Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Pretence of Understanding - cover

The Pretence of Understanding

Beth Davies

Publisher: The Poetry Business

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Beth Davies' The Pretence of Understanding explores loss, not just of loved ones but of youth and adolescence. In these poems where time can stand still or run backwards, the reader finds themselves caught in longing moments of looking back at childhood; they remind us to run in the snow while we get the chance.
Available since: 06/01/2023.
Print length: 36 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Kentucky Wonder - cover

    Kentucky Wonder

    Ronald Franklin Saia

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Kentucky Wonder is a compilation of 70 poems written and read by Ronald Franklin Saia about love, family experiences, and the wonders of God. Some poems will bring tears, some poems will make you laugh, and some will draw you closer to our Lord. Most of all, this audio-book will bring you joy! 
    Ronald Franklin Saia was born a grandson to an Italian from Sutera, Sicily. Growing up in rural Kentucky gave Ronald a deep feeling in his soul for the outdoors. He hunted, trapped, rode his buckskin mare Old Beauty, slept under the stars, and cooked super over an open camp fire. He is a real American partriot. While Ronald worked his way through college, he lived at home with his precious mother, Mary, and father, Victor. What a blessing it was for God to have chosen them for his parents. 
    For a time, he worked in Venezuela where he met his wife, Barb. He has traveled in South and Central America, and Europe. Ronald's inspirational poetry is straight from his heart and represents a true appreciation for creation and God's works along with life's experiences and personal observations. 
    ©2014 Roanld Franklin Saia (P)2014 Ronald Franklin Saia
    Show book
  • A Lick and a Promise - cover

    A Lick and a Promise

    Imelda May

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The audiobook version of A Lick and a Promise read by Imelda May.
    A Lick and a Promise is the debut poetry collection of one of Ireland's most famed female musicians, Imelda May.
    Following the release of her first poetry EP Slip Of The Tongue  in 2020, this collection contains 100 poems, including two each from both her father and young daughter. Using the themes of Breast, Below, Blood, Eyes, Tongue and Temple, the poems are written in May's absorbing, visceral style and encapsulate heartbreak, sex, nature and womanhood. Included in the collection is 'You Don't Get to be Racist and Irish', the powerful poem which was written in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and was recently used by Rethink Ireland campaign.
    Show book
  • Reckon - cover

    Reckon

    Logan Phillips

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    “Reckon illuminates all that tries to hide.” — JAVIER ZAMORA, author of Solito: A Memoir 
    “Logan Phillips’s Reckon is a hell of a book... Arizona needs this book. America needs this book. You do too.” — ANDER MONSON, author of Predator: A Movie, a Memoir, an Obsession 
    In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town of Tombstone to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, whiteness, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.” 
    As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.  
    With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle. 
    NARRATED BY THE AUTHOR. Cover: art by Logan Phillips, design by Leigh McDonald. 
    “A full-throated consideration of the antecedent of sultry desert queerness—the cowboy.” — RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ, author of Brown Neon 
    “Reckon implodes the braggadocio and myth of the gunslinging West.” — ANTHONY CODY, Whiting Award winner 
    “Flying through masculine silence, Reckon is the owl.” — SESSHU FOSTER, author of City of the Future
    Show book
  • Circumtrauma - cover

    Circumtrauma

    Jumoke Verissimo

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    From one of Africa’s most acclaimed writers, poetry about the Nigeria-Biafra war 
    Everyone carries a piece of the war within them: what happens when we neglect to consider each individual’s story? The Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70) erupted when the southeastern region of Nigeria, known as Biafra, declared independence. It was a major conflict; however, this war remains largely absent from official historical accounts. While victims have passed down their experiences across generations, the official silence and the dominance of narratives from larger ethnic groups have perpetuated stereotypes that diminish the suffering of some victims. The differing narratives that are absent from history books continue to divide and polarize social groups within Nigeria and beyond.  
    Weaving together cut-ups and redactions from personal narratives, historical accounts, and reflections on the enduring impact of war, and with raw language and searing imagery, the poems in Circumtrauma grapple with loss, resilience, and the search for healing amidst the fractures of deep-seated divisions.  
    This collection compels readers to confront the profound and often-silenced complexities of history, the intergenerational weight of inherited suffering, and the urgent need to acknowledge the diverse experiences and perspectives of all those impacted by the tragedy of war. It is a testament to the enduring power of art to bear witness to the human condition, offering a path towards healing and reconciliation.
    Show book
  • Born in the USA - Exploring America in Poems - The Great Lakes Poets - A celebration of American poetry - cover

    Born in the USA - Exploring...

    Ambrose Bierce, Paul Laurence...

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another.  Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us. 
     
    Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy. 
     
    In the volumes of this series we take a look through the prism of individual regions of the United States through the centuries and decades. 
     
    The United States may be many things: the world’s policeman, a bully, a shameless purveyor of mass market culture but it also, in its better moments, a standard bearer for truth, transparency, equality and the more positive qualities of democracy. 
     
    Little wonder that’s its poets are rightly acknowledged as wonders of their art.  Leading lights in the fight against slavery and for equality, even if the rest of the Nation is finding it problematic to catch up.   
     
    In this volume we have collected verse from poets born around the Great Lakes. These huge bodies of water are really inland seas and the poetic beauty created on their shores by poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ambrose Bierce, Vachel Lindsay, James Whitcomb Riley, and Alice Carey humble and inspire us all in ways that only a poet’s words can.
    Show book
  • More Patina than Gleam - cover

    More Patina than Gleam

    Jane Aldous

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    This series of poems, based in post war Edinburgh, tell the story of Linda, fleeing with her 11 year old daughter from England and an abusive relationship. In hiding as a lady's companion in one of the city's suburbs, mother and daughter settle into their new life in Elsie's rackety house, and encounter a variety of characters who will change their lives forever.
    More Patina than Gleam celebrates outsiders getting by in hard times – the day to day grind of cleaning a house, periods, prejudice, ageing, sexuality and falling in and out of love. The poems are not autobiographical, but Jane Aldous, whose own mother used to say that she could have run away with Jane when she was a baby, has gently torn scraps from her own life to add to the collage.
    Show book