Poetry

Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, this book attempts to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.

In China, every phase of modernization had its particular poetic forms and lyrical articulations. The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for poetical experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with entangled local and global concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental anxieties, socio-political transformations, and the return of nationalist sentiments and Cold War divisions. In search for creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes are anything but mutually disjunctive and often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book.

George Eliot thought of herself as a teacher, as did her contemporaries. Their view that her writing was a deliberate and consistent attempt to synthesize in fiction an elaborate and coherent theoretical analysis of the human situation is studied in this book, originally published in 1984.

Bebe Ashely's prizewinning second collection charts the poet's efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, how our medium of communication shapes our words, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It's also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley's reputation as a fearless experimenter.

A poetry collection

'I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it.' The title section of Kim Hyesoon's visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation.

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot to share the joy of poetry. It's a unique poetry book club and every quarter our expert selectors choose the very best new books to deliver to our members across the globe. Our lively quarterly magazine is packed full of sneak preview poems from all the selected poets, alongside exclusive interviews, insightful reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. Our Summer 2025 Selections are:Choice: Midden Witch by Fiona Benson (Cape)Recommendations: Beast by Pascale Petit (Bloodaxe) Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi (Faber) Versus Versus edited by Rachael Boast (Bloodaxe) Bunting's Honey by Moya Cannon (Carcanet)Commended: Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie (Carcanet)TRANSLATION CHOICE: TBCPAMPHLET CHOICE: TBCYou can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

Originally published posthumously in 1980, this book centres on 5 British poets - Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Jon Silkin, Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson - and on the emergence in postwar British poetry of 'double-lyrics', poems which have 'become two persons, two ways of expressing and attending critically in dramatic divisive conflict.'