Poetry

An uplifting poetry collection from the number one bestselling author of My Name Is Why, Lemn Sissay OBE

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

For the past decade, Lemn Sissay has composed a short poem as dawn breaks each morning. Life-affirming, witty and full of wonder, these poems chronicle his own battle with the dark and are fuelled by resilience and defiant joy. Let the Light Pour In is a collection of the best of these poems, and a book celebrating this morning practice.

'How do you do it?' said night
'How do you wake up and shine?'
'I keep it simple,' said light
'One day at a time'

'They call me Jax, though my real name's Eva

The whole of the Jackson Five rolled into one serious diva

No.1 on the guest list, top of the charts

When I make my grand entrance, the sea of sequins parts...'

From Hamburg to Jo'burg, Oslo to Soho, Patience Agbabi follows her critically acclaimed debut collection R.A.W., with Transformatrix, an exploration of women, travel and metamorphosis.

Inspired by 90s poetry, 80s rap and 70s disco, Transformatrix is a celebration of literary form and constitutes a very potent and telling commentary on the realities of late twentieth century Britain. It is also a self-portrait of a poet whose honesty, intelligence and wit manages to pack a punch, draw a smile and warm your heart all at once.

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEAD

This book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision.

MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poems on the modern world and city life. Liz Lochhead writes with an alert and sensitive eye on personal relationships and women's experience of them. The book provides an invaluable introduction to modern Scottish poetry and to the poets who are arguably its greatest practitioners.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015

Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral,
Poet pilgrims competing for free picks,
Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix
From below-the-belt base to the topnotch;
I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch
when the tales overrun, run offensive,
or run clean out of steam, they're authentic
and we're keeping it real, reminisce this:
Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business.

In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-Century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style.

Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life.

Scotland's ballads represent one of the high-water marks of Scottish literature and are famous as superb expressions of oral culture, reflecting a world of magic, deep passion and history transformed into legend.

This selection includes more than eighty of the finest ballads, together with an introduction, notes and glosses. The versions come from the last three centuries-from the time of Burns and Scott, who were among the earliest collectors, up to the present day.

Although the ballads are anonymous in a way, the singers themselves determine the versions we have, by a process of selection, interpretation and refashioning. Wherever possible, this edition includes the names of the singers, many of whom were women.

An internationally recognised ballad scholar, Emily Lyle is a research fellow at the School of Scottish Studies in the University of Edinburgh, and is general editor of The Grieg-Duncan Folk song Collection.

This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry. Kevin MacNeil's voice and vision, while rooted in the Hebridean islands, is open to a wide range of cultures, not only those of Scotland - from Gaeldom to urban Scotland - but to the wider European and American mind and, through his interest in Zen Buddhism, to Japanese and Chinese culture.
With astonishing freshness and versatility, MacNeil's poetry creates powerful connections and new combinations -he has wit as well as feeling, a powerful sense of the past and the local while being resolutely turned towards the future and the cross-cultural.

A superb new collection of haiku and other short poetic forms on the theme of Glasgow - its people, landscape, culture. As always, Spence is uniquely illuminating, witty and delightful.
Incorporating some of the poems which appeared decades ago in the much sought-after collection of the same title, Glasgow Zen includes mostly new material from this highly popular and exquisite poet.

Clear Light contains 150 haiku bursting with Alan Spence's characteristic verve and wit.

Mythic and mesmerising, inspiring and hilarious, these poems shed clear light on the delights, hardships, breakthroughs and frustrations of the world of the momentary.

Simple in form, these haiku request a fresh look at the familiar and leave us reeling at how much in the world, from the exotic to the everyday, we have yet to observe.

Bloodshot Monochrome is a glorious poetic take on all things black, white and read.

Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead in 'Problem Pages', playing out noir dramas in 'Vicious Circle', or capturing moments of her own life in perfect snapshot, Agbabi's verse is sublimely lyrical and spiked with gleeful humour.

This superb anthology offers a lively and indispensable collection of poems and songs from the eighteenth century. Here are the poets who created the literary tradition of vernacular directness which Burns drew upon and shared.

Before Burns includes a substantial selection from the work of Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson (Burns's 'elder brother in the muse'), as well as a wider selection from the men and women writers whose good-humoured accessibility so characterised the poetry of their time.

MacLachlan's excellent introduction also puts these works in perspective and makes a case for a linguistic confidence, rather than insecurity, in their vigorous use of English and Scots.

From Len Pennie, the performance poet sensation, comes an electric debut collection about loving, learning, surviving, growing and giving - an instant Sunday Times bestseller

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, SUNDAY POST AND iPAPER BESTSELLER

And I have done more than just simply get by
So much more than escape or survive
Through the galvanisation of love, time and patience
I'll take hold of my story and thrive.
After life that was seldom what life ought to be
Through laughter and love I'll be whole
This story is mine from the cover to spine
And the narrative I will control


Whether she's writing letters to her younger self, advocating for women's rights or adapting fairy tales to process an abusive relationship, Len's voice is bold, unashamedly frank and unmistakably hers.

The poems in this collection, both funny and fiercely feminist, announce a formidable new talent. Moving deftly between English and Scots, poyums is as approachable as it is affecting.