The 1960's saw Charles Bukowski struggle for recognition & slowly emerge as a unique, talented & prolific poet & writer, whilst holding down a day job at the Post Office. These letters to various friends, lovers & literary contacts provide an intimate & fascinating look at Bukowski's mind, his emotions, his attitude towards his own creativity & the comings & goings of his daily life. ...

'I wrote letters to many in those days.. . it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.'
The 1960's saw Charles Bukowski struggle
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'I wrote letters to many in those days.. . it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.'
The 1960's saw Charles Bukowski struggle
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Charles Bukowski was a uniguely talented & prolific writer, best known for his Beat Generation writing that reflected his experience of low life urban America.
Selected Letters Volume 4 collects together correspondence with various friends, lovers & literary contacts, providing an intimate & fascinating insight into Bolowski's mind, his emotions & his attitude towards his own creativity, right up until his death in 1994.
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Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic & 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 & aesthetics contend with war, death & violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry & his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece & Rome, particularly Homer & Ovid, & to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large & difficult themes into highly concentrated forms.

This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength & coherence of an extraordinary body of work.

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From the 1950s onwards Peter Redgrove wrote poems of imagination & power; this volume is a distillation of his work from The Collector ...

Representing the best of ten books & twenty years' work, Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into his strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are coming to the work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm & disquiet at the way the poems shift
- almost without your noticing
- from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising. These are the secret, spiky narratives from the arch story-teller, the mixer of hilarity & menace, the past-master of fractured realism. The world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination.

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Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' & cheered the 'roughness & humour & brag & tenderness & completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion & loss'. This rich selection
- made by the author
- exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm & language & a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited
- the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children
- but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions & conceits.

A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted & widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range & continuing development.





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Taken from his first six books, these poems confirm Robert Crawford as a poet of exhilarating energy wedded to a constantly refreshing delight in nuanced language. Richly nourished by his background, Crawford's work is both lyrical & wry. Its intelligent humour & attunement to our technological present are impressively fused with a deepening note of spirituality. Unpredictable yet recognisable, these are poems of beguiling vitality.

While readers have praised Crawford's lovingly lyrical engagement with politics & science in such collections as A Scottish Assembly (1990) & Spirit Machines (1999), with gender in Masculinity (1996), or with environment & spirituality in The Tip of My Tongue (2003), what emerges in this Selected Poems is a clearly growing commitment to the protean delight of poetry itself: a belief in its uniqueness as a medium which can subtly sound out complex relationships with heartfelt intelligence. In Crawford's language there is a confidently contemporary Scottish music that celebrates a kinship between the cherished, minute detail, local or personal, & the magnificently universal, ' As a candle-flame believes in the speed of light'.

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