British Poetry Titles: Authors Q to R

Published October 2024. Paperback, 486pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $35

ISBN 9781848619562

"A life’s work of steady, compassionate, precise observation animates these deceptively simple poems, rooted in their landscape and making a sense of home over and over again in each one. A virtuoso of stress and line endings, Elaine Randell has the ability to turn the events of each day into a kind of thought-music, while the sequences of prose narrative vignettes provide glimpses of the difficult lives of the sorts of troubled people she has come into contact in her professional work, sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, sometimes hopeless, sometimes almost comic. It’s all about the truth of things." — Ian Patterson

Published 2008. Paperback, 147pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9780907562719  WITHDRAWN AFTER THE RELEASE OF THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (see above)

This Selected Poems represents thirty-five years of work as poet, glimpses in time, concerns, loves, gardening and other preoccupations. 

"Elaine Randell's poetry is about people, that is herself and the lives of those around her. The personal and the words are set in context, in the houses and streets and countryside we inhabit, we move through. [. . .] In her sequences ‘Watching women with children', 'Six pieces from the sauna' and 'Hard to Place', like Charles Reznikoff's Testimonies, people speak for themselves and their words are respected. And at the root of this respect is the heart, the base-line we work from, the qualities of love we choose, value or deny. The love for ourselves and for others. But though the heart is always at the centre of her work it never indulges in the vanities of egotism. The unique ego is out to lunch, on the shelf where it belongs. What matters is both what truly happens in the heart and what's out there, what the other people are saying and doing, even what the creatures and plants are saying and doing. That quality of carefulness." —Lee Harwood

Edited with an Introduction by Grevel Lindop
Published July 2024. Paperback, 306pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619159

Jeremy Reed’s output has been prodigious. Since 1975 he has published more than forty books of poems, besides countless pamphlets and fugitive pieces, and many novels, biographies and books on cultural history. The full range of his poetry will never be truly known, for he often writes in public places, and if someone expresses interest may give them the poem. By the time this selection appears his tally will have grown further, because he writes continuously. His poems are his diary, his autobiography, his therapy, his addiction. Reed has moved from publisher to publisher, often writing for several at the same time, and his style has evolved continuously over more than four decades. Formalist, symbolist, language poet, nature-poet, modernist, post-modernist, performance poet: Reed has been all these and more.

Published 1995. A5 Paperback, 32pp. OUT OF PRINT

ISBN 9780907562207.

Published jointly with Oasis Books, London, this book comprises the first four sections of the long poem Alstonefield . Parts of section 5 subsequently appeared in Shearsman, PN Review and other journals. A new edition, including the complete Section 5 (which is longer than the first four sections put together) was published by Carcanet Press, Manchester, in 2003. 

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).



Published 1997. A5 Paperback, 55pp. £7.50

ISBN 9780907562245

Until the 2007 titles listed below, this was Riley's most recent full-length collection, apart from Passing Measures (Carcanet, Manchester, 2001), which is the author's Selected Poems, the experimental sequence Excavations (Reality Street Editions, 2005), and A Map of Faring , published only in the USA.

NOW (MOSTLY) INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).



Published 2007. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Since the 1970s, Peter Riley and his wife have been making regular trips to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, and he has been writing a series of poems and meditations about the place—a spectacular area of natural beauty. To date, many of these poems, and poem-sequences, have appeared in small-press and bibliophile editions, and in artists' books. Three of the sequences were also collected in the author's Selected Poems, Passing Measures , published by Carcanet in 2000. Now, for the first time, all of Peter Riley's Llyn writings—both poems and prose-poems—are collected together under one set of covers.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).



Published 2007. Paperback, 212pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781905700097 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The subtitle says it all: here are numerous stray publications and lost poems, and prose-poems from throughout the author's career. Amongst many other works, the collection includes the previously unpublished sixth part of the long poem 'Alstonefield'.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 8x5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610514 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Greek Passages is a set of 105 prose-poems derived from four sojourns in Greece, mostly in the vicinity of Argos and thus at the hub of early Greek power. The structure is entirely diurnal, building each poem from the day’s events, so that cognizance of monumental historical figures and events infiltrate from outside into notes of fauna, ruins, the news, books about Greece or not, American music listened to, pleasant dinners, dreams of northern England etcetera. Two shorter stays on the west coast of the Peloponnese furnish beginning and ending sections of a gentler, more lyrical cast, and there are interruptive excursions, mostly to the remains of cities and wars. Everywhere what is presented to the eyes is the starting-point for a poetical process creating lenses in location and sense. NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2010. Paperback, 204pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848610927 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Derbyshire Poems brings back into print two important earlier collections (from the 1970s and 1980s) by Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts , together with the explanatory essays that were originally issued alongside the latter volume, and an uncollected sequence from the same period which belongs with the other poems dealing with the Peak District. This is an important volume which provides the bcakground to Riley's later forays into writing in, of, and under the landscape.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613942 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps. The cast includes migrant workers, returning soldiers, children growing up, and population movements such as the early 19th-century descent on the northern manufacturing districts from demographic disaster zones, with my awareness of my own ancestry among the displaced Irish of Manchester and West Yorkshire. Woven into this are various artistic, poetical, cultural and instinctive ventures to traverse cold and emptiness, limit and futility, in the hope of attaining the metaphor of lasting warmth. Its pattern is that of a long sequence of beginnings, some of which reach their conclusions, usually elsewhere in the text, some of which don’t. The textual mode is literal and lyrical, to posit the value of these two forces in sustaining hope. (Peter Riley) 

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2017. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615458 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

" Dawn Songs consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called ‘Mass Lyric’; and ‘Dawn Songs’ itself, which concerns a lamentational genre of Transylvanian village music and forms the bulk of the book. So if ever there was a book discussing musical practices which very few people outside the area know about or want to, this is it." —Peter Riley



Published 2018. Paperback, 608pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848616103 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 1 covers 1962–1997, encompassing books such as Love-Strife Machine, The Linear Journal, The Llyn Writings, The Derbyshire Poems (including Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts), Noon Province, Reader, Lecture, Author and Snow has Settled…

Published 2018. Paperback, 592pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848616110 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 2 covers the period from the late 1990s to 2015, covering books such as Excavations, Alstonefield, Two Setts and Coda, The Glacial Stairway, Greek Passages and Due North . Like its companion volume, it also contains a large number of uncollected poems.

Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618855 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

        ‘How do you get mortal harmony

out of a stone box into the moving air?

With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.’

Proof asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren’s song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet’s task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. Proof brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision. 

   ‘And it is through

this hole in the night that the wren sings.’

Edited by Robert Sheppard

Published 2024. Paperback, 152pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619180

Mary Robinson (née Darby) was born in 1758 in Bristol, and was a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and actress. Tutored by both Garrick and Sheridan, she had a short but dazzling career on the London stage, where she was spotted by the young Prince Regent and became his mistress. The resultant scandal was hot gossip and salacious news, brought to a new reading public by the institution of the daily paper, for which, ironically, Robinson would later write. Although she had always written, her main literary career dates from a serious accident in 1783, which left her permanently disabled. In the 1790s, she produced most of her best work, with an ever-accelerating productivity, in verse and fiction, until her death in 1800 (she wrote 70 poems in that last year). Once associated with fashionable Della Cruscan poetry, in the final years of her life she was in contact with S.T. Coleridge and William Godwin, representatives of vanguards in both politics and literature. After her death, her work suffered from an almost-complete obscurity, aided and abetted by Victorian revulsion at her scandalous past. This position has now changed, and there has been considerable interest in her life, her writing, and the connection between the two in recent years.  

Published 2015. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613898 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Hearing Rilke quoted at the Co-op, an experience evoked in the title poem to Peter Robinson’s latest collection, Buried Music , the poet continues his work of discovering poetry in everyday, anywhere places. It is as if, as Roy Fisher intuited, ‘he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made.’ Prompted by varieties of losses — health, hopes, friends or relatives — his listening unearths a rhythmic contour from such opening cracks in the terrain. Buried Music finds poetry in its absence, presence in the place of what’s missing. For those who have followed his trajectory, this new book offers a fresh opportunity to tune in to the work of what Poetry Review has called ‘a major English poet’, one according to The London Magazine , who is ‘writing at the height of his powers’ and producing, in the words of the selectors for the Poetry Book Society in 2012, ‘his finest work to date.’ For those new to his writing, this world is all before you.

Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612921 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and accompanies Silent Conversations : A Reader's Life , shortly to appear from Seagull Books. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's parents.