Formal and yet sensitive, steeped in memory and precise locale, Cathy Conlon's poetry is a joy to read and to re-read. Whether she is writing about the Belfast gardener who removed the dead and maimed from bombsite rubble only to plant 'in the crumbs of clay' until flowers appeared, or of a classroom encounter with the incoming 'new Irish', or feeling for the homeless among the Mills & Boons of a public Library, she creates poem after poem of studious empathy and precision. Chased by a sec...

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passio...

When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: 'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.'Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkin's unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urb...

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Su...

Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books.Luck Is the Hook is her sixth book from Bloodaxe. In these poems, chance pl...

Capturing David Niven on a magical marble escalator to heaven in 1946, recording L. S. Lowry's studio after his death, and peering into the illicit worlds of the Victorian Mutoscope, these poems document what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs are arrested in time by photography. Assured and unsettling, Sinéad Morrissey's poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light a...

'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall tothe Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge forcriminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution intextiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since1930, I have watched the mills o...

This beautiful Ladybird ebook edition of Jack and the Beanstalk is a perfect first illustrated introduction to this classic fairy tale for young readers from 3+. The tale is sensitively retold, following Jack as he climbs the beanstalk outside the window and enters a world beyond his dreams, with giants, gold and talking harps.Other exciting titles in the Ladybird Tales series include The Little Red Hen, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, Goldilocks and...

With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and discovered lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings - of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here, tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Death encounters his own double and Daphne te...

An Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. Helen Ivory’s new collection The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses...

A Poetry Book Society RecommendationThis is a book of wonderings and wanderings. Many of the wanderings are on familiar territory explored on foot, the hills of Wicklow and of the Burren in Co. Clare, the shorelines of Dublin Bay, of North West Donegal, of Galway, Achill and the Aran Islands. Other poems bring us farther afield, to a French village on the banks of the Saône, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, to a sacred mountain lake in China. In these poems ther...