Arc Publications: 54 books

This vibrant collection, building on the rich strengths of The Ark Builders, serves as a generous introduction to Mary O'Donnell's work to those yet to discover her expansive visions and powerful voice.

Hailed as the 'prophet' of the Surrealist movement by André Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work is completely underrepresented in the English language. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from...

This selection of poems by Cheran, one of the most important poets writing in Tamil today, charts the civil war in Sri Lanka of more than three decades, and its aftermath, in a narrative set against a landscape once idyllic, now devastated. Yet this is not the only narrative in this book: woven throughout...

One hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War, the Polish poet Wioletta Greg undertakes a literary journey through her own family history, exploring in both poetry and prose a century of life, death, love and tragedy. With passion, tenderness and humour, she traces a path from the lives...

Miłobędzka's poetry crystallizes relationships between people from erotic engagements to the bond between mother and child. These are poems rooted in the earth and body, beginning in a physical experience that expands into philosophical questioning. They are not polite, they do not hide their imperfections....

Lucid narratives of family dramas, global warming, and conversations with Death make a riveting new collection from this prizewinning poet. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home their engagement with the church, art and natural beauty provide surefooted travelling companions.

Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees combines the poet's unerring instinct for the surprising perspective on commonplace objects or events with a mischievous delight in the detail of the absurd. Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability.

This collection is about women's experiences of work, the city, menopause and ancestry. The poems have a touch as deft as the seamstresses and other craftspeople who populate the book. They are funny, political and lyrical. Wills shapes the metaphorical and physical terrain of the female body in an...

Curtis's humour and charm, ability to turn a poem with the seemingly simplest of images, and that understanding of how words will play over the listener's ear, are hallmarks brought to the fore on the page... His greatest skill is to make readers go 'yes, of course'; he reminds us of what we've known all along. Michael McKimm, The Warwick Review

The poems in the first fulllength collection to be published in the UK by the acclaimed Mexican poet Pedro Serrano are taken from Desplazamientos, a volume of selected poems which draws on all his collections since 1986. Chosen by both the poet and his accomplished translator, Anna Crowe, these poems...

Thaw is a book length sequence of short (all 10 lines long) poems. Like haiku, at first glance these seem simple meditations on nature, that, when given time, open out into a larger reflections on human experience, emotions and how the three interact. A rich and peculiar sequence that is both shadowy and illuminating, tender and insistent, broad and deeply personal.

Michael O'Neill's Return of the Gift is a volume about what is given and what is lost. Writing unsentimentally and with insight about powerful subjects such as the death of his mother, caring for his father, and his own recent diagnosis of cancer, the poet speaks of and to his personal and historical...

History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under...

Confident in his use of Christian icons, nothing is ‘sacred’ to Paul Stubbs who is as prepared to write as God and Pope as he is Adam (and Eve). Using paintings by Francis Bacon as their starting points, these poems delve into baroque realms of psychological and philosophical thought, filling the unknown with urgent possibility.