Publisher: COMMUNE WRITERS INT'L
This poetry collection consists of poems that cut across several themes such as love, abuse, violence, gender equality, races, ironies of life, mental illness, and others. The poems are narrative-like short stories. Some aim at questioning societal issues, while others will open your mind to a new way of thinking.
Two brothers, long estranged, reunite at a ceremony to honour their lost sibling's life. As they seek to let go, they must confront the past whilst rediscovering the joy that binds them together. A powerful fusion of movement, song and text, Now, I See is an exploration of identity, forgiveness and nature's capacity to heal. It celebrates the profound bond of brotherhood and the resilience that can be found in joy. Now, I See is the second instalment in Lanre Malaolu's groundbreaking trilogy that excavates and celebrates the reality of being a Black man in contemporary Britain. It was premiered at Stratford East, London, in 2024, directed by Malaolu. The first play in the trilogy, Samskara, was premiered at The Yard Theatre, London, and was widely acclaimed.Show book
Algernon Charles Swinburne was born on April 5th, 1837, in London, into a wealthy Northumbrian family. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, but did not complete a degree. In 1860 Swinburne published two verse dramas but achieved his first literary success in 1865 with Atalanta in Calydon, written in the form of classical Greek tragedy. The following year "Poems and Ballads" brought him instant notoriety. He was now identified with "indecent" themes and the precept of art for art's sake. Although he produced much after this success in general his popularity and critical reputation declined. The most important qualities of Swinburne's work are an intense lyricism, his intricately extended and evocative imagery, metrical virtuosity, rich use of assonance and alliteration, and bold, complex rhythms. Swinburne's physical appearance was small, frail, and plagued by several other oddities of physique and temperament. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s he drank excessively and was prone to accidents that often left him bruised, bloody, or unconscious. Until his forties he suffered intermittent physical collapses that necessitated removal to his parents' home while he recovered. Throughout his career Swinburne also published literary criticism of great worth. His deep knowledge of world literatures contributed to a critical style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. He is particularly noted for discerning studies of Elizabethan dramatists and of many English and French poets and novelists. As well he was a noted essayist and wrote two novels. In 1879, Swinburne's friend and literary agent, Theodore Watts-Dunton, intervened during a time when Swinburne was dangerously ill. Watts-Dunton isolated Swinburne at a suburban home in Putney and gradually weaned him from alcohol, former companions and many other habits as well. Much of his poetry in this period may be inferior but some individual poems are exceptional; "By the North Sea," "Evening on the Broads," "A Nympholept," "The Lake of Gaube," and "Neap-Tide." Swinburne lived another thirty years with Watts-Dunton. He denied Swinburne's friends access to him, controlled the poet's money, and restricted his activities. It is often quoted that 'he saved the man but killed the poet'. Swinburne died on April 10th, 1909 at the age of seventy-two. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.Show book
What lies behind this sunlit world?…Something too deep for thought,…Open only to prayer. These poems reflect moments when one experiences something more than what one sees and hears, feelings of the sublime, the holy, the transcendent. …When meditating by a Wiltshire stream, or walking alone through an African forest, observed by a thousand unseen eyes and ears, from giant cats to tremulous snakes. …Feelings of going beyond oneself, beyond anxiety and feelings of inadequacy, losing oneself in the great chain of being. …The healing experience of being part of nature, losing the fear of death. From intimations of transcendence in nature, this book moves on to the magic of ancient churches where so many have offered up their sorrows and joys and then to meditations and prayers, as well as the consolations offered by ancient rituals, by the rhythm of the church’s seasons, from the magic of Christmas through the penitence of Lent to the glories of Easter. The final section explores the tragic lockdowns caused by Covid-19.Show book
After All We Have Travelled,the debut poetry collection by Sarala Estruch, is a distinctive journey across time, continents and cultures, through memory and generations of family history, exploring the long legacies of empire and its personal and political effects. It is a story of intergenerational trauma, grief and disconnection, but it is also a story of the enduring power of love, of connection, and of embarking into motherhood. Combining elements of memoir, biography, and fiction with formal and experimental poetry, Estruch's work explores the losses incurred by forbidden interracial and intercultural marriage, and is a potent reclamation of voice, story, and mixed-race identity. An important, compelling collection, it asks: What or who is family? What or where is home? And like the modern rose – a hybrid species with origins spanning the globe – to where do we return? 'After All We Have Travelled follows a young woman discovering her own complex history across cultures and languages, religions and lost histories. Where family mythologies meet silence, memory gives an emotive reasoning, singing into the void left by death and distance, using the lyric voice of self-making. This book charts a new terrain, a multiplicity of being mapped for future generations whose relationship to home is as yet unknown to its forebears.' – Sandeep ParmarShow book
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. “We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations. Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?Show book
The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives. But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poets, who brim with talent and verse, on a range of subjects and themes that we can all enjoy. The great city of London is perhaps unrivalled in its scale and effect on humankind down the centuries. Its sprawl and its teeming throngs have shaped the world and even how we live today. With the words of these 10 poets and their insightful, knowing verse we can perhaps begin to understand just why that is.Show book
