The Apple Fall is a remarkably assured first book of poems. It is a celebration of the lives of all kinds of women, from figures such as Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald to the anonymous peace campaigners of Greenham Common. Helen Dunmore's poems are concerned with that web of family which constricts or supports us: about becoming a mother and living closely with children; about the many facets of solitude. Helen Dunmore has a strong command of rhythm, and writes with fluency and sensitivity to achieve both precision and sensuousness. Her poems are fresh and direct, combining authority with lightness of touch - rare qualities in contemporary poetry. The Apple Fall is a book of poems with the widest appeal.

THE APPLE FALL.

Dunmore, Helen

Bloodaxe

Davies became famous briefly in 1911 when Home Secretary Winston Churchill raised his case in Parliament. But who was Davies? In this fictionalised account of a lifelong petty criminal, Constantine explores the mystery of a shadowy loner caught in a vicious circle of self-perpetuating crime.David Davies (1849-1929) was known in his day as the 'Dartmoor Shepherd'. He spent half a century in prison for a succession of minor offences, mostly for stealing coppers from the poor-boxes of local churches. In Constantine's novel three characters reflect on Davies' life, and understand him as best they can. But Davies remains uncomprehended and in isolation.Davies came from Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire, and Constantine has set his novel in the counties of the Welsh Marches, in Flint and Montgomery, Shropshire and Cheshire. He has made much use of documentary material - Hansard, newspaper reports and a biography - and aims in his novel to seek a truth behind established facts. Although historically based, Davies is a novel whose concerns are very much relevant to the present day, particularly in its portrait of the habitual offender and of vagrancy.This first novel by a young award-winning Bloodaxe poet marks the emergence of an exciting new talent in British fiction.

Davies

David J. Constantine

Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999’s Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the malevolent powers-that-be to task, as in her seminal poem ‘I’m Over the Moon’: ‘I don't like what the moon is supposed to do./ Confuse me, ovulate me,// spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient / date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,// I'm angry. I'll take back the night.’\nShaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revealing in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Her poems dance wildly to the sizzling music of the English language, awake to every syllable: ‘Artless// is my heart. A stranger/ berry there never was,/ tartless.// Gone sour in the sun,/ in the sunroom or moonroof,/ roofless.’ These poems are also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny – ‘like having a bad boyfriend in a good band’ – though there is always wisdom beyond the punchline.\nBeginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, Liquid Flesh collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.

Liquid Flesh

Brenda Shaughnessy

Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Pierre Reverdy

Poetry

New and Selected Poems

Berg, Stephen

The Vigil

WILLIAMS, C.K.

Basil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'. As well as Briggflatts, this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great Sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realised 'Overdrafts' (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). Like the earlier Oxford edition, it presents in its entirety Bunting's own Collected Poems, with the addition of the posthumous Uncollected Poems; but this centenary edition from Bloodaxe also has a new introduction by the late Richard Caddel. Bunting wrote that 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard.' His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. The new separate Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts (2009) includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting. Bloodaxe has sublicensed a critical edition of Bunting s complete poetry, The Poems, edited by Don Share (2016), to Faber &amp; Faber. This has three poems not included in the Bloodaxe edition, together with a number of variants, anomalies, fragments and "false starts": apart from those additions, Bloodaxe's Complete Poems is complete (but has no critical apparatus).

Complete Poems

basil-bunting-richard-caddel

Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a major voice in American poetry. Supernatural Love shows the sensuous richness of her imaginatively daring poetry of ideas, and traces the evolution of this remarkable writer. Book by book, from an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates through the searching, dense, metaphysical imagery and cascading syntax which are her signature. From her classic portrait of Darwin in the last year of his life, to the vertiginous brilliance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, she produces poems as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion but never the same twice. With singular devotion, Schnackenberg writes as if poetry were a matter of life and death. Supernatural Love includes three collections previously published in Britain as well as The Throne of Labdacus, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. This new book-length poem telling the story of Oedipus is a visionary work of profound and tragic beauty. Her later collection, Heavenly Questions, winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize, was published by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2011.

Supernatural Love

Schnackenburg, Gjertrud

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