Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium...

'A thoroughly rapacious woman...as cruel as she is greedy' Cicero' A woman who took no thought for spinning or housekeeping...m eddlesome and headstrong' Plutarch' [She] caused the death of many, both to satisfy her enmity and to gain their wealth ' Cassius Dio' She acted in a haughty manner towards those who were placing her i...

Over, Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta... In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflections. She evokes the mirrors and doorways, dreams and night-time journeys that transform the familiar: entrances into a different reality. Over explores liminal places where ocean meets land, land drops to ravine, lives intersect in piazzas. The poem...

'Fascinating, brilliantly researched, this sweeping, wonderful book brings Cleopatra and her sister queens to vibrant life' KATE WILLIAMSToday, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt is the most famous woman of the ancient world. Yet she was not the only queen of her generation. She had an elder sister, Berenike, and a younger one, Arsinoe, both of whom also ruled Egypt.The circumstances in which three sister queens each sought power for themselves were unprecedented...

The Kingdom of Jane Draycott's fifth collection is clearly a world we know, altered a little by Draycott's distinctive, prismatic lyricism, whose loving attention to place and our moment is skewed in a way that opens the world afresh. Here are England's towns and countryside, roads and ports and sushi chains, yards and herbs, an airport and a columbarium, and poems that consider art in a time of plague by way of meditation on Titian, Apollinaire and Derek Jarman.

The Kingdom of Jane Draycott's fifth collection is clearly a world we know, altered a little by Draycott's distinctive, prismatic lyricism, whose loving attention to place and our moment is skewed in a way that opens the world afresh. Here are England's towns and countryside, roads and ports and sushi chains, yards and herbs, an airport and a columbarium, and poems that consider art in a time of plague by way of meditation on Titian, Apollinaire and Derek Jarman.

In galleries and living rooms, on trains and trams and buses, mysterious scenes are briefly illuminated, their occupants caught in 'some small act' or dream - in the National Gallery a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; on a winter train a commuter invokes their braver, doppelgänger self as a fire-fighter; in an abandoned sanatorium the grand piano dreams of former days and waits for a returning patient. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long ...

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet ClassicA Poetry Book Society Recommended TranslationIn a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: 'my pearl, my girl'. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six cent...

This volume explores the collection and display of human, animal, and cryptid bodies from antiquity to the present.An increasing amount of attention has been paid to impairment and disability in classical antiquity in recent years. However, one aspect of the subject that has not received significant attention, despite recent developments in the study of ancient paradoxography and ancient collections, collectors, and collecting, is the public display of impaired and disabled people....

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet ClassicA Poetry Book Society Recommended TranslationIn a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: "my pearl, my girl." One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new tran...

The first modern biography of one of the most fascinating, and unjustly neglected, female rulers of the ancient world: Cleopatra Selene. Princess, prisoner, African queen – and surviving daughter of Cleopatra VII.In 1895, archaeologists excavating a villa at Boscoreale, outside Pompeii, uncovered a spectacular hoard of high-quality Roman silverware. In the centre of one especially fine gilded dish was a bust of a female figure with thick curly hair, deep-set eyes, ...

The third full collection of poetry from a critically acclaimed British poet begins with a series of 26 poems based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. From there, the poems travel to a variety of locales, including a California ravine, a Venice piazza, the Atlantic Ocean, and outer space. An extract from a new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is also included. Focusing on the themes of love, time, myth, and history, this highly anticipated collection explores th...