Books published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Forty years after his country's independence from the British, Jack Mapanje has returned to his concern for ordinary people in Africa and in the world at large. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century. While he was long viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry was unavailable in Britain for over 35 years until Bloodaxe published this edition of his Selected Poems in 2007.

"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, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places.

Second collection by Kapka Kassabova, a young Bulgarian emigre poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. Her well-travelled poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments of history.

Looks at the author's ghosts of the past - including her late husband, Raymond Carver, and her parents, as well as victims of holocaust and wars - at the same time as she confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship.

C.D. Wright's work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Like Something Flying Backwards was the first UK edition of her work, and presents a wide range of her lyrics, narratives, prose poems and odes.

Features thirty poets from around the world who read to you in person. This title presents a fresh concept in publishing: your own personal poetry festival brought into your home. Each poet reads to you for about ten minutes - up to half a dozen poems chosen from across the range of their work.

The poems of The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass bring together a reckoning with a lost political legacy, a meditation on love, marriage and middle age, and a reaching back into foreign ancestry.

First collection by young English poet featured in Bloodaxe's new poets anthology "Voice Recognition" (2009). Sarah Jackson lived in Brighton for many years, and now lectures at Nottingham Trent University.

Examines the roles of hiddenness, uncertainty and surprise as they appear in poetry and other works of literature, in the life and psyche of the writer, and in the broader life of the culture as a whole.

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.

Joan Margarit's poems that evoke the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of his beloved handicapped daughter. His poetry reminds us that it is not death we have to understand but life.

Features poems that reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. This work examines the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgement and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, meanings in overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing.

Presents poems that explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon the author's own memories and experiences, as well as on art, myth, history and literature. This book includes the author's double sequence "Debatable Land", which speaks first of dementia seen from the outside, and then invents a voice for a woman living inside that condition.

Presents poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers. This work includes a selection from the author's collections, "A Grip on Thin Air" and "Icarus on Earth". It celebrates the landscapes the author lives in by observing and recording them, yet with an awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2008, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise.

"Tell Me This Is Normal" is a generous selection of Julie O'Callaghan's poetry, ranging from the "Edible Anecdotes" her readers gorged on in the 1980s to her most recent work confronting a very 'scary' 21st century with an armoury of lively and defiant language - as well as a baseball bat under the bed. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

A selection of Janet Frame's poems drawn from both "An Angel at My Table" and "The Goose Bath".

Elena Shvarts was the most outstanding Russian poet of her generation. Birdsong on the Seabed presents a selection of her later poetry. Russian-English dual language text. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

This compilation brings together Brendan Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies: Antigone by Sophocles and Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women. All three plays dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes

What are the contours of a life? This collection of poems features: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, and increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left.

Three lectures on contemporary poetry by one of Britain's leading poets, Fiona Sampson. Her lectures discuss the relationship between poetry, music and ideas, taking examples from a diverse range of writers, composers and philosophers.

New collection by leading Scottish poet.

Kate Potts's distinctive first collection is concerned with imagination - as means of escape and of illumination, as destructive and redemptive. Its finely honed urban landscapes are shot through with myth, storytelling and the lure of transformation.

Brings together many favourite poems from the author's four collections - "The Adoption Papers", "Other Lovers", "Off Colour" and "Life Mask" - as well as some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. The poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding.

The poems of Stone Milk address the way the written word preserves yet distorts the lives depending on it for fame or survival. Anne Stevenson's engaging new collection opens with A Lament for the Makers, an experimental sequence based on medieval dream poetry that plays with a Dante-inspired yet modern, scientific vision of an underworld of poets.

Includes selections from Allnutt's books "Spitting the Pips Out" (1981), "Beginning the Avocado" (1987), "Blackthorn" (1994) and "Nantucket and the Angel" (1997), as well as the whole of "Lintel" (2001), "Sojourner" (2004), and a collection of new poems, "Wolflight" (2007).

Contains poems which focuses on many different kinds of beginnings. The poems are about living through and coming to terms with changes - sometimes momentous or traumatic - and moving on into the future.

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. The Upshot includes a new collection, The Divided, and selections from three critically acclaimed earlier collections ranging from the lyrical exuberance of Sunset Grill to the vivid nocturnal surrealism of The School of Night.