The first English translation of a major work of postwar German poetry.Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was a member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group, which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II. From a wide-ranging literary career that encompassed all genres, Squandered Advice was Aichinger’s sole poetry collection. The book gathers poems written over several decades, yet Aichinger’s poetic voice remains remarkably consist...

The powerful and disturbing stories of legendary postwar Austrian-Jewish writer Ilse AichingerWhen someone pushes the bed out of the hall, when you see that the sky is turning green, and if you want to spare the vicar a funeral sermon, then it is time for you to get up, quietly, as children get up when the morning light starts to glint through the shutters, secretly, so the nurse doesn’t see—and quick!Like the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo and Br...

JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and official temptations, keeping unflinchingly to a code of "silence, exile, and cunning" could not have been managed without a show of strictness well beyond the reach of the theater of t...

John Burnside's remarkable book is full of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song.These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter lo...

**2024 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, Third Place WinnerFrom Lorna Crozier, the poet that Ursula Le Guin called a “truth teller” and “visionary,” comes a collection of soul-stirring poems that follow the death of a loved one.**After That is a book written from the dark hollow we fall into when we lose those we love. Lorna Crozier’s sure poetry finds the words to engage with the grief that comes from the death of her partner, the writer Patrick Lane, ...

A walk is like a knot that gets undone,And yet it keeps us closer.In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by l...

Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial PrizeWinner of the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full CollectionShortlisted for the 2015 T. S. Eliot PrizeShortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First CollectionIn this remarkable, intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological fast-forward f...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" ( The Times Literary Supplement).Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, wher...

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN'A master of language' HILARY MANTELJohn Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with...

"The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war." — The Times Literary SupplementSelected Poems 1968–2014 offers forty-six years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who "began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso" (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as "one of the era's true originals," Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, compiled by the poet hi...

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 ...

Mortality, Love, Ethics, Civilization, Divine Presence, Human Body, Modernity, The Natural World, and Constructed Spaces. The Sentinel watches and reports back to us in a voice that is timeless and worthy of trust. Whether describing renewal and regeneration, the despair brought on by global capitalism, or a place where decay and loss meet their antithesis, A. F. Moritz's magisterial voice, rare insight, and supple craft are on impressive display.