Bloodaxe Books: 229 books

The body is the 'bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for...

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence...

Nick Drake’s fourth collection, Out of Range, explores the strange interconnections and confronting emergencies – the signs, wonders and alarms - of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core...

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 highly engaging new collection opens with A Lament for the Makers, an experimental sequence based on medieval dream poetry that plays with a Dante-inspired...

Hafez is among the most celebrated of Persian mystic poets, thriving alongside such towering figures as Rumi and Saadi. Ubiquitous in Iran, he has also been hugely influential in the West. Interpreted variously as ardent mystic and lover, he fuses earthly and divine love with an intense constancy...

As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man,...

Sabotage is a collection of poems exploring private and public acts of destruction, disruption and vandalism in the 21st century. In Sabotage, several vital sites are under attack or at risk: the human body (including the brain and biological systems); structures of community (including family, nation,...

Virginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river’s upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers...

Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Moving from the violent to the erotic, Conquest describes women questing to rediscover their own desire. Split into three sections, the collection begins in the 19th-century England of the Brontësisters, travels through the vast continent of the USA, and finally...

Niall Campbell grew up on South Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and his first collection, Moontide, is filled with images of the island's seascapes, its myths, its wildlife, and the long dark of its winters. Quietly reflective and deftly musical, these thoughtful poems resonate with silence and...

A noctuary is a diary for the late hours. In Niall Campbell’s poems, this is a time for reflection, discovering what it means to be a young father, anxious, caring and protective, deeply connected to the new, precious life of another human being. The deftly lyrical poems in his second collection...

Louis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. He has worked closely on English translations of his poetry, with his co-translators fully engaging with the original poem in Irish. Keenly aware of the...

A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) was one of the most individual, versatile and approachable voices in 20th century poetry. Influenced at first by the Imagists, his poetry is remarkable for its lucidity and formal exactness and for its witty, humane depiction of life in the modern city. Out of step with...

At once a reckoning with a lost political legacy, a meditation on love, marriage and middle age, and a reaching back into foreign ancestry, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass is Harry Clifton's fullest and most ambitious attempt so far to bring together, in a single book, the discordant elements of...