "Everything You've Heard is True" (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1990), these poems capture the surrealism of daily life lived inventively and cheerfully at or near the edge. The poems have a novel particularity in their evocations...

This 16th collection by the author contains 59 comic and lyrical poems, including the 13-part title-poem. John Ashbery was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for "Self-Portrait in a Convex...

"Longing itself is nothing but the heart's open spaces," writes Mari L'Esperance. And in the open spaces at the heart of these poems is a mother who has disappeared. In a world of war and displacement, illness of the mind and body, imprisonment and...

"Time Signatures" is Chris McCully's first book of poems. It reflects his fascination - as student, scholar and theorist with the procedures of writing verse, especially with rhythmical and metrical structures. The subject-matter here is drawn from the...

This is the first comprehensive collection of Kruger's poems to appear in English. The poems are drawn from ten collections published over the last two decades. Kruger explores two themes in particular: the state of German culture and the fate of poetry...

Not only the migrating birds speak in "Translations from the Natural World". The imprisoned species of pigs use their slum language; ravens, cuttlefish, sunflowers and a shell-back tick are among those non-verbal members of our natural world which find...

Remarkable for its relentless truth-telling, and the depth and thoroughness of its investigation, for the freshness of its sources, and for the shock power of its findings. Even a reader who is not unfamiliar with the sources and literature of the...

This intimate and provocative autobiography, first published in 1936, reveals the innermost thoughts of a great American poet. Edgar Lee Masters was a transitional figure in American literature with one foot planted in the nineteenth century and the...

''Breast cancer is confronted here with keen sensitivity and candor in poems that are serious but not sentimental or self-pitying. . . . Almost all the verses are written in direct and prose-like style---this creates a singular tone and lends the...

Harry Golden greatly admired and loved Carl Sandburg, and the feeling was indeed mutual. Toward the end of his life, Sandburg shared his papers, letters, photographs, and memories with Golden. Combining these materials with his own recollections, Golden...

This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel...

Born and raised in San Francisco, Lai was trained as an engineer but blazed a trail in the field of Asian American studies. Long before the field had any academic standing, he amassed an unparalleled body of source material on Chinese America and drew on...

This volume is the first of its kind to collect classic and contemporary work focused on the intersection of poetry and cultural studies, reaching from Wordsworth's ''Preface to Lyrical Ballads'' and W. E. B. Du Bois's ''Of the Sorrow Songs'' to...

Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope...

Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope...

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have...

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have...

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in...

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in...

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

A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity...

After seven centuries, the Divine Comedy reborn... In the follow-up to his 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize-winning debut Unearthly Toys, Ned Denny takes a unique, startling approach to the medieval, quintessential spiritual epic.

After seven centuries, the Divine Comedy reborn... In the follow-up to his 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize-winning debut Unearthly Toys, Ned Denny takes a unique, startling approach to the medieval, quintessential spiritual epic.

After seven centuries, the Divine Comedy reborn... In the follow-up to his 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize-winning debut Unearthly Toys, Ned Denny takes a unique, startling approach to the medieval, quintessential spiritual epic.

After seven centuries, the Divine Comedy reborn... In the follow-up to his 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize-winning debut Unearthly Toys, Ned Denny takes a unique, startling approach to the medieval, quintessential spiritual epic.

Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan's Spring encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy...

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

Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list. But his recently-published correspondence with William...

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

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

Entering its tenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not...

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

Gathered from over thirty years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance - in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience...

William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume II reissued as a Carcanet Classic. After 1939, William Carlos Williams had embarked on the great original experiment that led to his magnificent, faulted master-work 'Paterson', and the work in the second...

The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a...

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

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

Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, first published in 1886, changed the language of poetry. In John Ashbery the book has a translator whose virtuosic originality brings Rimbaud's visions alive...

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: `my pearl, my girl'. One of the...

Two decades ago a critic characterised Marius Kociejowski as a poet `whose imagination prowls the geographical boundaries of western culture'. He has a Polish name, was born in Canada, and lives in London where he collects other exiles, listens to their...

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

Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur `A.C.' Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems...

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation. Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today's reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been...