Poetry

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 this debut book-length collection, 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.

In eclectic, formally confident poems, balancing keen observation with wry insouciance, Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures. Communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger. Figures from Madonna to Magwitch appear, but not necessarily as you know them. Familiar settings – the pub, the library, the farmyard, the house party – are made strange. These are ranging poems with a rangy humour, and warmth as well as wit.

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.

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.

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, 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, Ilya Kaminsky, Jane Kenyon, Petra Kuppers, Stephen Kuusisto, Adrienne Leddy, Ada Limón, 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.

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.

'The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse…through aftershocks of chronic illness, self-harm, and shame…to recovery (“I am found”). Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery… and disarming candor (“Underneath, I’m a bit of a sweetie”). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession… Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of First Rain in Paradise

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.

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.

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.

E.A. Markham’s iconic anthology "Hinterland" opened up new territory for many readers, with its substantial selections by 14 key poets with photos, interviews, essays by the poets themselves. It became a set text for the Open University and at many universities and colleges in Britain and the Caribbean. Since Markham compiled his selection over 30 years ago, the work of the poets he documents has become even more important, historically significant and highly influential. The poets featured – in depth – are Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite, Dennis Scott, James Berry, Mervyn Morris, E.A. Markham, Olive Senior, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

‘The product largely of offshore islands – Jamaica, Trinidad, Britain, etc (Guyana being the exception) – West Indian poetry in English has often been located on the fringes of the central experience. Its popularity is widely associated with local colour, linguistic and tonal innovation, thought to be lacking in the English “mainstream”. This collection shows that the most vital and challenging poetry of the British Caribbean heritage is both local in its urgency and informed by a hinterland of experience deeper than the geography of the islands’ politics.’ – E.A. Markham, writing in 1989

Selima Hill was awarded the The King's Gold Medal for Poetry 2022 on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.

In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, award-winning Argentine poet Laura Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age. 

The ‘things’ of life – bus journeys, potted plants, thunder at night, coffee-stained books, fleeting conversations and the rest – are made full through Wittner’s ability to pinpoint in them the consequential, and even the metaphysical, manipulating language with a translator’s delicate skill. There are funny, moving pen-portraits of Wittner’s two children, suddenly grown, as well as bell-clear descriptions of the task of writing. For this is also a collection about language itself – as an interface, as a surface, and as vital communication. 

Translation of the Route is Laura Wittner's eleventh collection. The poems in this dual language Spanish-English edition, Wittner’s first collection available in English translation, have been translated by the Mexican-Scottish bilingual poet and translator Juana Adcock, acclaimed author of Manca and Split.