Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizePBS Autumn RecommendationThe poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestige...

Dammtor is the old city gate and now the centre of ground transport for the great port of Hamburg. In James Sheard's second collection it is a 'station for midnights, hitched up on stone legs, hollow with sunken light' - a hub for the damaged and deracinated. These precise, wounded poems draw the reader through this desolate landscape - through sexual longing, sexual violence, bereavement and the beginning of hope through the birth of a son.Dammtor restlessly narrates the ...

The poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of 'Songs from the Same Earth', the troubling disconnects of 'A Dream Book', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled 'Fire', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of 'Sang the Rat' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a su...

The poems in Adam Thorpe's latest collection are concerned with the continuum between two worlds: the lived present and the felt past. With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks on the wall where an eighteenth-century priest was shot. With formal dexterity and rhythmic assurance, these versatile, subtle poems investigate ...

Adam Thorpe's fourth collection continues his engagement with history: the living continuum that connects us with our near and distant past, nourishing and illuminating our present. Here are traces left of presence: Indian scratchings on rock, the nail-marks of destroyed frescoes, spoken fragments of war memories - petroglyphs that function as both memorials and re-awakenings, traceable with the finger of the imagination. And here, too, are images of the stilled, the stopped life: a snowed...

Julia Copus's poems bring humanity and light to some of our most intimate and solitary moments, repeatedly breathing life into loss. In two previous collections, she has been feted as among the most compelling poets to have emerged in recent years; now, in The World's Two Smallest Humans, she is writing at her most captivating yet. These finely tuned poems are the fruit of her upbringing in a musical family, an affinity with the Classics, a fascination with the arc of time, and an unflinch...

Winner of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Award. In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting, or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking début collection explores perception, the...

From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe's new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging. In the title poem, the poet disturbs a flock of geese by his mere presence, and one goose takes the wrong direction, away from the flock, as a 'voluntary exile'. A bid for freedom, or a mistake?These poems explore our chances, record our traces...

Combining poems of historical depth, human fascination, and personal sensitivity with a willingness to explore the possibilities of poetic form and technique, this compilation produces diverse formal arrangements from Arabic, English, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Welsh poetry. As it aims to assimilate aspects of these traditions with the poet's own voice, this collection pays homage to the lives and works of Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, and Edward Thomas. Intimate a...

The best ink stones are slates from Chinese riverbeds, but in the long history of their use these have all been found. As one expert writes, 'the better the stone, the smaller and more consistent the particles will be and the denser the ink.' These new poems by Jamie McKendrick have a remarkable density of ink. They explore the grain, or 'tooth', of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail at the same time as they chart the medium they work in - not only what the eye sees, b...

The poems in this remarkable first collection have been hard won: 'Fruits of much grief they are,' as Donne said, 'emblems of more.' Having lost ten years to heroin addiction and recovery, Sam Willetts emerges now - suddenly, and apparently from nowhere - as a fully-fledged and significant English poet.In a book deeply conscious of history, one series of poems tracks his mother's escape, as a young girl, from the Nazis, in a narrative that moves from a Stuka attack on the Smolensk ...

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid -- from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mr Hafren, the Severn Sea' Philip Gross's meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a...