A debut poetry collection exploring language, loss, and the art of perception. Eric Langley's Raking Light draws inspiration from art conservation, using oblique light to reveal hidden textures and abandoned intentions. These poems delve into miscommunication, lost meanings, and the uncertainties of human interaction, testing the efficacy and authenticity of language itself.Attentive to resonance and echo, Langley's verse picks at words to uncover buried i...

Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a...

The subjects of this book are the subjects whose subjects are themselves.Narcissus so himself himself forsook,And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.In accusing the introspective Adonis of narcissistic self-absorption, Shakespeare's Venus employs a geminative construction - 'himself himself' - that provides a keynote for this study of Renaissance reflexive subjectivity. Through close analysis of a number of Shakespearean texts - including Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar...

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts 'in an age of bare hands and cast iron' and ends 'as the automatic lock / clunks shut' in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentieth-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight silence' of cattle out in rain - are coloured ...

Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third collection of poems, and follows the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem Dart, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Extending the concerns of Dart and written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—A stunning new collection by the award-winning young poet and translator."A.E. Stallings's latest volume of poetry feels a bit like a dream an academic might have. LIKE is a beautiful, perfectly synthesized conflation of the modern and ancient world, filled with so much mythology and culture." — Englewood Review of BooksLike...

The ravaging effects of illness, the breakup of a relationship and the disturbing nature of relocation. These are the subjects under award-winning Luke Davies' meditative eye. Luke Davies' Totem was a grand love poem, a hymn to life; Interferon Psalms is a song of the brutality of time, a song of death, yet equally as beautiful.

In his brilliant third collection, award-winning and critically-acclaimed poet Ken Babstock finds momentary stays against our gathering darknesses in the irrepressible, acrobatic, free play of the mind. Poems of conscience collide with the problems of consciousness, the concrete and the conceptual find equal footing, and formal beauty mixes with imagistic brinksmanship as the speaker attempts to leave our "homes half-sheathed Tyvek" and "drift into the pain of our neighbours." Like Babstoc...

Maintain your brain with these 320 fun ways to test your vocabulary knowledge and perhaps discover new words.You are given a word like CARPORT or a series of words like DONALD DUCK, and you make as many 6-letter words as you can from that word or series of words using each letter only once.Sound simple? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.Great fun and a great way to maintain your brain.

In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969, to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This selection, made by the author himself, draws upon the full arc of his career and offers an outstanding concentration of, and introduction to, the full range and powers of this distinguished poet.

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012.Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work ...

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection‘There are lines in All One Breath for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.’ - Sebastian Barry, a*New Statesman* Book of the YearIn this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since Black Cat Bone ...