A debut poetry collection exploring language, loss, and the art of perception. Eric Langley's Raking Light draws inspiration from art conservation, using oblique light to reveal hidden textures and abandoned intentions. These poems delve into miscommunication, lost meanings, and the uncertainties of human interaction, testing the efficacy and authenticity of language itself.Attentive to resonance and echo, Langley's verse picks at words to uncover buried i...

Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a...

Raking Light is Eric Langley's début collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the artconservation technique of 'raking light', in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays. Under raked light, paint reveals its damage and deterioration, its craquelure and canvas-warp, and discloses a backstory of abandoned intentions. Wit...

The subjects of this book are the subjects whose subjects are themselves.Narcissus so himself himself forsook,And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.In accusing the introspective Adonis of narcissistic self-absorption, Shakespeare's Venus employs a geminative construction - 'himself himself' - that provides a keynote for this study of Renaissance reflexive subjectivity. Through close analysis of a number of Shakespearean texts - including Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar...

A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceQueen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind.An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves.A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong.Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustr...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry PrizeStag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing ...

Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third collection of poems, and follows the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem Dart, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Extending the concerns of Dart and written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.

Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best CollectionWinner of the 2013 Costa Poetry AwardShortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Portico PrizeMichael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, ...

The ravaging effects of illness, the breakup of a relationship and the disturbing nature of relocation. These are the subjects under award-winning Luke Davies' meditative eye. Luke Davies' Totem was a grand love poem, a hymn to life; Interferon Psalms is a song of the brutality of time, a song of death, yet equally as beautiful.

In his brilliant third collection, award-winning and critically-acclaimed poet Ken Babstock finds momentary stays against our gathering darknesses in the irrepressible, acrobatic, free play of the mind. Poems of conscience collide with the problems of consciousness, the concrete and the conceptual find equal footing, and formal beauty mixes with imagistic brinksmanship as the speaker attempts to leave our "homes half-sheathed Tyvek" and "drift into the pain of our neighbours." Like Babstoc...

Maintain your brain with these 320 fun ways to test your vocabulary knowledge and perhaps discover new words.You are given a word like CARPORT or a series of words like DONALD DUCK, and you make as many 6-letter words as you can from that word or series of words using each letter only once.Sound simple? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.Great fun and a great way to maintain your brain.

Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Seamus Heaney's late father.