Bloodaxe Books

Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

In her debut collection Roshni Gallagher asks what can be seen, named or remembered. From Scotland to Guyana, the poems explore the porous boundary between the past and the present, and how ecological landscapes and landscapes of the mind and body are permanently altered by migration and memory. The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown.

Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher’s mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence – what can and can’t be spoken about. But stories are retained in the objects around us, from a pair of earrings made from stolen gold to a painting of a waterfall in the childhood home.

The poems look through windows, emerge from darkness, and traverse spaces ‘on the edge of things’ where land gives way to water. Seeing and being seen are often painful, yet there is beauty, healing and connection in what we choose to give our attention to.

Roshni Gallagher was one of three winners of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson, Neil Astley, Imtiaz Dharker, Theresa Muñoz and Nathalie Teitler. Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour.

Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

The poems of Nadine El-Enany’s debut collection Pelican Daughter are imbued with tenderness and fuelled by a hunger for justice, connection and a more empathic world. With stunning lyricism she fiercely probes the pain of being powerless in the face of global catastrophes – genocide, climate crisis – without tilting into despair. These poems do not divide the personal and political – indeed, boundaries are met with love and defiance, even when they appear immutable.

The voice that permeates is as inviting as it is brave, through the book’s expansive terrain, from the “hopscotch puddles” of childhood to peace marches that do ‘something/to time and space, like we’re here together / but we’re also there’, to a militarised border where people pass ‘prickly pears / over razor wire, sacks of apples and bread’. El-Enany ushers our attention to the vulnerable and the small, the ‘wail of forgotten things’, waking us to what we cannot hear, the ‘woodlice walking / and spiders making silk’. Hers is a poetry of clarity, compassion and a ‘readying kind of love for the world’.

Nadine El-Enany was one of three winners of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson, Neil Astley, Imtiaz Dharker, Theresa Muñoz and Nathalie Teitler. Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour.

Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

In her wide-ranging debut collection, Clementine Ewokolo Burnley asks what remains after once-familiar places and people have gone. The poems criss-cross the Atlantic, beginning in the 1850s. The voices of Caribbean returnees to the west African coast mingle with those of west African recaptives, German missionaries, and kidnappers. They witness the changes in family life through the generations as villagers or townsfolk are uprooted or stay put or uproot themselves, defying expectations by leaving or returning.

Her poems address the past only to illuminate what people can become to each other in the present, whether in Africa or Europe. In one sequence a group of university students from far-flung parts discover the freedoms of student halls in Glasgow. In sequences set in the Hebrides old friends recognise a late-blooming love after decades apart. In other poems, a woman consults her scars. Each sight, sound or smell has its threat value in Germany, and children of mixed heritage switch between languages in Italy. Weary of searching outward, women drop anchor in themselves. A couple find grounding in the non-human world that surrounds them. Going back in search of belonging proves futile only because connection was there all along.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was one of three winners of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson, Neil Astley, Imtiaz Dharker, Theresa Muñoz and Nathalie Teitler. Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour.

Published to celebrate his 80th birthday, this expanded edition of Peter Didsbury’s Scenes from a Long Sleep (2003) includes a later collection, A Fire Shared (2020), as well as new, previously uncollected poems. 

Didsbury’s staggering powers of invention, outrageous flouting of convention and subversive humour are fully and flagrantly displayed in this new collected edition of the poetry of this ‘secular mystic with the lugubrious tongue’ (Independent on Sunday). All the poems from The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987), That Old-Time Religion (1997) and A Natural History (2003) are included.

Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language, creating a bridge between our own times and a Connemara community on the margins of Europe. 

Drawing on classic forms within literary and oral traditions, Ethnology becomes a love song for Connemara, witness to vivid encounters: between the living and the dead and between the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agendas. In her first full-length book of poetry, fragility and strength are finely balanced, focused on the ruins of an island cottage built by her great-grandfather. Here, Cathy Galvin locates both mourning, humour and joy. The poems give a vivid, original voice to the tradition of keening, of honouring the loss of those we love.

John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals – disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners. To be common here is to share not only qualities but stories with many others – to be classed alongside people with similar origins and become connected also to what is commonplace in the world of animals and plants, days and tables. Sky and sea dominate as the speakers search for oneness and completion, confronted by vast silences and the shadow of Brighton’s collapsing West Pier.

John McCullough has published four previous collections; most recently, the Costa-shortlisted Reckless Paper Birds (2019), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Panic Response (2022), which included his long poem 'Flowers of Sulphur', shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His first collection of poems The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) won the Polari First Book Prize.

Polly Clark’s poetry inhabits a world that is strange, unsettling, and edged with danger. 

This retrospective of her work drawns upon her collections Kiss (2000), the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Take Me with You (2005), and Farewell My Lovely (2009), plus Afterlife, a collection of new poems.

Her debut, Kiss, journeys inward, exploring the self with an unflinching gaze, before Take Me with You turns outward to question how we connect – with others, with the wider world, with the unknown. In these collections, her characters, both human and animal, speak in many voices, illuminating the moments when we are most alive – and most alone. Farewell My Lovely  grapples with the price of survival, charting the experience of leaving one's life behind and returning as a stranger. By turns moving and darkly comic, these poems examine the ways we cling to who we were, even as certainty dissolves and the past slips beyond reach. This retrospective of her poetry opens with a magical new collection – also called Afterlife – in which there are no physical limits, nothing is stable and the world is distilled to its elements. The traumatic experience of rape transforms a girl into a tiger, and a tiger into a girl; a whale embraces both air and water until forced to inhabit only one by jealous fish. The poems grapple with the inexplicable nature of some experience, suggesting that we are most real in that mysterious space between living and dying. 

Polly Clark is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her first collection, Kiss, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second, Take Me with You, a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

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 Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ​The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ​ It introduces an ‘alternative girl child self’, inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove’s dream of such a girl (‘my death, and she is my soul’), and by a friend’s fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ​ The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. 

History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of ‘being’ through fiery language and elemental imagery. ​ She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘potentive space’ where play, fantasy and reality intersect.

Lily Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures. Communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger in poems where observation is balanced with insouciance. 

The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music – where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, ther sequence captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond – its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.

Winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024

This new translation of three collections from one of Denmark’s leading poets completes the remarkable Senses Quintet in English. 

Pia Tafdrup has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called ‘a cathedral of the soul’ and ‘the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years’.

Bloodaxe published David McDuff’s translation of the first two collections in the quintet, The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, in one volume in 2021. This edition brings together his translations of the third, fourth and fifth parts, The Sight of Light, The Sound of Clouds and The Touch of Skin.

All parts of life are mediated through the five senses in the five books, including the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.

The Taste of Lightning is a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lalić, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia’s most crucial poets. Lalić’s poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world – a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love – a love for his wife Branka that ‘matures like wine’ over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where ‘We are twin foci of the same ellipse… Which links two other foci: death and love.’

But for Lalić, the seen and the felt need to be held in memory if they are to last beyond the instant. This means putting them into words, in speech or a poem, though doing so distances us from the raw freshness of experience: ‘Images I barter for the right to pronounce them, / Names I slip as a bribe to time’. Memory, for Lalić, is also cultural. Many of his poems speak about Yugoslavia’s Eastern and Western heritages. About his native Serbia’s history and landscape, and its roots in Byzantium and ultimately in Ancient Greece. But also the seascapes and culture of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.

The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalić’s poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.

The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalić’s poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lalić’s death in 1996, on what God’s purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: ‘may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image’. 

Francis R. Jones, the book’s editor and translator, knew Lalić well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones’s 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lalić’s poetry.

With The Grove of the Eumenides, the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova affirms his place as one of Europe’s greatest living poets, the heir to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Miłosz. Venclova’s masterful poetry upholds a vision of the world that enables us to endure the darkness of our time through his singular insights, ethical endurance and profound compassion. With classical grace, yet manifesting a deep commitment to remain a witness to the contemporary world, The Grove of the Eumenides is a collection of great wisdom.

Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. Bloodaxe published another selection of his poetry, The Junction, in 2008, bringing together new translations of his most recent work from that time as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue.

While The Junction covered poems written while he was still in Lithuania before his forced emigration – and poems from his first decades in the US dealing with exile – The Grove of the Eumenides addresses ‘later life’ issues of democracy, memory, climate, travel, ethics and aging. There is no overlap between the two editions.

Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets – until now writing exclusively in Welsh. Her work has been translated into English and other languages by leading poets from around the world.

Following many years of campaigning, Menna Elfyn is moving towards her own sense of resolution as the Welsh language is now accepted and respected as an official language in Wales. In this hybrid book – for the first time – she has translated or written many of the original poems in English, now describing herself as ‘a proud bilingual’. Other poems in the book are translated by Emma Baines, Joseph P. Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas.

The poems in Parch offer a voice to those whose liberty or dignity have been undermined, seeking religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance for all, and not shying away from the effects of (in)humanity on our environment, histories and lives. Among these are powerful poems responding to sexual harassment, exploitation and violence against women, as well as to the plight of people caught up in armed conflicts past and present. Mercy is a recurring theme, with poems addressing the tension between justice and forgiveness.

In Welsh, ‘parch’ (the ‘ch’ is guttural) simply means respect. Menna Elfyn’s collection explores the many ways in which respect can be expressed, as well as how our world can so often feel parched of simple kindnesses.

Menna Elfyn shares Herta Müller’s belief that ‘holding one’s own language up to the eyes of another leads to a solid relationship, a relaxed kind of love’. This distils the essence of Parch: respect as refuge; the triumph of compassion over conflict.

Selima Hill’s twenty-second collection A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large. 

Self-portrait with a Bucket: On being an artist’s model. 

The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree. 

A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua: Different people’s senses of bafflement with each other. 

Baby Peter: A homeless man and his mother. 

Agatha: An afternoon in a care home. 

Room 17: A 70-year-old woman, baffled but determined. 

Men in Shorts and Bonkers: Out walking with dogs and their humans. 

Until the Tears Roll Down My Cheeks like Honey: Two strangers in a field. 

The Surly Mothers of Successful Men: Short pieces of memoir.

'Selima Hill is an inimitable talent. The mind is fragile and unreliable in her poetry, but is also tenacious and surprising, capable of the most extraordinary responses, always fighting back with language as its survival kit. Life in general might be said to be her subject, the complications, contradictions and consequences of simply existing. Nevertheless, Hill’s writing is eminently readable and approachable, even fun at times, the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones.' – Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, on behalf of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry Committee 2022

With a cover by renowned comic book artist Lisa Sterle, the poems in Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explore grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. 

Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as ‘lydia deetz’) who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go. 

Among other awards, Jessica Traynor has received Hennessy New Writer of the Year and the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2023. New Arcana is her fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.

Lovers of Kit Wright’s poetry – for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour – may find his new gathering exceeds expectations. Jug Band Jag is a wonderfully spirited bout of poetry-making whose forms and themes are markedly diverse, while the concern for musicality is constant. Whether, that is, he is dispensing the low-down on the Gunpowder Plot, or a ghost story from the world of dry-cleaning, or a fairy tale about ox tongue; reflecting on Hitler as artist, or tracing the frustrations of a career mafioso.

He gives a detailed and moving account of the sinking of the SS Persia during the First World War, in which his own grandmother and her baby were drowned, and traces the curious history of a small Kentish coastal town. A retired classics teacher sings the rivers of hell and of course, a Deep South jug band renders the blues.

Kit Wright’s vision of the world blends the sharply realistic with a distinctive brand of surrealism. Whatever his subject and the tune that he has found for it, these new poems are linked by the quicksilver of irony and the river of humanity that runs through them.

Clare Pollard thumbs her nose at Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. 

These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet’s own everyday life – from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane – all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages. Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the ‘Poetess’ over time, there are also poems about writers’ lives – sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L. 

Whether imagining a ‘three-martini afternoon’ at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.

Joint Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 

The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries: Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events. 

In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas. 

Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Mythic and familial beasts roam the swamps and moors of Pascale Petit’s Beast, a collection that ranges from the Camargue of Provence, the limestone Causses and gorges of the Languedoc, Indian tiger forests, the Amazon rainforest, to her home by Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Their essence is evoked in lithe and luxurious lines sometimes compressed as a trapped animal. An estranged father reappears as a hunter, while Maman is an orb spider or a grand piano; both are predators. And there are earthly beasts – wild horses and bulls, lammergeiers, bee-eaters and catfish, remnants of a vanishing natural world. 

Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, with trials such as climate change, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.

Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025.

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt’s poems as ‘at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron’. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.

The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book. That sense of stability ended with the Covid pandemic, which  Gillian Allnutt lived through in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book. 

The poems in the book’s third part, Earth-hoard, are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world now threatened as never before.

William Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East England, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the mythology and sacred sites of India, via a passionate political engagement that never limits song to mere rhetoric. He also drew on children’s games, ballads and street songs in poems showing both political anger and a wider concern for a society losing its common ground, its rituals and rites of passage.

Marratide: Selected Poems brings together poems from William Martin’s four collections Cracknrigg (1983) and Hinny Beata (1987) from Taxus Press; and Marra Familia (1993) and Lammas Alanna (2000), from Bloodaxe Books. Two comprehensive introductory essays by editors Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell discuss the life and poetry of William Martin in this edition published to celebrate his centenary.

 A QR code printed in the book links to archive audio recordings of poems read (and sung) by William Martin.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

This groundbreaking anthology brings together one hundred deaf, disabled and neurodivergent poets from across the international arena, from emerging voices to world-renowned authors, and offers an urgent redress, unpicking many misapprehensions and misrepresentations. 

The word versus means one thing pitched against another. To be versus versus, therefore, is a paradox, but paradox can be helpful – it can open a space for deeper thought. This anthology aims to be such a space. Here, the reader will encounter poems of love and pain, self-care and companionship; poems which challenge cultural, medical and political agendas and policies. There are war poems, poems as acts of witness and solidarity, poems which address the impacts of the climate emergency. There are humorous poems, nature poems, and much more. The selection also draws together poetry in a wide variety of styles and forms, and from different traditions, such as haiku, renga, sonnet, villanelle, prose poem, performance poem, and sign language. Building on the work of decades of disability justice advocacy, Versus Versus offers a poetry of assertiveness and immense vitality.

The anthology draws upon a wide range of voices from across the globe, including many indigenous poets and poets of color. Writer based in the US include: Agha Shahid Ali, Threa Almontaser, Kay Ulanday Barrett, John Lee Clarke, Meg Day, Kwame Dawes, Anita Endrezze, Megan Fernandes, torrin a. greathouse, Ona Gritz, Stephanie Heit, Linda Hogan, Cynthia Huntington, Rachael Johnson, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, I.S. Jones, Fady Joudah, Ilya Kaminsky, Tsipi Keller, Jane Kenyon, Petra Kuppers, Stephen Kuusisto, Adrienne Leddy, Ada Limón, Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Airea D. Matthews, Lateef McLeod, Erica Mena, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Naomi Ortiz, Saleem Hue Penny, Lucia Perillo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and heidi andrea restrepo rhodes.

This anthology was prepared with the help of an Advocacy and Advisory Panel: grateful thanks to Karthika Naïr, Chisom Okafor and Daniel Sluman. Many thanks to the Royal Society of Literature and to the judges of the 2023 Literature Matters Awards for selecting this anthology as one of the winning entries.

Cover image description: The book's cover features a square-shaped artwork by Polish artist, Julian Stanczak, entitled 'Concurrent Colors'. The painting creates an optical illusion of vertical moving curved lines in red and blue, giving the impression of moving waves or sand dunes. At the edges of the painting the lines thin out so that they resemble a comb effect. The painting has a darker blue framing band around it, filling the extent of the cover. The title of the anthology 'VERSUS VERSUS' is in a large red font at the top of the cover, and the subtitle, '100 POEMS BY DEAF, DISABLED & NEURODIVERGENT POETS', is in a large blue font underneath the square painting. The editor's name, Rachael Boast, is in a smaller red font beneath the subtitle.

Praised by Joan Armatrading for 'his charm, his poetry, his revolutionary ways, his caring for people, his inclusiveness', Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a poet who wouldn't stay silent, who didn't pull any punches, who wrote out of a sense of urgency and a commitment to social justice. 

Benjamin was a writer and performer of extraordinary range: an oral poet, novelist, playwright, children’s writer, reggae artist, actor, television personality and political activist. Born and raised in Birmingham, England, he was sent to an approved school for being uncontrollable, rebellious and ‘a born failure’, ending up in jail for burglary and affray. After prison he turned from crime to music and poetry. He was later nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry, and voted Britain’s third favourite poet of all time (after T.S. Eliot and John Donne) in a BBC poll. 

Known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults as well as his poetry with attitude for children, he had his own rap/reggae band. He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. 

Dis Poetry brings together all the poems from Benjamin’s three Bloodaxe collections, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), as well as some from The Dread Affair (1985), along with previously unpublished work and lyrics from various recordings. The book includes a QR code giving access to Pamela Robertson-Pearce's feature film To Do Wid Me originally released as a DVD-book in 2015 – enabling you to see and hear Benjamin performing in full over 20 of the poems in Dis Poetry on your phone while reading the book.

In Pretenders, her third book of poetry, Kate Potts asks: what is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? And what can ‘the imposter phenomenon’ – a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed – tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another?

Through lively and vivid poetic monologues drawn from original interview material, and through original poetry, Pretenders begins to consider individual feelings and experiences of fraudulence, pretence and persona in a wider social and historical context. The varied, hesitant, questing voices build to create a bold and innovative chorus.

Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, unsettling notions of ‘realness’, self-assurance, and the self.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. 

The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art. 

In her early poems, Blandiana’s voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana’s poetry.

Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down.

Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.

First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection. 

These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence. 

Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.

Conceived while collaborating with a Dutch artist on a project in Death Valley, California, Charlotte Van den Broeck's The Inside of a Stone explores desert landscapes and womanhood – and the emotional resonance between the two – while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman’s wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen’s magical healing.

After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020. The Inside of a Stone marks a departure from the themes of those earlier books, which often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes.

My Secret Life is the first book in English translation of the poetry of Krisztina Tóth, one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, Krisztina Tóth is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. The poems in My Secret Life were selected by her from three of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems. 

Tóth is, and has been for several years, a major figure in Hungarian writing and, being a major figure with an important public voice, she has also been, and is now, subject to unrelenting attacks by the government-funded, government-supporting, gutter press. She has been self-exiled in England but is moving to Switzerland shortly. Originally attacked for suggesting that a couple of standard pieces of literature might be removed from the school syllabus and replaced by writing by living women authors, her life has become the subject of the sort of storm of defamation already practised on others perceived to be threatening the values of the government.

Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025

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 is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as his father’s death. 

Yang Lian's work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. This edition of A Tower Built Downwards contains the full, unabridged collection, including poems that were removed for its publication in China.

Lithuania’s Tomas Venclova is one of Europe’s greatest living poets. His work speaks with a moral depth exceptional in contemporary poetry. Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. The Junction brought together new translations of work he had written over the preceding decade while living in the US as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue. There is no overlap between this selection, The Junction: Selected Poems, published in 2008, and his later retrospective The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (2025).

But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, Insistence takes stock of the parent's responsibility to her child, the poet's responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. In a long poem, Darcy revisits Inger Christensen's 1981 Alphabet, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima. In Darcy's 'Alphabet', the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. 

Described by David Wheatley as 'boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem' with 'cunning and humour', Ailbhe Darcy's poems interrogate cosmopolitanism as much as they do rootedness, love as much as grief. Ailbhe Darcy's first collection, Imaginary Menagerie, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011.

War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. 

Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.

After seeing the Scilly Isles from a small plane at a low altitude – flying over the Wolf Lighthouse ­– and then visiting the recent Sunken Cities exhibition at the British Museum, imagination and memory played their part in joining the Lyonesse dots together for her, prompting what she calls ‘a spontaneous inundation of approaches to the theme, images, soundings of Lyonesse’. As she writes in a preface to this book: ‘The universality of loss, both of physical cities and of the human experience erased from the record, enhanced the resource of Lyonesse in my writing. Lyonesse is a place of paradox. It is real, had historical existence. It is also an imaginary region for exploring depths. It holds grief for many kinds of loss… The poems seek re-wilding of a city where human loss interconnects with mythic loss; myth is rooted in the real.’ 

The second part of this book – New Lamps for Old ­– is a collection of poems she needed to write in coming up for air from the watery depths of Lyonesse, to find ways to begin again, to find meaning in life after bereavement. The ‘old lamps’ of a former life have been extinguished, leaving darkness. Her challenge was to find ‘new lamps’ to illuminate and give meaning to life. Lyonesse is a fluid magical world. The poems of New Lamps for Old are concerned with earth, air and fire. Both collections share allegiance with the fifth element, the spirit.

The first poem in her new collection asks 'Shall we go on the shiny?', the last one ends 'being altogether gone this time'. In between there's the tightrope, 'The Walking Shot', the report on the pilgrimage in progress, the marquise going out at five o'clock. The eye moves left to right along with the poems' movement. Though there are stops from time to time, for problems of the unidentified, the location of waterholes, whether or not those birds are oystercatchers, for the interior of a pocket and Nijinsky jumping. Then on, maybe to the beach again. Shall We Go? is Annemarie Austin's eighth book of poetry, following her Bloodaxe retrospective, Very: New & Selected Poems (2008) and later collection Track (2014).

Gunasekera takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures.