The work of an original, haunting, and experimental modernist poet is made available again for the first time in 50 years in this volume. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. A late modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman ...

' Between now and then, I will offer youA fist full of rock cress fresh from the bankThe valley tips of garlic red with dewCooler than shallots, a breath you can swankIn the village when you come. At noon-dayI will offer you a choice bowl of cawlServed with a ' lover' s' spoon and a chopped sprayOf leeks or savori fach, not used now,In the old way you' ll understand. The dinOf children singing through the eyelet shedsR...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZEFrom the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS'Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent'Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving. A bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place'

An author's walk "from source to sea along the Ouse in Sussex is a meandering, meditative delight" drawing on history, literature, and the river itself ( The Guardian, UK).In To The River, author Olivia Laing embarks on a weeklong, midsummer odyssey along the banks of the River Ouse in Sussex, England, from its source near Haywards Heath to the sea, where it empties into the Channel at Newhaven. More than sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned he...

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that...

The original and classic The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas is available once again, now with a brilliant new preface by Paul Muldoon.The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas’ body at the morgue of St. Vin...

Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient and primal landscapes . Both evoke a similar sensation in us - we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying. In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of fairytales. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at r...

This lovely book of poetry brings together over 100 of the most celebrated and cherished poems of the 20th century. Including poets as diverse as John Betjeman and Ted Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon and Allan Ahlberg, and subjects from all avenues of life - war, family life, love, death, religion, the countryside, animals and comedy - the whole breadth of the nation's life during the 20th century is encapsulated here. Compiled and edited by Griff Rhys Jones as part of the successful The Nations...

A Times Literary Supplement , Telegraph and Financial Times Best Book of 2025'The glorious gathering-in of his achievement that is The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited with meticulous care and luminous clarity. . . allows us for the first time to see his dozen formal collections as only the most visible peaks in a constantly rolling range...

Published to mark the poet's 80th birthday, this collection confirms R. S. Thomas as our pre-eminent poet.'This is the book I've been waiting for' Ted Hughes

A best of R.S. Thomas's poems in a beautiful new gift editionR. S. Thomas (1913- 2000) was born in Cardiff. He studied classics, then theology and, after ordination, served six rural Welsh parishes for most of his life. His first book of poems was published in 1946. He won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964 and published regularly, Collected Poems 1945-90 marking his eightieth birthday.

Through an exploration of her country home in Wales, acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris discovers the heart of her fascinating country and what it means to be Welsh. Trefan Morys, Morris's home between the sea and mountains of the remote northwest corner of Wales, is the 18th-century stable block of her former family house nearby. Surrounding it are the fields and outbuildings, the mud, sheep, and cattle of a working Welsh farm. She regards this modest building not only as a reflection of ...