Carcanet Press Ltd : 273 books

Arcimboldo's famous seventeenth-century Mannerist portraits, in which the sitter's face is composed of vegetables and fruit, suggest how – in subordinating a mixture of elements into an unrelated whole – the imagination can translate and transform the medium of expression itself. Tim Liardet's...

Reimagining myth, history, and literature, this compilation draws upon the poet’s remarkable travels and experiences as a doctor while working in some of the most remote parts of the world. As it brings Rimbaud, Dante, and 17th-century picaresque into play, this compilation explores the ultimate journey of crossing into another world or another life.

The poems that Kelly Grovier’s third collection, The Lantern Cage, brings together are prompted by scenes that occur in life’s everyday spaces—city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains. The title conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement,...

Set against a backdrop of ecological, political and emotional turbulence, Seasonal Disturbances is a charged yet meditative exploration of the relationship between nature, the city and the self in the 21st century. An interrupted zuihitsu written on board a Dutch barge on the Thames explores the elemental...

At the heart of James Harpur's The White Silhouette is a meditative poem inspired by the Book of Kells—a poem that follows threads into themes such as the nature of the divine, the efficacy of sacred art, and the way of silence. The title poem—described in the TLS as a "compelling spiritual...

Witty and stylish, these extracts from Frederic Raphael’s journal chronicle the life and reflections of the screenwriter. Of special interest to film enthusiasts, this candid memoir includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West-and their vivid recollections of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey,...

A collection of poetry by South African-born, Yorkshire-based Carola Luther, this account is a chronicle of mourning, renewal, and the realities of human relationships. Addressed to the eponymous ‘Malarchy’-a magical, quarrelsome, and often drunken young boy-these poems explore silences, absences,...

With poems culled from a period of 20 years, this compilation brings together the works of English poet Peter Sansom. Having made the local and familiar his own resonant territory, Sansom explores the common ground of modern life, such as supermarkets, darts matches, life with teenagers, and family...

A first collection from a reviewer, editor, and scholar of poetry, Tonight the Summer’s Over explores the themes of belonging and estrangement with precise resonance. Born in Belfast but brought up in rural Lincolnshire, England, Rory Waterman turns an unblinking eye on his own childhood, caught...

A book of geographies, this collection chronicles the poet’s history as it traces the places where he has lived and taught. Written by an immigrant, this book also masterfully tackles political topics, including the war on terror and terror itself: its causes and effects. Through sonnets, ballads,...

Miles Burrows is a man always in love, and confused as lovers have to be by the inconstant nature of ‘the other'. With Waiting for the Nightingale, he expresses social class anxiety, nostalgia and the competing glamour of women and metaphysics. Burrows is also aware of mortality, Eros and Thanatos tap constantly at his funny bone. Does God exist? Will the nightingale sing?

Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the 12th to the 20th and 21st centuries, and relocating it to the modern “walled city” of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon...

Included in this collection are the poet Gillian Clarke’s personal verses and stories from farmers in her family, her neighborhood, and Wales. There is an instinctive and deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book, and its open structure naturally allows for the incorporation of her seven...

Istanbul-a place that is both exotic and familiar, spanning west and east, past and present-is fully explored in this collection of poetry that sketches out its many faces. Memories, cultures, and histories intersect in these poems that arch from imaginings of contemporary Turkey and trace back...