Books

An anthology celebrating the winner and shortlistees of the third Brotherton Poetry Prize, presented by the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. Winner Dillon Jaxx Shortlistees Will Fleming Lucy Holme Jam Kraprayoon Adam Panichi

Stav Polegs second collection follows Dante’s Vita Nuova, Purgatorio and Convivio to explore the links between love, language and longing.

While the place and year of Steve Malmudes birth (Manhattan, 1940) nominally stamp him as a second-generation poet of the New York School, his hieratic, almost ideogrammatic poems, made slowly and carefully - sometimes over many years - are utterly...

'If difference, then resistance.' Hal Coase has a gift for catching the rhythms of speech and exchange, and an eye for a telling image. His book's Italian title, Eccolo, meaning 'Here he is', or 'Here it is', captures his work's immediacy, and the poems'...

How the noise in my head grows and grows, splinters into phantoms and shapes, graceless muses for her cot-mobile. How I terror. Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations...

Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state. So begins Lorna Goodisons astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as uncompromising as an Old Testament prophet, stern as a...

A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024. The days have no names. The day they count the dead, the day they closed the doors, turned off the lights. Were still here in the silence, hearing tree-talk, the winds secrets, the company of birds. (The...

In her first Carcanet collection, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back. In her striking inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, on cities seen and...

Angela Leightons sixth book of poems turns on the curious arts of remembering and forgetting. A poem will be written, James Longenbach writes, if in the grip of memory we are able to forget. A poem may be read in the same spirit, of remembering, to...

Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this books occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful...

Infinite in Finite develops the inimitable style of The Multiverse, the authors first collection (2018), praised as showing some of the best technical skills of any living poet, the work of one who is not afraid of big subjects, whose enthusiastic gaze...

Ned Dennys startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says – in his essay on Hölderlin – about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "worlds night," consist? In the fact that the gods have...

The Coming Thing is a brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evanss first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Toibin. He says of her inimitable narrative...

During the latter phases of Covid, Isobel Williams completed her celebrated translations of the polyamorous ancient Roman poet Catullus. The poems that proved impossible when she prepared Shibari Carmina, published to acclaim in 2021, finally surrendered...

Last Poems brings together the poems of Thomas Kinsella from his five final Peppercanister pamphlets, originally collected as Late Poems (2013), along with a substantial selection of new poems, fragments and revised work which the poet completed before...

For the Unnamed was originally entitled For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Picos Sarco and Sepulvedas Black Swan in Los Angeles, in 1852. That title provided the full narrative in a nutshell: we know the names of...

In poems and translations, The Grid tells a highly unusual set of stories about the end of the world, ancient and modern.

When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often...

Joey Connolly's second book of poems focuses on dissolution and aftermath. It roams across forms and history, grieves for a relationship that broke down, and it is haunted by climate anxiety. The Recycling asks if the specific occasions of this...

Jorie Graham's latest collection continues her urgent attention to climate change, an open letter to the future where 2040 is both the future and event-horizon.

Michael Edwards' new collection consists of 92 poems forming a single long poem that recounts the finding of another world in moments, often dramatic, sometimes everyday, which become doorstones, thresholds.

In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong...

This second collection is a plea for a broader understanding of how we communicate and embrace diversity, exploring how oppression of those considered 'other' has parallels with rising fascism.

To mark the centenary of Donald Davies birth, Carcanet publishes a new Selected Poems drawn from the full trajectory of his poetry and showing his skills as lyric, satirical, elegiac, epistolary and philosophical poet. He was, par excellence, the engaged...

[To] the Last [Be] Human collects the four remarkable books Jorie Graham has published with Carcanet since 2008, Sea Change, Place, fast and Runaway, a tetralogy in which her signature line and attention to our Anthropocene moment emerge, uniquely,...

Debut collection So Many Rooms won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2020 and the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry 2020. This highly anticipated second collection tells stories, many of them with powerful historical resonance, drawing on lived...

David Kinloch is one of the notable Scottish poets of his generation. His friend Edwin Morgan admired his sparkling poems full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness; and Douglas Messerli declared, David Kinloch is surely one of the most...

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,...

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.

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...