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Wilfred Owen with his flaring genius; the intense, compassionate Siegfried Sassoon; the composer Ivor Gurney; Robert Graves who would later spurn his war poems; the nature-loving Edward Thomas; the glamorous Fabian Socialist Rupert Brooke; and the shell-shocked Robert Nichols all fought in the war, and their poetry is a bold act of creativity in the face of unprecedented destruction. Some Desperate Glory will include a chronological anthology of their poems, with linking commentary, telling the story of the war through their art.\nThis unique volume unites the poetry and the history of the war, so often treated separately, granting readers the pride, strife, and sorrow of the individual soldier's experience coupled with a panoramic view of the war's toll on an entire nation.","brand":"smeikalbooks","offers":[{"title":"New - Paperback","offer_id":1223576977419,"sku":"9781447242000N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/getImage_b4030604-1d8a-4bc7-a485-53526a2a05f4.jpg?v=1510794108"},{"product_id":"goodbye-europe-writers-artists-say-farewell","title":"Goodbye Europe- writers \u0026 artists say farewell","description":"This is not a book about politics. It is a book about what makes us British, and what makes us European.\n\nSpend time with some of your favourite writers and artists in this truly unique collection spanning everything from art, language, food, music and movies, to war, literature, driving, nudity, geography, smoking and nature.Featuring pieces of exceptional quality from some of our most treasured novelists, historians, journalists, poets and artists, including: Jessie Burton, Richard Herring, Alain de Botton, Tom Bradby, Val McDermid, Matt Haig, Afua Hirsch, Lionel Shriver, Sarah Perry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ian Rankin, Owen Jones, Mark Kermode, Robert Macfarlane, Chris Riddell, Former Prime Minister Jim Hacker and many more.\n\nA must-read for anyone who wants to understand the times we live in, our relationship with the continent, and ourselves.\n\n* * * * *\n\nINCLUDES PIECES BY:\n\nYasmin Alibhai-Brown, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Tom Bradby, Jessie Burton, Ben Collins (aka The Stig), Colonel Tim Collins, Robert Crampton, Adam Dant, Alain de Botton, Kate Eberlen, Matt Frei, Nicci French, Simon Garfield, Jonathan Lynn writing as Former Prime Minister Jim Hacker, Matt Haig, Richard Herring, Jennifer Higgie, Afua Hirsch, Owen Jones, Oliver Kamm, Alex Kapranos, Mark Kermode, Hari Kunzru, Olivia Laing, Marie Le Conte, Amy Liptrot, Robert Macfarlane, Henry Marsh, Val McDermid, Ian McEwan, Hollie McNish, Kate Mosse, Jenni Murray, Sarah Perry, Ian Rankin, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Chris Riddell, Andrew Roberts, Will Self, David Shrigley, Lionel Shriver, Sunny Singh, Ece Temelkuran, Rob Temple, Bee Wilson, Sarah Winman","brand":"smeikalbooks","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":32679051984981,"sku":"9781409177548N","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9781409177548.jpg?v=1598610723"},{"product_id":"vintage-huxley-brave-new-world-revisited","title":"Vintage Huxley: Brave New World Revisited","description":"In his 1932 classic dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley depicted a future society in thrall to science and regulated by sophisticated methods of social control. 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His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood with block-buster scripts; his works inspire mountains of scholarship and criticism every year. He has given us many of the very words we speak, and even some of the thoughts we think. Nick Groom and Piero explore how Shakespeare became so famous and influential, and why he is still widely considered the greatest writer ever. They investigate how the Bard has been worshipped at different times and in different places, used and abused to cultural and political ends, and the roots of intense controversies which have surrounded his work. Much more than a biography or a guide to his plays and sonnets, Introducing Shakespeare is a tour through the world of Will and concludes that even after centuries, Shakespeare remains the battlefield on which our very comprehension of humanity is being fought out.","brand":"Icon Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"New - Paperback","offer_id":32679063617621,"sku":"9781848311152N","price":4.19,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9781848311152.jpg?v=1598611087"},{"product_id":"more-letters-of-note","title":"More Letters Of Note","description":"FOLLOW-UP TO THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER\nINCLUDING LETTERS FROM:\nJane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Mozart, Janis Joplin, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. Jung, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Simpson, David Bowie, Dorothy Parker, Buckminster Fuller, Beatrix Potter, Che Guevara, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Bronte and many more.\nDiscover Richard Burton's farewell note to Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Keller's letter to The New York Symphony Orchestra about 'hearing' their concert through her fingers, the final missives from a doomed Japan Airlines flight in 1985, David Bowie's response to his first piece of fan mail from America and even Albus Dumbledore writing to a reader applying for the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor at Hogwarts.\nMore Letters of Note is another rich and inspiring collection, which reminds us that much of what matters in our lives finds its way into our letters.","brand":"Canongate Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"New - Paperback","offer_id":32686027276373,"sku":"9781786891693N","price":10.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9781786891693.jpg?v=1598877326"},{"product_id":"duffy-worlds-wife","title":"Duffy: World's Wife","description":"That saying? Behind every famous man . . . ? From Mrs Midas to Queen Kong, from Elvis's twin sister to Pygmalion's bride, they're all here, in Carol Ann Duffy's inspired and inspirational collection, The World's Wife. Witty and thought-provoking, this is a tongue-in-cheek, no-holds-barred look at the real movers and shakers across history, myth and legend. If you have ever wondered, for example, how exactly Darwin came up with his theory of evolution, or what, precisely, Frau Freud thought about her husband - then this is the book for you, as the wives of the great, the good, the not so good, and the legendary are given a voice in Carol Ann Duffy's sparkling and inventive collection.\n\n `Carol Ann Duffy is a poet of skill, talent and great heart' Erica Wagner\n\n `Duffy takes a cheeky, subversive, no-nonsense swipe with a dish clout at the famous men of history and myth. They don't have a chance in hell of dodging her quick-witted wallop as she relays their stories from their spouse's points of view' The Times\n\n `Poignant, thoughtful, funny, rich and accessible' Ruth Padel, Guardian, Books of the Year","brand":"smeikalbooks","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":32689266196565,"sku":"9780330372220N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9780330372220.jpg?v=1598946222"},{"product_id":"npg-charles-dickens-his-circle","title":"NPG: Charles Dickens \u0026 his Circle����","description":"`When I was at primary school, my teacher asked if any of us had heard of Charles Dickens. 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He also admired and surrounded himself with artists, including two of his oldest friends, Daniel Maclise and Augustus Egg, the celebrity painters Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, William Powell Frith and John Everett Millais, and many of his illustrators: Hablot Knight Browne (aka Phiz), George Cruikshank, and the father and son Frank and Marcus Stone. He worked tirelessly with fellow social reformers including Angela Burdett--- Coutts, Thomas Noon Talfourd and Elizabeth Jesser Reid. 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Capturing the intense emotional landscapes of youth, passion, and heartbreak, it remains one of the most celebrated and widely read volumes of erotic poetry published in the last hundred years, with well over a million copies sold worldwide.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-path-to-node=\"2\"\u003eThe narrative of this collection charts the volatile highs and lows of romantic devotion, masterfully balancing sensual imagery with the bittersweet ache of distance and loss. 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Jung, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Simpson, David Bowie, Dorothy Parker, Buckminster Fuller, Beatrix Potter, Che Guevara, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Bronte and many more.","brand":"Canongate Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"New - Hardback","offer_id":32906274177109,"sku":"9781782114543N","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9781782114543.jpg?v=1606244772"},{"product_id":"long-take","title":"Long Take","description":"Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, The Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.\n\n 'A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring' John Banville, Guardian\n\nA noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable - and unclassifiable - books of recent years. \n\n Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but - as those dark, classic movies made clear - the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties. \n\nWhile Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it - yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.  \n\nRobin Robertson's The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.","brand":"Pan Macmillan","offers":[{"title":"New - Hardback","offer_id":32986894008405,"sku":"9781509846887N","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9781509846887.jpg?v=1612400018"},{"product_id":"mr-lear-a-life-of-art-nonsense","title":"Mr Lear - A Life of Art \u0026 Nonsense","description":"Acclaimed historian Jenny Uglow brings us a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Lear, full of the colour of the age.\n\nEdward Lear lived a vivid, fascinating, energetic life, but confessed, 'I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.' He was a man in a hurry, 'running about on railroads' from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India and Palestine. He is still loved for his 'nonsenses', from startling, joyous limericks to great love songs like 'The Owl and the Pussy Cat' and 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose', and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly in the age of Darwin and Dickens - he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters - his genius for the absurd and his dazzling word-play make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.\n\n\nLear was a man of great simplicity and charm: children adored him, yet his humour masked epilepsy, depression and loneliness. Jenny Uglow's beautifully illustrated biography, full of the colour of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships and restless travels\/ Above all it shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires - an exile of the heart.","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"New - Hardback","offer_id":39488745766997,"sku":"9780571269549N","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9780571269549.jpg?v=1628011470"},{"product_id":"the-green-hollow-faber-drama","title":"The Green Hollow (Faber Drama)","description":"In 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. Poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power.\n\n This is a portrait not just of what happened, but also of what was lost. What was Aberfan like in 1966? What were the interests of the people, the social life, the sporting obsessions, the bands of the day? What was the deeper history of the place? Why had it become the mining village it was, and what had it been before the discovery of coal under its soil? Perhaps most significantly: what is Aberfan like today?\n\n The Green Hollow is a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance; a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation. It is also a story known along generational rather than geographic borders. Based on the BBC One production, The Green Hollow is a beautifully rendered picture of a time and place - and a life-altering event whose effects are irrevocable.","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39654304645205,"sku":"9780571339075N","price":7.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/b679bf23-a981-4af8-a942-78b8f3b848f3.jpg?v=1644282726"},{"product_id":"weatherland-writers-and-artists-under-english-skies","title":"Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies","description":"Writers and artists across the centuries, from Chaucer to Ian McEwan, and from the creator of the Luttrell Psalter in the 14th century to John Piper in the 20th, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things and woven them into their novels, poems and paintings. Alexandra Harris' subject is not the weather itself, but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination. She builds her remarkable story from small evocative details and catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals: 'Bloody cold', says Jonathan Swift in the 'slobbery' January of 1713; Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one...Weatherland is both a sweeping panorama of cultural climates on the move and a richly illustrated, intimate account - for although weather is vast, it is experienced physically, emotionally and spiritually; as Harris cleverly reveals, it is at the very heart of English life and culture.","brand":"Thames \u0026 Hudson Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655367180373,"sku":"9780500292655N","price":7.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/d1fac0cd-aa18-4644-a69e-103499b7e81a.jpg?v=1644282761"},{"product_id":"blue-horses","title":"Blue Horses","description":"Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.\nMaybe the desire to make something beautiful\nis the piece of God that is inside each of us.\n\nIn this stunning collection, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work. \n\nHerons, sparrows, owls and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees or the paintings of Franz Marc, Mary Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.\n\nBlue Horses asks what it truly means to belong to this world and to live in it attuned to all its changes. 'To be human,' she shows us, 'is to sing your own song'.","brand":"Little, Brown Book Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655393394773,"sku":"9781472153746N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/a4d6f072-0b76-4565-a970-4a4bfb810fe6.jpg?v=1644287712"},{"product_id":"introducing-joyce-a-graphic-guide","title":"Introducing Joyce: A Graphic Guide","description":"James Joyce is one of the most famous--and controversial--writers of the twentieth century. The myth of his difficulty has discouraged many readers from works such as \"Ulysses,\" but David Norris explores his life and work in this engaging and intellectually rigorous introduction.","brand":"Icon Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655427178581,"sku":"9781848313514N","price":4.19,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/323d6003-6384-432b-bc3d-59fee5374dde.jpg?v=1644282815"},{"product_id":"a-dylan-thomas-treasury-poems-stories-and-broadcasts-selected-by-walford-davies","title":"A Dylan Thomas Treasury: Poems, Stories and Broadcasts. Selected by Walford Davies","description":"An exclusive and detailed collection of Dylan Thomas' poems, stories and broadcasts, featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary. A must-have for all literature lovers. This selection provides the perfect introduction to Dylan Thomas' work, from poems and broadcasts to his short stories. It highlights his myriad talents, as well as the fluctuating moods and passions that inform his work. Discovered at the age of 19 through a poetry competition in a London newspaper, Dylan Thomas became the object of immediate acclaim and criticism for his adventurous language and resonant verse. Thomas' poetry and prose embrace touching childhood reminiscence and a spiritual yearning from which he emerges, not as the loud bohemian of the personal legend, but as the careful and reflective artist of the poems, stories and broadcasts themselves.","brand":"Orion Publishing Co","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655434747989,"sku":"9781780227269N","price":5.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/1eb486ad-84f8-4c4c-be86-4e98b21a267d.jpg?v=1644287770"},{"product_id":"felicity","title":"Felicity","description":"'And just like that, like a simple\nneighbourhood event, a miracle is\ntaking place.'\n\n'If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger,' Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver's love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. \n\nOur most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes - with joy - the strangeness and wonder of human connection.","brand":"Little, Brown Book Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655437140053,"sku":"9781472153739N","price":5.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/aa80231b-e6fe-4864-aead-f14523d312a2.jpg?v=1644285331"},{"product_id":"plays-two-incarcerator-five-visions-of-the-faithful-silence-and-violence-the-biggleswades-the-last-days-of-desire-incarceration-five-and-violence-the-last-days-of-desire","title":"Plays Two: Incarcerator, Five Visions of the Faithful, Silence and Violence, The Biggleswades, The Last Days of Desire: \"Incarceration\", \"Five ... and Violence\", \"The Last Days of Desire\"","description":"Includes the plays Incarcerator, Five Visions of the Faithful, Silence and Violence, The Last Days of Desire, The Biggleswades.  With an Introduction by David Pownall, and an essay by Peter Craze  A volume of language-rich, theatrically-ambitious tragedies. Betts' hugely popular verse drama Incarcerator (White Bear and BAC) was a Time Out Critics' Choice, while his Five Visions of the Faithful (White Bear), is a series of uncompromising narratives exploring freedom, faith, death and desire. In Silence and Violence the wife of a war hero seduces a much-reviled sculptor as Betts examines the artist's quest for self-expression in a Philistine state. 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To a most galuptious scene Kid', Kleinzahler locates and exhibits in his poetry the human heart at the core of lived experience. This is a poet searching for - and finding - a cadence capable of describing life as it is lived today. Kleinzahler's poetry is, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep), 'ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.' The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the 'moments of grace' buried amongst the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655438778453,"sku":"9780571305599N","price":7.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/82f514fa-7f0a-40eb-a435-7dedd2591268.jpg?v=1644290246"},{"product_id":"moonlight","title":"Moonlight","description":"\"A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes.\" (Sunday Times). \"A deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death...Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinter's image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty...The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face \"death's dateless date\" in a state of mortal terror.\" (Guardian). \"Pinter has written few more fascinating plays.\" (The Times). First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011. \"The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.\"\n(Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005).","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655440449621,"sku":"9780571276608N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/51f6839f-d6f3-4ff8-af1e-4a8d522bc4ca.jpg?v=1644280230"},{"product_id":"new-selected-poems-1988-2013","title":"New Selected Poems 1988-2013","description":"New Selected Poems 1988-2013 provides an unrivalled account of a period of work that was crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Together with its earlier, sibling volume, it completes the arc of a remarkable career. Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney discussed with his publisher the prospect of a companion volume to his landmark New Selected Poems 1966-1987 aimed at presenting the second half of his career, 'from Seeing Things onwards', as he foresaw it. Although he was unable to complete a edition\/selection, he left behind selections that have been followed here. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 reprints the author's chosen poems from his later years, beginning with his ground-breaking volume Seeing Things (1991), his two Whitbread Books of the Year, The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999), and his multi-nominated, prize-winning volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). 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The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.  \n\n'To read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of \"the bends\". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.' Seamus Heaney\n\n  'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' 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Sebastian Barry's \"Tales of Ballycumber\" premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2009.","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655497859157,"sku":"9780571251315N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/5ef7c149-4c4a-4445-b704-603ebd594a57.jpg?v=1644285380"},{"product_id":"black-sun","title":"Black Sun","description":"Toby Martinez de las Rivas is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in recent times; to some, a modern-day William Blake. The Guardian described Terror, his first book, as 'visionary' and 'exciting', the New Statesman as 'remarkable', and all combined to praise its brave and lucid intensity. Black Sun is a sequel of poise and clarity that is, if anything, more open and accessible than its predecessor. Beginning where Terror left off, it pursues that book's fascination with history and with theology, with the physical body and the body of the State, with preservation and redemption. \n\nBlack Sun confronts the dark dreams and hidden powers of this world, and, through the poet's attentive watching and wondering, offers its readers a way 'to know - \u0026amp; still to resist a last despair'.\n\n'A lucid and spontaneous lyricism . . . how unlike most of his contemporaries Martinez de las Rivas seems to be.' 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Beautifully presented, the text is accompanied by quotations from Shakespeare's works and lush illustrations of his gardens, past and present, plucked from a multitude of sources including embroidered Elizabethan clothing and Victorian gardening books, as well as various gardens around the world.Roy Strong's detailed account is inspired by Shakespeare's works and supplemented by Francis Bacon's 1625 essay Of Gardens \"which provides Elizabethan-era advice to garden enthusiasts on such topics as topiary, seasonal gardens, scents, aviaries, and more.\"\n\nReview\n\nWholly original..thoughtfully illustrated--Archives of Natural History\n\n'This elegant little book takes on the character of a detective story as Strong […] uncovers the way Shakespeare became a gateway for early gardening historians' -- Daily Telegraph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn 'elegant little book' -- Tim Richardson's books of the year, Daily Telegraph \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A total delight, rich with quotations and sumptuous images' --Birmingham Mail\n\n'Artily Produced [with] an unmissable text by Sir Roy Strong' --Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times Weekend\n\n'Thanks to Sir Roy's waspish wit, this coffee-table book includes some entertaining garden observations and anecdotes' --The FT Weekend Books of the Year\n\nFrom the Back Cover\n\nPublished in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, The Quest for Shakespeare s Garden traces the origins of garden history and the Elizabethan garden, as well as telling the story of the Bard s own garden in Stratford-upon-Avon. Beautifully presented, the text is accompanied by quotations from Shakespeare s works and lush illustrations of his gardens, past and present, plucked from a multitude of sources including embroidered Elizabethan clothing and Victorian gardening books, as well as various gardens around the world. Roy Strong s detailed account is inspired by Shakespeare s works and supplemented by Francis Bacon s 1625 essay Of Gardens\" which provides Elizabethan-era advice to garden enthusiasts on such topics as topiary, seasonal gardens, scents, aviaries, and more.\n\n\nAbout the Author\n\nSir Roy Strong is an art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster, and landscape designer. He has served as director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 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Among others we hear from Martin Luther King, Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Lincoln, Emmeline Pankhurst, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander the Great, Greta Thunberg, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, Churchill, JFK, Boudicca, Muhammad Ali and Malala. Voices of History shows how these unique speeches enlighten our past, enrich our present and inspire - and hold warnings for - our future.","brand":"Orion Publishing Co","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39655500447829,"sku":"9781474609937N","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/559337cb-9d55-4188-81f2-b407f0d2f470.jpg?v=1644282890"},{"product_id":"minsk","title":"Minsk","description":"A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Minsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. 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Drawing from the scientific to the literary, the medical to the historical, Uppal is as concerned about the inheritance of the past as she is about the tragedies of the present, which makes her both a witness of the terrors and inconsistencies of the past and a messenger of an incomprehensible future.  Successful Tragedies includes work from six books published in Canada, including Ontological Necessities, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007, and her latest collection, Traumatology.\nIn these poems she meditates over spilt milk with Freud, has sex with Christopher Columbus, issues warnings to gynaecologists, sets up shelters for virgins from Greek myths and organises a protest on Abraham's lawn, and much more - Readers experiencing Uppal for the first time will enter a turbulent but vital landscape, discovering a poet dedicated to uncovering the motivations behind our cruelties and our compassions and determined to explore the absurdity of the world.","brand":"Bloodaxe Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39656774172757,"sku":"9781852248604N","price":5.97,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/6ea49350-4815-4cfc-9d4d-26a8c9790c7b.jpg?v=1644304877"},{"product_id":"the-big-bumper-book-of-troy","title":"The Big Bumper Book of Troy","description":"Product Description      The northern word for hometown, ‘toon’, flickers in meaning between ‘tune’ and ‘cartoon’. In Bill Herbert's big bumper book, the title toon is Troy: the first lost home. Exiled to a lighthouse on the River Tyne, the wily Scots maestro has written a book in love with lost and difficult things. Sometimes reflective, sometimes subversively mischievous, he registers or rails against displacement and resettlement, lamenting the passing of relatives, cities, furniture, and the odd lemur. Plugged in to the poetry zeitgeist as ever, Herbert has revived a medieval publishing craze: the Troybook. Painstaking excavation of old comics establishes that the original site of Troytoon is Dundee. Or Madrid. Or possibly St Petersburg. The search for traces of Troy leads to Donegal, Crete, and, at the heart of his grand tour, a vivid verse journal set in post-perestroika Moscow. Dust off your highest brow and fasten your seatbelt, we’re flying Economy to Byzantium. 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Born in Dundee, he established his reputation with two English\/Scots collections from Bloodaxe, Forked Tongue (1994) and Cabaret McGonagall (1996), followed by The Laurelude (1998), The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002), Bad Shaman Blues (2006), Omnesia (2013) and The Wreck of the Fathership (2020). He has also published a critical study, To Circumjack MacDiarmid (OUP, 1992) drawn from his PhD research. His practical guide Writing Poetry was published by Routledge in 2010. He co-edited Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) with Matthew Hollis, and Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) with Yang Lian. Bill Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and lives in a lighthouse overlooking the River Tyne at North Shields. He was appointed Dundee's first Makar from 2013 to 2018. Twice shortlisted for the T.S. 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Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor and Seeing Stars, this generous selection provides an essential gathering of this most thrilling of poets, and is key reading for students and general readers alike.","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39660562317397,"sku":"9780571310692N","price":6.59,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/57e0ee49-9818-44b0-8f0d-b35f0e49dd01.jpg?v=1644292719"},{"product_id":"selected-poems-of-christopher-logue-faber-poetry","title":"Selected Poems of Christopher Logue (Faber Poetry)","description":"The arrangement of these Selected Poems demonstrates the consistency of Christopher Logue's vision as it matured through a varied career. 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Book of Longing, his new collection of poetry, was twenty years in the making and written in Montreal, Mumbai and during his retirement in Mt Baldy.  Enhanced by Cohen's own playful and provocative illustrations, these poems show the full range of one of the most influential and enigmatic writers of his generation.\n\n'Awe-inspiring. . . Cohen emerges as the wry, sensual mystic his champions have always known he was' Sunday Telegraph\n\n'Exceptional. Clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound. . . as soulful a credo as he has ever put on paper' New York Times\n\n'Playful, colourful, erotic. . . brilliant and sharp as flint' Big Issue\n\n'Dazzling' Sunday Herald\n\n'The best bring an ironic, world-weary sensibility to bear on themes of ageing, sex, sensuality and spirituality' Financial Times\n\n'A fine book of poems' Time Out\n\n'Cohen maps this wasteland of the heart with humour, and sometimes anger' Independent\n\nCohen's career began in 1956 with the publication of Let Us Compare Mythologies, and he has since published nine books of poems, and has made numerous internationally successful recordings. 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