bloodaxe books ltd tyne and wear (416 results)

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This landmark book celebrates two decades of poetry by women from Britain and Ireland, covering all the major figures, from Fleur Adcock to Carol Ann Duffy. It charts the irrepressible growth and flowering of women's poetry, showing how the women's movement bestowed a permission and confidence on these many distinctive female voices: no longer apologetic, often courageous, always powerful. The older generation is represented in the work of poets such as Stevie Smith, Ruth Pitter, E.J. Scovell and Elizabeth Jennings, re-forging the missing link in the continuing chain of work in which inner and outer worlds are shown from a woman's perspective. Anne Stevenson has written: 'No artist can be optimistic in days of spiritual decay, but it is possible to be honest . And joyful.' Honesty and vitality combine to produce a remarkable energy and spirit, contained and celebrated in this selection, from the measured and lyrical in the work of Freda Downie to the passionate and primitive in Deborah Randall's tooth and claw. Kathleen Jamie weaves a fierce intelligence and keen intuition into the subtle and highly original rhythms of her work. The poems of Carol Ann Duffy dramatise a broad repertoire of voices, while Medbh McGuckian's exquisitely patterned imagery draws together the diverse threads of male and female, thought and feeling, pain and pleasure. In the world of U.A. Fanthorpe the menace of darkness is illuminated by bright sparks of humour, an engaging sense of fun. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This book helps readers, writers and teachers to hack their way into the jungle of contemporary poetry. It informs, demystifies, illuminates and excites. It gives a realistic account of the poetry scene in Britain and Ireland, corrects common misconceptions and allows young or new writers to see themselves in context. Paul Hyland has written the book he wanted to read when he started getting into poetry. * Modernists to Martians: Groups, movements, fashions and influences. Jargon and hype: What it all means in plain English, from the ludic to the ludicrous. * Key books: Which are the most important collections and the most influential anthologies? Which are the poems of our time? * Poetry readings: The circuit and the circus. The importance of the ear, the power of the spoken word versus the ego-trip turn-off. * Getting into print: The editor's eye view. Submitting work to magazines and publishers. How to target editors and save time, paper and money. * Competitions and prizes: Winning words. Competition poems. Do prizes lead to publication? Awards and bursaries. * Organisations: Poetry societies, Arts Councils, regional arts boards etc. Who your allies are. How they help and how you should approach them. * Critical help: Where you can get feedback and advice. Postal services, pundits and gurus. Courses, workshops and writers-in-residence. * Nice Little Earners: Jobs poets can do. Readings, writers-in-schools, residencies. * Resources: A wealth of information and listings, together with provocative chapters on both Riches and Paranoia. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness - all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes. These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey (which intensifies in the new poems). Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, When God is a Traveller was her fourth collection of poetry, and was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2014. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Irina Ratushinskaya was only 28-years-old when she was sentenced to seven years' hard labour and five years' internal exile, accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Her crime: writing poetry. She was held for three years in a strict regime labour camp, in a special unit for women political prisoners where she suffered beatings, force-feeding and solitary confinement in brutal, freezing conditions. But her poems were smuggled out of the camp, and published in 1986 by Bloodaxe in No, I'm Not Afraid, the book which spearheaded an international campaign which eventually secured her release. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. "Alternative Anthem" is a live album of poems from books published over three decades, including "John Agard Live!", a DVD of filmed highlights from recent performances made by filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce. It includes poetry from "We Brits" in which the Guyanese-born word magician gives an outsider-insider view of British life in poems which both challenge and cherish our peculiar culture and hallowed institutions; "Weblines" that contains three powerful Caribbean myths of transformation: the steeldrum, the limbo dancer, and Anansi, the spider trickster god; and, "From the Devil's Pulpit" that is a Devil's eye view of the world, sweeping from Genesis across time; and, other collections including "Mangoes and Bullets" and "Lovelines for a Goat-Born Lady", as well his children's books, featuring some of Agard's best-known poems - "Listen Mr Oxford don", "Palm Tree King", "Half-Caste", and "English Girl Eats Her First Mango". The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Raving Beauties women's theatre company was born out of a deep sense of frustration with domesticity, naivete and a burning need for a creative outlet. It led to an enormous personal, political and professional learning curve. Hallelujah for 50ft Women is their third anthology of women's poetry. Their first book, In the Pink (The Women's Press), sold thousands and was reprinted six times. Our relationship to our bodies is affected by many things including culture, religion, family, sex, hunger, pleasure and pain. This new anthology is inspired by a passionate desire to celebrate our bodies in a fully realised way, leaving Barbie's grotesque silent pliability in her box for good. Instead of pouting, our mouths have the power of language, our romantic fluttering hearts give and receive compassion, skin ages with grace when we see beauty in everything, a pierced belly button connects us to our ancestors and a belly needs to be strong before it's flat. This book has been selected from over a thousand submissions. New poets published here for the first time are proud to share this anthology with established writers such as Selima Hill, Kim Addonizio, Jackie Kay and Helen Dunmore. By revealing the complex depths of our relationships with our bodies Hallelujah for 50ft Women makes a much needed contribution to a compassionate understanding of our evolving selves. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 'Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?' Mae Wests racy wisecrack could have been aimed at this book, which is packed with 69 high-calibre, sharp-shooting poems. Pleased to See Me bulges with boldly playful and seriously sensual treatments of everything you ever wanted to know about sex but never thought to find in a poem. Pleased to See Me is a sassy and unashamedly saucy celebration of fleshly pleasures by some of our finest poets. These are very sexy poems not just because they are about sex, says Astley, but because their luscious language is handled with wit and sureness of touch. This is the first book to show how the way poets write about sex has changed dramatically. As in so much else, the boundaries have shifted. Sex in modern poetry as in films, novels and music is treated freely and frankly, with passion, tenderness and a great sense of fun. Expect surprises and reversals as well as creepiness and unease, coupled with in-your-face exuberance. Were talking strong language and strong emotion here. Editor Neil Astley caught the zeitgeist in Staying Alive, his highly praised anthology of poems on every aspect of modern living. Now he turns to more intimate matters, bringing you a spicy selection of X-rated contemporary poems for reading in bed. Pleased to See Me covers and uncovers everything we like doing with our bodies, both women and men. These are poems to have fun with. Read them to your lover. Make this your personal pillow book. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Sylva Fischerova is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes poetry with a vivid imagination as well as historical reach, and was first published in English as a young poet by Bloodaxe in 1990. Her poetry moves in and out of historical events, with an understanding and loving eye on our frailties as well as our corruptive acts, against the backdrop of her commanding sense of space and time, and 'makes beauty from monsters'. Mixing semantic and sonorous sense, her poems come to life through metamorphosed moments, showing that nothing can be taken literally in a world 'endowed with sense and meaning'. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The Honey Gatherers takes its title from a phrase in Michael Ondaatjes The Cinnamon Peeler, a poem which describes the need to be marked, and marked out, by love. The search, the sweetness, the sting and the death of love, are all to be found in this anthology. Wide-ranging in its inclusiveness, The Honey Gatherers celebrates the great passions of John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, Keats, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the beloved Anon, whilst con?rming the extraordinary gift to this headlong debate of 20th century poets. Pablo Neruda, Lorna Goodison, Brian Patten, Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Parker, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Sharon Olds are just some of those who meet in these pages. Here are poems about romantic love, the ideal of love, the hurt of love, lost or unrequited love and parting all you might expect to ?nd in such a gathering but here too are poems of friendship, surprise, celebration and consolation. This is a book which explores Raymond Carvers big question And what did you want? and offers some answers: To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver: Late Fragment Most love poetry anthologies only cover the classics. This one includes modern poets and erotic poetry as well. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Passionfood is a feast of classic and contemporary love poems. There are a hundred flavours in this four-course celebration of love, passion and desire. Compiled by Staying Alive editor Neil Astley, its menu is distinctively different from that of other anthologies of love poetry. There are no broken hearts here. Passionfood is a celebration of true love - love that grows into love that lasts, love that fills every part of our lives, love that never leaves us. Passionfood opens with a starter selection of poems about attraction, desire and longing. Passion is the main course: the excitement of love, being and staying in love, including many of the greatest poems in our literature - by writers such as Shakespeare, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and Auden. For dessert, the book offers deliciously saucy poems by leading contemporary poets. But like love, Passionfood is a feast which doesn't have to end. The fruit that follows dessert offers still more poetry to savour: poems about deepening love and friendship, love that never leaves us, poems celebrating closeness, trust and mutual understanding, poems of joy, wisdom and shared recognition. Passionfood is a book of positive, provocative and witty love poems for everyone whose life has been nourished and sustained by love, mixing passion with food for thought. It's also a book which holds out hope, and as such, a perfect gift for the person you love, for weddings and engagements, birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine's Day. This new edition is beautifully presented in a quarter-bound hardback gift format. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 'Hanzlik's poetry, more particularly his early poetry, is characterised by controlled savagery, by a smouldering anger, though balanced and held in check by a note of lyricism and often indeed of tenderness. He is a master of the medium-long poem: in his earlier collections were often evocations of classical or Biblical subjects (though with an entirely modern and often topical subtext), while some of the more recent ones are meditations on casual topics, such as his stamp collection, a news item about a scientist's Nobel Prize, or a flight of fighter aircraft overflying his home on Air Day. At a time when so much Czech poetry is either politically declarative or traditionally escapist, Hanzlik's unmistakable individual voice, bruising though it may be, is refreshingly new.' - Ewald Osers 'The fluency and energy are unmistakable, and at the centre of the poems there is a real and difficult subject: political violence. Killings, mutilations, stiflings, beheadings occur in poem after poem, and are connected in some way with people in authority. Hanzlik uses dramatic monologues by invented or legendary or historical personae.' - Graham Martin, from his preface. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. Red Letter Day is the latest collection from one of Scotland's leading poets: 'With a swashbuckling relish for language, and an intense lyricism allied to delicacy of phrase, Tom Pow's new poems daringly set events of global significance against moments of startling intimacy, and the vulnerability of childbirth. Masterly evocations of landscape, from Scotland to South America and the Arctic, retain a sense of mystery, a still centre; triumphantly confirming his advocacy of harmony and humanity, and the symmetry of love, in the face of the howling world surrounding us. ' - Stewart Conn. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Tony Harrison's v. was written during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 when he visited his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery and found it vandalised by obscene graffiti. In the book-length poem, he confronts the foul-mouthed skinhead thug responsible, who becomes a foil for his own anger and alienation. The political and media reaction to v. would make a book in itself. This is that book. As well as Tony Harrison's poem and Graham Sykes's photographs, this new edition of v. includes press articles, letters, reviews, a defence of the poem and film by director Richard Eyre, and a transcript of the phone calls logged by Channel Four on the night of the broadcast. Channel Fours film of v. won the Royal Television Societys Best Original Programme Award. The Star: 'A plan to televise a poem packed with obscenities caused outrage last night. ITV chiefs intend to screen a reading of Tony Harrison's verse v. which is full of four-letter words.' Daily Mail: A torrent of four-letter filth the most explicitly sexual language yet beamed into the nation's living rooms the crudest, most offensive word is used 17 times.' Gerald Howarth, MP: 'It is full of expletives and I can't see that it serves any artistic purpose whatsoever.' Mary Whitehouse: 'This work of singular nastiness.' Sir Harold Pinter: 'The criticism against the poem has been offensive, juvenile and, of course, philistine. It should certainly be broadcast.' Sir Richard Eyre: 'If I had the slightest influence over educational policy in this country, I'd see that v. was a set text in every school in the country, but of course if we lived in that sort of country, the poem wouldn't have needed to be written.'. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of "the pluralist now". It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the distinctive breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland - from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway - as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation's most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first Collected edition of her poetry replaces her Selected Poems, with the addition of work from her later Oxford collections The Incident Book, Time-Zones and Looking Back. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Amongst the Astronomers' and 'Things' - as well as the notorious one about kissing John Prescott. She has since published five later collections with Bloodaxe. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. From London's hospital wards to rural Italy and the Great Plains, Sally Read's first collection eulogises the emotional and physical borders we cross, whether in sexual surrender, the squeezing of a trigger, or the point at which skin is pierced by a needle. What results appeals to the thresholds at which we succumb to desire, love, or grief. Yet, ultimately, there is tenderness and acceptance as she considers what breaks us, and what binds. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. His new collection, "Wait", finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by 'the conscience-beast, who harries me', and 'riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly'. Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Metro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candour and style. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In her second collection, printer's daughter Heidi Williamson mines the rich language and history of printing to consider themes of belonging, parenthood, love, and how we communicate, and fail to communicate, with each other. Individual, familial, and cultural inheritance is explored - through subjects ranging from Gutenberg to Gill, Kindles, Twitter, ultrasounds, the death of Diana, 3D printing, climate change, childlessness, genes, and what is downloadable. By turns sensual, playful, and stark, The Print Museum collects exhibits and fragments from this fading industrial art and displays them alongside pieces driven by the same forces of longing, loss, transformation and delight. Winner of the Poetry Category and Book by the Cover award, East Anglian Book Awards, 2016. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems. A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. The first in a series, Staying Alive was followed by a sequel, Being Alive (2004), a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astleys Staying Alive, which became Britains most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers whove wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. Staying Alive didnt just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadnt read poetry for years because it hadnt held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. Being Alive was followed by a companion anthology, Being Human (2011), and by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Jane Griffiths writes mysteriously resonant poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers in classically precise language. "Another Country" presents a selection from her first two collections, "A Grip on Thin Air" and "Icarus on Earth", as well as a whole collection of new work. Where the earlier books are shot through with a migrant's sense of estrangement, her new poems explore what it might mean to settle in a place. The central sequence 'Eclogue Over Merlin Street' highlights this changing perspective through a dialogue between two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement. Many other poems echo this tension, caught between love of a place and the fear of losing it. Jane Griffiths celebrates the landscapes she lives in by observing and recording them, yet with a strong awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation. Hers are poems that delight in being in the world, despite the threat of loss. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Lawrence Sail's new collection encompasses a striking variety of subjects. He reflects on detail in the natural world, both in micro- and macrocosm, looking for example at flowers, birds, the sea, the earth seen from space; he explores the intricacies and balances of love and family relationships; he finds new resonances in the paintings of David Bomberg, Howard Hodgkin and Paul Klee, and affinities in his translations of Mallarme, Rilke and Trakl. His imaginative scope extends into a sequence of prose poems responding powerfully to Gabriel Faure's nine Preludes for piano. Throughout the collection, close attention to the physical world is paired with the perceptions such careful consideration provokes. Often this embodies a duality - instances of love carry the shadow of grief; a beached boat evokes the horizon; a book is both an object and an emblem of lost authority; the fragment of a Roman carving suggests wholeness restored. Above all, there is in Sail's writing a celebration of the world, its preciousness magnified by the ways in which he takes the measure of what appears in the title poem as 'all that lasts, / all that is gone', the juxtaposition of the transient and the enduring. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "Bad Shaman Blues" are what we sing in middle age, when our visions and our virtues seem far away. They also lament the role of contemporary poetry: reached for in trauma, otherwise ignored. The poet as shaman cuts a reduced and comic figure - which immediately suggests W.N. Herbert. Packing his medicine pouch with classical lyric and barbarian spell, the Scot explores his border territories. Hadrian's Wall becomes a mirror through which to embark on an absurd shamanic flight to - naturally - Siberia. "Bad Shaman Blues" is a Through the Looking Glass book, in which the familiar and the foreign confront one another. Sofia and Novosibirsk, Crete and Kolkatta, are all distorted in its hall of mirrors. In the textual underworld of the Scots tradition, literary ghosts are stalked by critical machines. Herbert's "Bad Shaman Blues" presents the conventional poetry volume with its doppelganger dark, destabilising, daft and was was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize as well as being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Polly Clark's haunting third collection is about leaving one's life and returning a stranger. In poems which are moving and often darkly comic, she explores the ways in which we try to hang on to what we were, and the ways in which we accept that everything we were certain of has gone forever. "Farewell My Lovely" is a book of transformation in many voices, from riffs on popular songs to a modern reworking of "Magnificat" or "Mary's Song". Polly Clark's vivid and unswerving gaze is applied with the same intensity to a dream of childhood, the vulnerability of a new species of bird or the fragility of marriage, creating a powerful collection about the price of survival. The book ends with a final farewell to innocence in a series of poems drawn from the Falklands War. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Sarah Wardle was poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur FC when many of these poems were written. Her Score! is a winning commentary on contemporary culture, shooting at the heart of consciousness, family, sport, the female voice and Darwinian science. Her second collection kicks off with her Spurs poems, tackling the common ground between goals of competition and community. Then X: A Poetry Political Broadcast presents poetry as a beacon of imagination, choice and responsibility: the still, small voice that guides us through lifes terrain. Score! is completed by Sheet Music, a medley of poems ranging from London to Stone Age man, Schrodinger's Cat to Nelsons Column. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This international anthology has been assembled in a matter of days as an immediate if inadequate response to the suffering in Bosnia. What else is there to say about Bosnia? What more can anyone do? KLAONICA is the poets' attempt to do or say something. It includes poems by many leading writers, some already published in The Independent's series Bosnia Poems. The poems are baffled, helpless, heartfelt, heartbreaking, angry, tender, grieving. Useless too: except that readers should find some comfort, some hope, in this book. And the book is published to raise funds for Bosnian relief. The writers come from Britain, Ireland, Europe, North America and Bosnia. They include Annemarie Austin, Joseph Brodsky, Gillian Clarke, David Constantine, Ivor Cutler, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fisher, Linda France, Rebecca Hayes, Adrian Henri, Ted Hughes, Nicki Jackowska, Kathleen Jamie, Medbh McGuckian, Ian McMillan, Glyn Maxwell, Christopher Middleton, Czeslaw Milosz, Adrian Mitchell, Andrew Motion, Josip Osti, Ruth Padel, Brian Patten, Patricia Pogson, Peter Porter, Simon Rae, Peter Reading, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Carole Satyamurti, Jo Shapcott, Abdulah Sidran, Ken Smith, Heather Spears, Mario Susko, R.S. Thomas, Stevan Tontic and John Hartley Williams. KLAONICA is the Serbo-Croat word for slaughterhouse, abattoir, butchery, shambles, and describes conditions in that doomed country after over a year of vicious warfare that includes massacre, rape, pillage, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, the destruction of towns and villages, churches and mosques, and ultimately of a state and a whole society. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this conflict - and there are more wrongs than rights to it - it amounts to genocide, in Europe, here at the end of the twentieth century. The Bosnians are starving. They have planted no crops, they have used up all their stores and savings, they have no fat left, and winter is coming. Over and above the depredations of a three-sided war, they need food and medicines. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be given to Feed the Children and other organisations seeking to alleviate the suffering in Bosnia. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The twin obsessions of D.M. Thomas's poetry and novels are love and death. This selection shows how his treatment of those themes over 30 years has flowered and grown more various, from his early erotic lyrics, through his celebrated science fiction pieces, to more recent poems about sexuality, relationships, family deaths and his search for lost Cornish roots. D.M. Thomas's first book appeared in 1968, when his poetry was also published in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Five more collections followed, including Dreaming in Bronze (1981), winner of a Cholmondeley Award, and a Selected Poems from Secker and Penguin. This book includes work from all his previous collections and from News from the Front, his collaboration with Sylvia Kantaris, as well as many new poems. His fiction and poetry have been profoundly influenced by Russian literature, and he has published translations of Akhmatova and Pushkin. While his poetry has been widely acclaimed, he has become better known for his controversial novels, especially for The White Hotel (1981), an international bestseller, and for his quintet of novels, Russian Nights. His most recent novel is Flying in to Love (Bloomsbury), an exploration of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Few English poets have quite Kit Wright's range. From heart-felt lyricism to blistering satire, from the ribald to the grief-stricken, his poems cover almost everything life can throw at anyone, quite literally from the sublime to the ridiculous. Entertaining and engaging, writing with wit, panache and dazzling virtuosity, Kit Wright is both a seriously funny poet and a poignant chronicler of our times. His latest collection, published on his 70th birthday, shows him young at heart and writing, as always, from the heart of England. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Clare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girls natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance. In The Heavy-Petting Zoo, the male of the species is shown in all his preening glory, his growling and posturing exposed but also given marks out of ten. The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insiders in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of todays bright young things. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.