On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory taking advantage of the day off, drowned quietly in Dublin's Royal Canal.In Ireland's Eye, Mark Anthony Jarman uses this confluenc...

With characters ranging from the desperate to the obsessive to the wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs dazzling linguistic verve and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people, he puts us in their skin so that we feel their frailty and courage. No other contemporary Canadian short-story writer slices up the imaginative excitement, cultural hybridity, and Joycean play of language we see in 19 Knives. With one of the stories s...

“In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry―of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.”―Marg...

A pantoum about a child touching the smallpox-scarred face of an aunt; a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in the form of a nursery rhyme; Joseph and Mary sleeping on the Sphinx's stone paw: these are some of the experiences brought before us in The Heronry.Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Winner of the The Poets' Prize (1990)Yet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richnes...

The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.

What would happen if you were cycling to the office and just kept on pedalling?Needing a change, Mike Carter did just that. Following the Thames to the sea he embarked on an epic 5,000 mile ride around the entire British coastline - the equivalent of London to Calcutta.He encountered drunken priests, drag queens and gnome sanctuaries. He met fellow travellers and people building for a different type of future. He also found a spirit of unbelievable kindness and generosity t...

“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book ReviewLondoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforg...

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...

This "interesting, insightful book" by the author of Deep South reveals "a side of Britain few visitors see" ( The New York Times Book Review).After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scot...

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to a...

In 1912, Carl Stearns Clancy undertook the longest, most difficult and most perilous journey ever attempted on a motorcycle. By June 1913 he had made history, becoming the first person ever to travel round the world on a motorbike. A century on, bestselling author and biker Geoff Hill recreates Clancy’s historic journey and ends up on the road trip of a lifetime. Following the same route, and with Clancy’s account of the journey echoing in his head, Geoff travels through Europe and north A...