Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Andrew Barrow

'Your brother looked healthy, happy, natural. But everything else about him is extremely odd. Not faintly odd. Extremely odd. Except in appearance. He's the opposite of you.' Quentin Crisp 
 
At the age of twenty-two, the youngest of five brothers, Jonathan Barrow, was killed with his fiancée in a car crash. He left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Queue, in which, among other things, he prophesied his own death. The story of a boy and a dachshund, populated by a kaleidoscopic menagerie of people and animals and an array of anthropomorphic in-betweens, The Queue is a vivid and irreverent portrayal of the world in which Jonathan and his awe-struck older brother Andrew were raised. 
 
Jonathan and his book form the framework of a remarkable study of a young man's inner and outer effervescence, his family, England and high and low society in the Swinging Sixties. Filled with fascinating and fantastical anecdotes, Animal Magic documents a heady and peripatetic childhood in Lancashire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, misadventures at home and school, and the early working life of the two brothers, on the lower rungs of show business, backstage at Claridge's, and finally in advertising. This spellbinding elegy negotiates love affairs, family tensions, exhibitions, publishers' rejections and precarious living in a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. 
 
Punctuated with excerpts from The Queue and Jonathan's other bizarre and brilliant writings, Animal Magic is a book bursting with humour, wit and pathos and featuring an outlandish cast of characters, from an eccentric father, a mischievous family dog and a down-and-out ex-schoolmaster to curious stars of Swinging London like Mick Jagger and Tommy Cooper. It is a memoir unlike any other.

Animal Magic

A Brother's Story

Joe Sacco

A landmark of graphic journalism, capturing the heart of day-to-day life in occupied Palestine. 
 
Palestine remains one of the most influential works of visual reportage ever created - a ground-breaking fusion of comic art and investigative journalism. 
 
Based on months of on-the-ground reporting in the early 1990s, Joe Sacco powerfully documents his own experiences and the daily lives of Palestinians during the First Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with remarkable insight and clarity. 
 
Through drawings, reportage and storytelling, Sacco captures the moments of grief, resilience and absurdity that conventional journalism can miss. Palestine is a modern classic that continues to inspire artists, journalists and readers who seek an unflinching and nuanced account of the conflict. 
 
‘The bar is set extremely high when it comes to graphic books and the Middle East: one thinks of Joe Sacco's Palestine’ Guy Delisle 
 
‘Palestine is utterly compelling, and as affecting as the work of any war photographer or poet’ Varsity 
 
For readers interested in Middle Eastern history, human rights and documentary storytelling.

Palestine

Anne Carson

Anne Carson' s first full-length publication in Britain, Glass and God introduces an assured and challenging new voice: vivid, laconic, precise. Her 'Short Talks' are about everything from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, from waterproofing to walking backwards; the brilliant long poem 'The Glass Essay' deals with the end of a contemporary love affair, but is haunted by the Brontë sisters. 
 
Blending the modern and the classical, Anne Carson writes with an intensity and an integrity that is transfiguring.

Glass And God

James Lasdun

Concerned with transformations and dislocations - both physical and emotional - the poems in James Lasdun's second collection speak exquisitely of desire and loss. 
 
Jetlagged, estranged, out of synch or out of kilter, the figures in these poems sometimes just miss each other, sometimes connect explosively. And under their feet - whether it's a Roman pavement, a hill-path in Mexico, a Surrey lawn or a New York street - there is always something primitive, turbulent, ready to reveal itself. Intellectually rigorous, musical and deftly formal these apparently classical poems blend a dark, erotic animus with an exhilarating wit.

The Revenant

Matthew Sweeney

The poems in A Smell of Fish connect and radiate like the spokes of a wheel: haiku, sestinas, poems beginning with a line by somebody else or sparked off by foreign travel, a version of Dante, a sea sequence set on the Suffolk coast, and - long overdue - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird. 
 
In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world where all explanations are withheld. 'If Beckett and Kafka come to mind', as Sean O'Brien wrote in his essay on Sweeney in The Deregulated Muse, 'they are not simply influences but kindred imaginations'. So we encounter a valley mysteriously filling with the smell of fish, second-world-war planes reappearing over London, a secret attic mural of a naked ex-lover, a cosmonaut abandoned on the moon, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland. 
 
Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.

A Smell Of Fish

Robert Crawford

Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance. 
 
Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to brosnachadh, the poems' resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where 'Nothing is ever single'.

Full Volume

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. 
 
The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.

One Secret Thing

Michael Longley

Emerging, as it did, after over a decade of silence, Gorse Fires had an immediate and resounding impact - revealing a poetry that seemed renewed and re-energised - and winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1991. It is now regarded as the pivotal book in Michael Longley's distinguished career. 
 
If Ireland remains Longley's starting-point or implied focus, it is often sighted through disturbing perspectives that derive from foreign cultures, from Homer's Odyssey, from the Second World War, and from the Holocaust. Even his beautifully precise poems about the West of Ireland are shadowed by the many destructive forces ranged against the creative act. 
 
Longley's versions of Odysseus' return to Ithaca and 'Ghetto' (based on the Polish ghettoes) epitomise his concern with the meaning of home and family. He sees these archetypes of Western civilisation as vulnerable, problematic, violated by power. Odysseus' homecoming involves murder and vengeance as well as reunions - a connection with the ambiguities of life in Northern Ireland. 
 
Gorse Fires is an unusual artistic blend: darkly austere, yet abundant in images, catalogues and syntactical virtuosity. The formal links between poems gives the whole collection the air of a richly varied sequence; it is a work of the highest order. 
 
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

Gorse Fires

Negotiating the borders and hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe - with occasional coracle trips or forays to Antarctica for a round of golf - the homesick flaneur surveys the surrounding devastation with the same mixture of fascination and alarm he feels when he discovers the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made catastrophe: the ruins and remnants of war peopled by kidnappers and assassins, feral dogs, death squads, the dispossessed and deracinated. 
 
These poems are parables of threat, parties for the end of the world; they speak eloquently of damage, displacement and the resulting swell of terror: 
 
'I looked back at the door 
heard the lock click, then beyond 
another lock, then another.'

Black Moon

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

In late 1995 and early 1996, cartoonist/reporter Joe Sacco travelled four times to Gorazde, a UN-designated safe area during the Bosnian War, which had teetered on the brink of obliteration for three and a half years. 
 
Still surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the mainly Muslim people of Gorazde had endured heavy attacks and severe privation to hang on to their town while the rest of Eastern Bosnia was brutally 'cleansed' of its non-Serb population. But as much as Safe Area Gorazde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived. 
 
Since it was first published in 2000, Safe Area Gorazde has been recognized as one of the absolute classics of graphic non-fiction. We are delighted to publish it in the UK for the first time, to stand beside Joe Sacco's other books on the Cape list - Palestine, The Fixer and Notes from a Defeatist.

Safe Area Gorazde

The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95

Neil Rollinson

With the frank, subversive, and very funny poems in his first two books, Neil Rollinson established himself as a deft cartographer of the sensual world. While a rich and tactile eroticism still courses through Demolition, there is a new seriousness here, as mortality starts to throw its long shadow. 
 
These poems occupy a more rueful, reflective space - provisional, mercurial and fragile - a darker place where disintegration and loss are the only certainties, and memory is the only solid ground. Central to this is the death of the father - whether the poet's own, or the lost fathers of Borges or Vallejo - and the theme is broadened through a number of moving examinations of the erosion of time and youth. Against this gathering darkness, Rollinson sets a spirited defence, blending the lyric and vernacular voice in a muscular celebration of food, sex, sport and the natural world that is unusually refreshing, and sophisticated enough to allow both humour and profundity. 
 
The poems in Demolition never give up hope; they exhibit a tenacious optimism - or at least a steely pragmatism - that says: we have what we are given, there is no alternative, and we all must find what joy we can in life, and in its living.

Demolition

Thomas Lynch

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that's painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem: 'Listen - /something's going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred/percent. We die. And more's the pity.' 
 
In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and fauna and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.

Walking Papers

Since Glass and God, which was her first full-length collection published in Britain and which was nominated for the 1998 Forward Prize, Anne Carson has published a book a year to extraordinary critical acclaim. Her last two volumes, Autobiography of Red and Men in the Off Hours were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has received numerous North American awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. 
 
In her brilliant new book, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 'tangos' of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importatnly, by Carson's own unique sensibility. 
 
The unnamed narrator - sometimes 'I', sometimes 'the wife' - speaks of the man she calls only 'the husband', illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking. The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects - beauty, desire, love, betrayal - with freshness and devastating power. 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The Beauty Of The Husband

Anne Enright

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life 
 
'Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer' THE TIMES 
 
'A joy to read' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices. 
 
'One of the best essayists alive' MEGAN NOLAN, OBSERVER 
 
'Confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels' INDEPENDENT 
 
'A glorious antidote to the mad, sad world' EIMEAR MCBRIDE 
 
'So alert, so attuned, so alive' LUCY CALDWELL

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

In this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. 
 
Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. 
 
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Sanctuary

Mark Doty

My Alexandria comprises a series of eloquent meditations on the essential themes: mortality and life, beauty and loss. The collection is haunted by the spectre of AIDS, but is transfigured by Mark Doty's ranging imagination, effortless stylistic skill and huge emotional power.

My Alexandria

The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. Meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy to these poems, a state of lucid wonder, that allows for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss. 
 
Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun and Allaran Point - the plovers and oystercatchers, whooper swans and snow geese, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between. 
 
What Longley says of Edward Thomas might easily be said of him: 'The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/ He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf'. Full of intensity and grace, tenderness and wisdom, these are poems of deceptive simplicity from a craftsman of international stature.

Snow Water

Sam Willetts

The poems in this remarkable first collection have been hard won: 'Fruits of much grief they are,' as Donne said, 'emblems of more.' Having lost ten years to heroin addiction and recovery, Sam Willetts emerges now - suddenly, and apparently from nowhere - as a fully-fledged and significant English poet. 
 
In a book deeply conscious of history, one series of poems tracks his mother's escape, as a young girl, from the Nazis, in a narrative that moves from a Stuka attack on the Smolensk Road to the Krakow ghetto, the destruction of Warsaw, to Nuremberg and Nagasaki and, finally, his mother's grave. Other poems address Englishness, secular Jewishness, and the childhood pleasures of Oxfordshire - an increasingly deceptive pastoral, stalked and eventually shattered by heroin, which brings a grim new existence among dealers and users. The redemption the poet finds, through detox and rehab, love and writing, is full of regret for the years and lives wasted, but also offers a lyrical rebirth of the senses: 'In a new light, a new moon/ that isn't made of scorched tinfoil/will turn your tide again'. 
 
Deft, economical and wonderfully original, this is work that celebrates the peaks and troughs of a lived life, the poems' vivid clarity feeling both fresh and fully earned. It is rare to find an unknown poet of such mature quality, and New Light for the Old Dark represents a brilliant dawning.

New Light for the Old Dark

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant - the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death - but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. And Longley's interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. 
 
A sequence about his grandchildren's births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley's continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland, Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of leverets, otters, swans, wrens, lesser twayblade and bird's-foot trefoil, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe's foremost 'ecological' poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a 'soul-arena'. 
 
A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title-poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple 'ache' beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection's multiple 'doors'. Others are music and paintings, 'cloudberry jam from Lapland', a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that 'bend and magnify the daylight', poems by a master craftsman.

A Hundred Doors

In the space of two collections, Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995), Michael Longley broke a long poetic slience and re-drew the map of poetry at the end of the millenium. The Weather in Japan consolidates and expands the vision of those volumes, leading the reader through the various hells we have made this century. 
 
Preferring to see the horrors of political violence through the filter of the domestic, pointing up the fragility of the order we create, he takes us from the fields of Flanders, through Terezin and Auschwitz to the troubled north of Ireland. And, in images drawn from the west of Ireland, Italy, America and Japan, he explores the fundamentals of 'home' and 'civilisation'. 
 
Longley's grave humanity, Zen-like connective imagination and ecological eye give the most delicate compelx, beautiful things - a spring gentian, a lapwing or a snowflake - the nutritious light that allows them to grow greater than the crass brutality that surrounds them.

The Weather In Japan

Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. 
 
This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.

Selected Poems

Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me. You've no idea how much - right from the first time we met.' 
 
In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse - from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet's art. In Redgrove's poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.

Collected Poems

John Hartley Williams

Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge; by a spooked version of Rimbaud's 'La Bateau Ivre'; by encounters with Malcolm Lowry, the floating dead, the 'old men behind the waterfall' and the knitted poet; by poems about donkey jackets and dancing with donkeys, and a one-sided conversation with a decidedly un-Romantic polar bear two doors down from Dove Cottage. 
 
Long celebrated for his ranging, restless imagination, his baroque, elliptical narratives, his manic humour and maverick stance, Williams returns with another invitation to join him for a jug or two of wine in his out-of-kilter universe: a world that is both strange, and strangely familiar. Welcome to the Café des Artistes!

Café des Artistes

John Burnside

Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. 
 
In this Selected Poems, his territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. 
 
We can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and continuity. 
 
This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes intimate, resonant, exquisite music.

Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle's work for a French animation studio requires him to oversee production at various Asian studios on the grim frontiers of free trade. His employer puts him up for months at a time in 'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual deprivations of a man very far from home. After Pyongyang, his book about the strange society that is North Korea, Delisle turned his attention to Shenzhen, the cold, urban city in Southern China that is sealed off with electric fences and armed guards from the rest of the country. The result is another brilliant graphic novel - funny, scary, utterly original and illuminating.

Shenzhen

A Travelogue From China

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work. 
 
What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

What is the Grass

John Burnside's remarkable book is full of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. 
 
These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. 
 
Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there. 
 
‘The unmistakeable work of a master’ Times Literary Supplement

Black Cat Bone

The poems in Grimalkin - Thomas Lynch's first publication in Britain are all concerned, in one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. In each poem, Lynch is looking for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces: the gravities of sex and death, love and grief - all the things that make us breathless and horizontal, mortal and memorable. 
 
By means of a wry, mordant wit, telling observation and glorious poise, we are shown the strong tensions that make us human: the forces in our nature that create, replicate, restore, renew us; and those that kill us, constrict our lives, silence us. From spirited invective to meditations on morality, from lyrics of love and desire to a corrosive flyting to his ex-wife, these poems explore an extraordinary emotional range and technical facility but, more importantly, they reveal a compassionate, wise, and genial humanity.

Grimalkin And Other Poems

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