Bloodaxe Books: 229 books

Frieda Hughes’s poems and paintings reflect her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, and her later experiences when living in London, Australia, and most recently, Wales. From childhood, writing and painting have been the two driving forces behind her commitment to life. They first came together...

There are two acts of recovery in this book – one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl...

Matthew Sweeney's tenth collection of poems is as sinister as its dark forebears, but the notes he hits in Horse Music are lyrical and touching as well as disturbing and disquieting. Confronting him in these imaginative riffs are not just the perplexing animals and folklorish crows familiar from his...

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves – Herbert Read's Art Now (1933/1948) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas...

Canada's Priscila Uppal has gained an international reputation for her boldly provocative poetry in just a dozen years, since publishing her first collection, How to Draw Blood from a Stone, at the age of 23. Noted for their startling imagery, unforgettable characters and visionary lines, her poems...

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

Spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit...

Archipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly, and they keep the...

The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is three Books of the Dead bound as one. This trilogy comprises an alphabet of trees spoken as witness to a Highland hanging, ten pattern poetry dream diagrams and thirty-five death sonnets deconstructed to Mary Queen of Scots. Saturated with the languages of arboreal...

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer given the Welsh laureateship. She is a bilingual virtuoso, publishing several books in both English and Welsh. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her ?rst three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995),...

Pauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking… her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her eighth collection Tiger...

Pauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking… her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from...

Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple from three different viewpoints: the mother,the birth mother and the daughter. This unique and honest volumeof poems has been adapted for radio. Also included in thebook are new poems reflecting issues of sexuality, Scottishness and being working-class.

The Star: 'A plan to televise a poem packed with obscenities caused outrage last night. ITV chiefs intend to screen a reading of Tony Harrison's verse v. which is full of four-letter words.' Daily Mail: A torrent of four-letter filth... the most explicitly sexual language yet beamed into the...