Books

We are still here on earth, and with a troubled sense of wonder Jeffrey Wainwrights new collection acknowledges lifes sufficiency. The poems evoke Ruskin as writer and artist, his insistence on precision, the thing seen in fullness rather than the seer,...

Joseph Minden's debut collection Poppy is a research trip to the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme. It is also an ill-fated visit to Penang, an echo of the Opium Wars, a tour of fragmentary family myth and a fear of familiar vampires - all grimy...

This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an...

Jay Gao's debut collection Imperium introduces a compelling innovative talent. These poems layer together formal experiments, lyric intensity and occasionally sardonic perspectives on the contemporary. His perspective is refreshingly original: he writes...

In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear and hope. For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred DAguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by...

Celia Sorhaindo's engrossing debut, Radical Normalisation, writes back from the margins, bringing readers to her Dominican home. It adjusts perspectives on the universal questions about poetry as a resource and value in the present. Sorhaindo's wit and...

The latest collection from multiple Forward- and T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated poet. Draycott teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at the universities of Oxford and Lancaster. Her fifth Carcanet collection, The Kingdom has its face turned towards the...

Zoe Skouldings new poems take their readers into new worlds: here, we come to terms with the impossible speech of the cormorant, chart the cross-cultural coordinates of Newborough Warren with Map of Havana (and its this way to the Malecon / to look out...

The highly anticipated debut collection from a contributor to Carcanet's New Poetries VIII anthology.

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific...

Andrew McNeillie is a Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, nature writer and editor of the ecoliterature magazine Archipelago. His seven collections of poetry make up this timely Collected.

Tara Bergin's third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin's book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of...

The radical, French Romantic poet finds his ideal translators in Gallas and Ganz, bringing this important poet to the attention of a modern audience.

Jee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain kinds of peace...

The University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets, many of whom have been members of staff or creative writing fellows. Its Brotherton Library houses the archives of several outstanding contemporary poets and its Poetry Centre...

A new collection from this widely-celebrated and much-loved poet.

Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russias terrible years of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic...

At the volcanos edge, in exilic space, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or in the acid clouds of Venus, Mina Gorjis Scale traces life at its limits. The poems range across scales of distance, temperature and time, from vast to minute, glacial to...

The poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scuphams hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling Curtain Call, often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and...

The much-anticipated first collection from Eric Gregory Award winner and a contributor to Carcanet's New Poetries VIII anthology.

The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends - pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record - they forced the people to...

The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic...

When, in March 2019, the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown on ordinary life, Gabriel Josipovici began to write a diary tracing his life under the new dispensation. 100 Days responds to the escalating crisis, as well as to the...

Originally subtitled On the Art of Living in the Merciless Order of Modernity, the writing in Zest adds up to a pattern book for intellectual and emotional survival in this fractious age. The book opens with Hieronymus Bosch in the Garden of Eden, where...

In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to...

The poems in Naming of the Bones touch on Christian values and work towards a significant faith, at the same time focusing on the wonders of an evolving cosmos. The poems delight in the things of the earth, suggesting a secular Christianity. They hope...

Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in...

The personal-political memoir of a lawyer and businessman turned writer, an American emigre who never found a home in America.

The highly anticipated second collection from this Forward Prize-winning poet. Book of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Carola Luthers new book, On the Way to Jerusalem Farm, explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. Carola Luthers new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world...

New contemporary prairie gothic collection from Canadian poet Sheri Benning, a lead poet from Carcanets bestselling anthology New Poetries V. Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada...

Her poems are voyages of discovery. Literally. Over and over she writes about the journeys, physical and metaphysical, that are transformative experiences.' So wrote Sarah Maguire of Jane Duran, whose new book's two striking sequences take readers into...

Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant...

The poetry of Miles Burrows was discovered in 1966 when Tom Maschler, already an editor at Cape, heard him give a public reading in London. Cape published him. After that, Burrows continued his life in many walks, most of them medical. Having studied...

This debut collection ventures into Northern islands, finding new ways of talking about connection, silences and belonging.

Grand Larcenies features generous selections from the work of ten classic modern Dutch poets. The translator, a notable Welsh poet now living in Holland, takes his bearings from Robert Minhinnick's seminal Welsh anthology The Adulterer's Tongue, which...

In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes...

The title poem of this collection, Robert Wellss first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: Was that the day...

Gregory Woods is the leading British critic and historian of gay literature. He has published five previous Carcanet poetry collections, the first being We Have The Melon (1992). Ten years in the making, Records of an Incitement to Silence revisits many...

The bestselling Complete Poems from the Nobel Prize-winning Salvatore Quasimodo, reissued as a Carcanet Classic.

'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her...

Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider...

The Extasie is a compelling book of love poems with its lyrical roots deep in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rural traditions of the nineteenth. Among New Zealand poet John Gallas's spirit guides are John Clare and, in particular, Wyatt...

Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two...

Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two...

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings...

Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of our major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home. As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations,...

'On First Hearing Careless Whisper' is one of several poems in this brilliant new collection that put time on pause in order to look at life through art: 1980s pop, painting, or a congeries of writers including Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D. H...