3.

	Being Alive: the sequel to Staying Alive Edited by Neil Astley
Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, which became Britain’s 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 who’ve 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 didn’t 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 hadn’t read poetry for years because it hadn’t held their interest. Now Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. ‘I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that’s my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you’re not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again’ – MERYL STREEP. £10.95 paperback  978 1 85224 675 4.  514pp.  2004.
Buy this book now from

4.

	Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds Edited by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce
Soul Food is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by celebrated contemporary poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places. The anthology opens with a series of poems on human life and spiritual sustenance, starting with Rumi: ‘This being human is a guest house. / Each morning a new arrival…’ The poems which follow explore many ways of keeping body and soul together, offering food for thought on knowing yourself, living with nature, who or what is God… All are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to searchers and non-believers. Soul Food shows how poetry can help feed our hunger for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. Soul Food includes Anna Akhmatova, Maya Angelou, Coleman Barks, William Blake, John Burnside, Paul Celan, Chuang-Tzu, Emily Dickinson, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jane Hirshfield, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kabir, Jane Kenyon, Lal Ded (Lalla), DH Lawrence, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton, Czeslaw Milosz, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Amrita Pritam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rumi, St John of the Cross, Edith Södergran, Anna Swir, Wislawa Szymborska, Shinkichi Takahashi, RS Thomas, and many others… 'These poems illuminate the path of life' - Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times £7.99 paperback  978 1 85224 766 9.  160pp.  2007.
Buy this book now from

5.

	Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century Edited by James Byrne and Clare Pollard
Who are the best young poets today? Which new poets are most likely to become the defining voices of their generation? Two young editors, James Byrne and Clare Pollard, set out to answer these questions in Voice Recognition, a vibrant anthology introducing 21 of the most exciting young poets of the 21st century. Voice Recognition showcases the work of a talented new wave of poets from Britain and Ireland who are just now starting to make their mark. None has yet published a first book of poems. All are likely to produce distinctively different debut collections in the next few years. Influenced by poetries from across the world, and unafraid to take risks, all these poets are committed to extending and remaking the traditions of poetry in a fast-changing new millennium. Their poems show a lively range of styles and subjects – sometimes sexy, sometimes dark, but consistently brimming with vitality. The future of poetry begins here. Jay Bernard • Emily Berry • Amy Blakemore • Siddhartha Bose • Ailbhe Darcy • Joe Dunthorne • Miriam Gamble • Sarah Jackson • Annie Katchinska • Mark Leech • Toby Martinez de las Rivas • Jonathan Morley • Adam O’Riordan • Colm O’Shea • Sandeep Parmar • Heather Phillipson • Kate Potts • Sophie Robinson • Jack Underwood • Ahren Warner • James Womack £9.95 paperback  978 1 85224 838 3.  168pp.  2009.
Buy this book now from Other books by Clare Pollard: Bedtime The Heavy-Petting Zoo Look, Clare! Look!

6.

	Briggflatts By Basil Bunting
New edition with DVD & CD Basil Bunting is one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain – in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’. Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This new edition includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem (and a posthumously published additional Note), the new edition includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ and other background material. ‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it’ – Thom Gunn. ‘His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’ – Hugh MacDiarmid. £12 paperback with free DVD & CD 978 1 85224 826 0.  80pp.  2008.
Buy this book now from Other titles by Basil Bunting: Complete Poems Basil Bunting reads 'Briggflatts' and other poems (double cassette)

7.

	Too Black, Too Strong By Benjamin Zephaniah
Too Black, Too Strong is Benjamin Zephaniah's latest collection from Bloodaxe, addressing the struggles of black Britain more forcefully than all his previous books. It includes poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case and other high profile political trials. Zephaniah is a poet who won't stay silent, who doesn't pull any punches, writing out of a sense of urgency and a commitment to social justice: 'The more I travel, the more I love Britain, and it is because I love the place that I fight for my rights here. It is probably one of the only places that could take an angry, illiterate, uneducated, ex-hustler, rebellious Rastafarian and give him the opportunity to represent his country.' £7.95 paperback  978 1 85224 554 2.  88pp.  2001.
Buy this book now from Other books by Benjamin Zephaniah: City Psalms Propa Propaganda

8. 

	Wild Geese: Selected Poems By Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver is one of America’s best-loved poets. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has lived for many years in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees. Mary Oliver is hugely popular in the States, where her many collections have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but Wild Geese is her first book to be published in Britain for over 40 years. It was followed by three new collections from Bloodaxe. £8.95 paperback  978 1 85224 628 0.  160pp.  2004.
Buy this book now from Other books by Mary Oliver: Thirst Red Bird Evidence

9.

	The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry: from Britain and Ireland Edited by Edna Longley
This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points up connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Edna Longley draws the poetic line of the century not through culture-defining groups but through the work of the most significant poets of our time. Because her guiding principle is aesthetic precision, the poems themselves answer to their circumstances. Readers will find this book exciting and risk-taking not because her selections are surprising but because of the intensity and critical rigour of her focus, and because the poems themselves are so good. The anthology covers the work of 70 poets in depth, including WB Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, TS Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, WH Auden, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, John Hewitt, Keith Douglas, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and many others. £10.95 paperback  978 1 85224 514 6.  368pp.  2000.
Buy this book now from Other books by Edna Longley: Poetry in the Wars The Living Stream Poetry & Posterity Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems

10.

	Darling: New & Selected Poems By Jackie Kay
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Humour, gender, sexuality, sensuality, identity, racism, cultural difference: when do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay’s part of the equation. Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. ‘Kay’s Darling locates her alongside Ted Hughes – even T.S. Eliot – in that elite group whose children’s writing, rather than gainsaying their primary poetic project, informs and enriches it… One of Kay’s greatest strengths is the way she locates individual experience in the collective. As befits an adoptive daughter of peace marchers, Kay is a writer for whom the personal is indeed political… Even such a public poet as Kay, though, writes verse shaped above all by human cadence. She has an immaculate ear for speech patterns, using accent and dialect, in particular, to lift and characterise’ – Fiona Sampson, The Guardian ‘Darling is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night’ – Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year) £9.95 paperback  978 1 85224 777 5.  224pp.  2007.
Buy this book now from Other books by Jackie Kay: The Adoption Papers The Lamplighter