Poetry

Black Harvest

'The first ever Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the South Wales Valleys beautifully illustrated with black and white photographs .Includes work by all the leading Welsh writers including: Duncan Bush, Peter Finch, Mike Jenkins, Oliver Reynolds, Labi Siffre,Chris Torrance, Herbert Williams. Foreword: Prof. Dai Smith'


I am Nobody's Nigger

Revolutionary, reflective and romantic, I Am Nobody's Nigger is the powerful debut collection by one of the UK's finest emerging poets. Exploring race, identity and sexuality, Dean Atta shares his perspective on family, friendship, relationships and London life, from riots to one-night stands.


In the Presence of Absence

One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish's self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.


Moon Tell Me Truth
Poems from Palestine and Beyond

All the poems in this collection were written and illustrated by children aged 9 to 15 from Palestine, Argentina, India and Spain. They were submitted as entries for the 2023 Hands Up Project international poetry competition and read by a panel of judges composed of artists, playwrights and leading figures in the world of ELT. They are presented here in the form in which they were originally received, with a foreword by Alice Oswald, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.


Plague Lands and other poems

Born in Baghdad in 1945, now living in London, Fawzi Karim is one of the most compelling voices of the exiled generation of Iraqi writers. In the first collection of his poetry to appear in English, his long sequence Plague Lands' is an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile, haunted by the deep history of an ancient civilisation. Memories of Baghdad's smoke-filled cafés, its alleys and mulberry-shaded squares, the tang of tea, of coffee beans...arak, napthalene, damp straw mats', are recalled with painful intensity. Karim's defiant humanity, rejecting dogma and polemic, makes him a necessary poet for fractured times. Working closely with the author, the poet Anthony Howell has created versions of Plague Lands' and a selection of Karim's shorter poems. Notes on the poems, Elena Lappin's introduction and an afterword by Marius Kociejowsky exploring Karim's life, illuminate the context of the poetry.


Selected Poems

In his long life as a poet, Pablo Neruda succeeded in becoming what many poets have aspired to but never achieved: a public voice, a voice not just for the people of his country but for his entire continent. Widely translated, he probably reached more readers than any poet in history; justly so, for, as he often said, his "poet's obligation" was to become a voice for all those who had no voice, an aspiration that stemmed from his long-time commitment to the communist faith. Born in 1904 in the rainy south of Chile, he enjoyed from an early age the luck of attention. One of his first books, Twenty Love Poems, became a bible for lovers in the Spanish language, and confirmed him in his poet's vocation. At the same time he pursued a lifelong career as a diplomat, serving in a series of consular posts in the Far East and Europe. In 1971, while serving as Chilean ambassador to France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In a famous essay, "On Impure Poetry," Neruda calls for "a poetry as impure as old clothes, as a body with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, and taxes."

 


Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language of speaking to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. Your Silence Will Not Protect You brings Lorde's poetry and prose together for the first time.