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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For the past four decades, Robert Bringhurst has been writing some of the most powerful poetry in English. Distinguished by engaged & passionate curiosity, a wide-ranging intelligence & true originality, his poetry has sometimes been mistaken as austere & opaque. In fact, his work engages in ideas about the human condition, myth, the natural world, language & philosophy, & is unusual for having both a pared simplicity & profound wisdom. His watchword is clarity, & the elements he considers crucial to effective typography could just as easily be looked for ...

Keats is celebrated as a writer in three forms: lyric verse, narrative verse & letters. All three are represented here in a volume which reprints all the famous odes, a selection os sonnets & other short poems, both versions of HYPERION, extentsive selections from ENDYMION, & the complete ISABELLA, LAMIA & THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. Finally, there-are letters in which Keats discusses his attitude to poetry & to other poets. ...

The first ever selection of her stories, from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994. Her star is in the ascendant -winner of the 1994 W. H. Smith Award, shortlisted for the second time in 1995 for the Irish Times International Fiction Award. This wonderful selection of the greatest stories will demonstrate her genius, her versatility, her extraordinary humanity, & will delight new readers as well as her fans. ...