Penelope Shuttle’s History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book’s themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, guided by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space.The first of the book’s four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace...

This groundbreaking study of the facts, fantasies, and taboos surrounding menstruation was published in 1978 and helped bring about a profound shift in attitudes toward a natural phenomenon that had been reviled and denigrated over the centuries.Thoroughly researched yet highly readable, combining psychology, anthropology, and poetry, Shuttle and Redgrove illustrate their theories using examples ranging from the Bible to such modern-day pop horrors as vampire movies and the cult fi...

Adventurous, searching, interested in the luminous instant of reality that dwells in the perpetual now of the poem, Penelope Shuttle is a poet who clearly shares Picasso's view that 'If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?' This selection - drawn from ten collections published over three decades plus new work - shows both her consistency of voice and her energised openness to language and to life. Not for nothing was one of her books titled Adventures wit...

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Penelope Shuttle's new poems. There was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Isles of Scilly and St Michael's Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy's name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle ha...

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Penelope Shuttle’s new poems. There was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Isles of Scilly and St Michael’s Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy’s name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle ha...

Penelope Shuttle’s new collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration, drawing on architecture, history and personal memory. These are poems drawn from the flipside of experience, undermining and rebuilding syntax in order to precipitate language, and, in the main, abjuring punctuation. The poems also engage both with active and meditative thinking in order to establish a vulnerable and temporary equilibrium; poems more interested in framing questions than ...

Write Yourself is the ideal introduction to how to facilitate groups and individuals in finding inspiration for their creative personal writing voices. This book explains how and why writing is such an illuminative, healing, and cathartic process, and provides many practical exercises that encourage the exploration of emotions, memories and experiences. Chapters cover the use of writing with a variety of client groups, including those made up of people suffering from depression, anxiety or...

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot PrizeIn The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Long...

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICEThe Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald's first collection of poems, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice. Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the book introduced readers to her meditative, intensely musical style, and her breath-taking gift for visionary writing.'The poetry of Alice Oswald arrives like a zephyr . . . a fresh and exciting first collection.' Kathleen Jamie, Times Literary Supplement'an...

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. And he has just received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry from Her Majesty the Queen. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, he casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voic...

The European winters of 2009 and 2010 serve as inspiration for the evocative poems in this collection that anxiously yet joyfully unite the seasons and creatures of the planet. The extremity of those record-setting winters in the UK redefined all seasons for the poet, and her notion that nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination is conveyed in poems such as "Polar," in which a polar bear rug transforms personal and ecological longing into a creative act. The co...

Niall Campbell grew up on South Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and his first collection, Moontide, is filled with images of the island's seascapes, its myths, its wildlife, and the long dark of its winters. Quietly reflective and deftly musical, these thoughtful poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love and the stillness of solitude. This highly assured debut collection will establish him as one of the most distincti...