Latest Releases

Translated from Russian by Stephen Capus

Published February 2025. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619685  Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa, Ukraine, in 1889, as Anna Gorenko. She adopted her pen-name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and lived most of her life in that city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter-revolutionary activities. 

      Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953—with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War—she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake of the notorious Zhdanov speech, in which she was described as a ‘cross between a nun and a whore’. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. Stephen Capus's formal translations offer a new way of approaching Akhmatova for Anglophone readers.

Published February 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems — of air, of glass, of wind, of west.

Translated from German by Nicholas Grindell.
Published February 2025. Paperback, 84pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848619630

Among many other things, Honey Protocols can be approached as a dictionary (offering peculiar and extravagant definitions of creatures and concepts alike), as a routine documenting its own abolition (48 of its 66 poems open with the same phrase, escaping this compulsion towards the end), or as a book of tall tales (in one, two men sail a three-masted trampoline out onto a lake, the trampoline capsizes, they sink, the lake spits them back out onto the promenade). The collection might also be read as a dreamlike visit to the battlefield where the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves cross swords with the kind of stories that are constantly told to us (and sold to us) by the massed forces of mockery (with tech support from the Delphic engineers).

2nd Edition. Published January 2025. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619555

Ebook edition ISBN 9781848619586, available from the usual online retailers, £4.95 / $7.50

Deserted by her mother as a baby, Emily lives with her father in Mexico City, working in the local orphanage. When a mysterious cousin, Santi, appears on the doorstep, he brings with him family secrets, and soon Emily finds desire and temptation have overturned her straightforward life forever. The Poison That Fascinates is an alluring fable forged in astonishing, sensuous prose. Jennifer Clement conjures a world heavy with the weight of Mexican superstition, mythology and faith, where saintliness and mortal sin sit side by side. The author's second novel, out of print for a little while now, offers another glimpse of Jennifer Clement's continuing growth as a literary novelist.

2nd Edition. Published January 2025. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619548

Ebook edition ISBN 9781848619579, available from the usual online retailers, £4.95 / $7.50

A True Story Based on Lies is a remarkable and original novel that addresses the universal issues of class discrimination, male oppression and female servitude through dual narratives of spellbinding power. Set in contemporary Mexico, the book charts the consequences of a sexual relationship between Leonora, a servant in the wealthy O'Connor home, and her master. When a child, Aura Olivia, is born from this union she is brought up as the daughter of the house. As the novel unfolds, the "true" story gradually emerges. First published over 20 years ago, but out of print for some time, we are delighted to reissue this early example of the author's fiction.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619678

The Exact Colour of Snow articulates a complicit, playful commentary on our mundane interactions with the natural world. Notes, fragments and glimpsed biographies explore how we ignore our fragile landscape even while grounded in its rhythms, shapes and colours. Skeining through the fashion and factories of global import export and dye making, we travel back to soil, plants and animals. A route that offers different harvests: clearing bombs to erect North Sea windmills in the Mesolithic sludge of Doggerland, unseasonal Abbotsford oranges, and the production of fine leather for golf gloves from hairsheep in Yemen and North Africa. Behind the scenes in these poems, the excluded – often mothers or young women – observe and study to understand the whole shape of things. The final colour of snow in this collection is green. Exact Colour of Snow follows Bridget Khursheed’s debut, The Last Days of Petrol, which was hailed by Joyce McMillan, of The Scotsman, as “…brave, brilliant and chilling poetry, which almost forces a recognition of the new precarity of human life on earth”.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,

Walked over my baskets full of bread,

Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,

And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:

      Hawk, take everything

      That is weak in me,

      In your claws: eat it.

      Leave me wise and patient.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 412pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848619609

Before Dark: Collected Poems reflects Anderson’s peripatetic lifestyle of three decades. During a weekend in Paris in 1971, whilst teaching at the University of Grenoble, he met T.T. Wong, a young Chinese artist from Shanghai, and their long discussions cemented his aspiration to go East. English society had, he felt, since he was born into it shortly after the end of World War II, succeeded only in submerging his nose in the effluvium of a squalid sewer of class discriminations, so the time was more than ripe for him to bid farewell to the UK. Arriving, eventually, at the University of Hong Kong where T.T. Wong’s letter of introduction to a young Dostoevsky scholar heading a department had directed his feet, Anderson discovered that it was an institution where the ancien régime (Terms of Service finely calibrated to reflect skin pigmentation…) was firmly entrenched. After a good number of years he moved still further east, to Manila and the University of the Philippines. Through all these years, and the first few years of his return to the UK, the poems of Before Dark were written, along with the prose The Hoplite Journals, described by the novelist James Hamilton-Paterson as “enter[ing] that select pantheon of books to travel with, a vademecum ... A most remarkable achievement.”

Published January 2025. Paperback, 174pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619647

The Fabled Third is the final instalment in the sequence that began with A Presentment of Englishry. It continues to follow Laȝamon's 12th century version of the legendary history of Britain up to the death of Uther, ending as the story begins to overlap with Sir Thomas Malory’s later, better known tale of King Arthur. When Laȝamon's Uther arrives at Tintagel, he doesn’t enter the late fifth century settlement revealed by recent archaeology, but a castle that didn’t exist on that site. Looking at the fifth century through the lens of the twelfth produces a blurred version of the past. My attempts to reconcile that version with what is now known about late fifth century Britain makes the picture even less focussed. I recommend the pleasures of a flexible attitude towards geography, history, architecture and chronology.

Translated from Italian by Sarah Stickney.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. English only.

ISBN 9781848619616

This volume offers a translation of a large proportion of the author's recent huge selected volume in Italy. Restricted to the English versions in order to save the book from a vast page-count, it offers readers a superb over-view of a lifetime's creativity in Italian, and Albanian — for some of the work began life in the author's native language, before his exile in Italy.

“Gëzim Hajdari’s generous literary, scholarly, and editorial work extends across different countries and languages. Resistance, commitment, social justice, freedom, courage, and solidarity are at the centre of his research. In his own words, ‘Good poetry is an act of life and of ethics. A great life means great poetry.’ An already established poet in Albania, after moving to Italy, the author went through a patient, painful, and empowering reconstruction of his unique poetic voice, which has since developed as translingual Albanian-Italian.

 This edition represents the first English translation of Hajdari’s Poesie scelte, masterfully carried out by Sarah Stickney, who reconstructs the sense of subjectivity and history that is foundational to Hajdari’s poetic career. This book as such presents Anglophone readerships not only with a masterpiece of translingual poetry but also with what I have previously defined as Hajdari’s first self-anthology, that is, a retrospective collection and reorganisation—constructed by the author himself—of a substantial part of his published poetic work, here meticulously re-read and re-interpreted.’’—Alice Loda

Published November 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619289

In the Postface to his 114 Songs of 1922, Charles Ives wrote: “Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, ‘in the leaf’ and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.” Oddly enough, some of the songs in this book have been sung, but most remain silent on the page awaiting a willing reader who’s ready to take the title at face value. These are songs in which “nothing happens/& it is good” if you want it to be. —Billy Mills 

Published November 2024. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618411

To read Mark Goodwin’s poems of rock and grass and sky and the body-mind moving through them is to enter deep place: living, uncontainable – an event not a landscape. His poems are a grounding in minute shifts and experiences: visual reflections become aural echoes, sounds lift off the page into the ear, inferences and possibilities of language are opened up. Meaning pivots on the unexpected. Word and line breaks are subtle levers of time and scale. The page is Mark Goodwin’s theatre of transformations. Through the slippage and junctures of language, I find myself out in the open, participant in the tactilities and sights and noises of place. His poems, opening on the page in this locked-down time, gladden the heart.