A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of poetry from one of the most innovative and influential poets from China. Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages.The different sections – short poems, sequences, and one long poem – form a single comprehensive statement of Yang’s recent explorations. It...

Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. Narrative Poem, Yang Lian’s most personal work to date, is built around a series of family photographs, the first of which was taken on the day he was born, on 22 February 1955, and the last of which dates from the time he spent undergoing...

*WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015**WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015*There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, ...

Born and raised in northern Manchuria during the colonial period of Korea, Yun Dong-ju was a poet of the utmost purity, beauty, and sincerity. His posthumously published collection of poems under the title Sky, wind, stars, and poems is one of the all-time favorites of Korean readers. Wishing not to have so much as a speck of shame toward heaven until the day I die, I suffered, even when the wind stirred the leaves. (From Foreword) In simple diction and straightforward expressions, his poe...

In this powerful, evocative collection, master storyteller John O'Donohue explores themes of love and loss, beginnings and endings. Inspired by the ancient wisdom of the Celtic tradition and the rugged, majestic landscape of his birth, the west of Ireland, here he also creates a unique vision of a place and time, and the echo of a memory that will never fade.

JANE HIRSHFIELD's first book, Alaya, received the Quarterly Review Of Literature Prize in 1982. In 1986, OF Gravity Angels receive d the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation for a book in progress; in 1989, it was awarded the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal. Hirshfield's third book The October Palace, published in 1994, received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the Poetry Center Book Award. She has also edited aand co-transla...

I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely. In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of parents and close friends, explores elements of ancient Celtic culture; poems are inspired by works of art, landscapes rural and urban, and historical figures from Tolstoy to Simone Weil. What connects poem to poem is the poet's vividly sensual la...

One of China’s most significant contemporary poets, co-translated by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith*Shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize*Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the sp...

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is Tishani Doshi's third book of poems, following two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Belongs Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for best first collection. In Girls are Coming out of the Woods, Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breathtaking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is esse...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...

* A haunting love story a la Romeo and Juliet ofthe Orient, a love that cannot be but a love that will grow old during the most devastating war in history.* A shamelessly original work of art that you can read legally outside China. ￭ New Beijing Voice* A tour de force. ￭ Leanne Delehanty,author and visual artist* A refreshing pallet of colours…A subtle undercurrent of prose ￭ Ashish Anant, Out of the Blue* This is the kind of book that you ...

Winner of the Herder Prize, Nichita Stanescu was one of Romania’s most celebrated contemporary poets. This dazzling collection of poems – the most extensive collection of his work to date – reveals a world in which heavenly and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound, where love and a quest for truth are central, and urgent questions flow. His startling images stretch the boundaries of thought. His poems, at once surreal and corporeal, lead us into new metaphysical and ...