Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold ......
After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to poetry. His debut Flood Season explores diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the cliches that surround our nation states, and hybridity.
For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. From the Ground to the Birdsong collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2024 cohort.
Grammar of Passage details a German family's quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel's attention to detail in this debut, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.
It's 1970s Ireland: Jack O'Connell saves the life of an American sailor, Troy, who repays him by unwittingly stealing the love of his life, Kate O'Rourke. Jack fights to win Kate back, but his perfect life falls apart when she dies. In the fall out, he loses custody of their son, Cathal, to his embittered sister-in-law, but many questions remain ......
Humaning, Laurie Ogden's striking debut, moves through a storm of conflicting notions of womanhood, the body, and difference. Sometimes open and playful, sometimes dark and surreal, the poems offer up self-authorship and anthropomorphism as tools for transformation in the aftermath of trauma.
'In Search of Fat' is a translation of some of Bewketu Seyoums's popular poems from Amharic. The poems in this bilingual edition mark his distinctive humorous but cutting style in predominantly short form. The translations, with input from the author, aim to replicate in English the energy and vitality of his voice. Bewketu Seyoum is a popular ......
Peter Ebsworth is a poet in love with the stage. Enlisting heavyweights such as Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett to Sticky Vicky, the veteran Benidorm erotic entertainer, as extras, his debut collection, Krapp's Last Tape, shows him to be a true connoisseur of high and low culture.
The question of belonging lies at the heart of Life in a Country Album: who gets to decide who belongs? "Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?" In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, this book is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. Nathalie remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.
