{"title":"Poetry Highlights","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"nadir","title":"Nadir","description":" There are 35\nmillion child refugees in the world today; over a million children were born in\nflight, in exile, in camps. While a great deal has been written about the suffering\nof those who are fleeing persecution, displacement, hunger and war, in \u003ci\u003eNadir\n\u003c\/i\u003eLaura Fusco attempts to record the voices of the refugees themselves,\nespecially the women and the children. \n\n \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e \n\n \u003ci\u003eNadir \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about desert\ncaravans, dangerous sea-crossings and desperate marches, about fences, camps, detention\ncentres, squats and underpasses. It is a portrait of ‘a crowd of a hundred\nsolitudes’, the wretched of the earth, the defeated who refuse to accept\ndefeat.  \n\n ","brand":"Smokestack Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584334020686,"sku":"9781838465346","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_4bd2d03c-7bf2-4a9b-a0a7-37ed438380d7.jpg?v=1752239623"},{"product_id":"overlap","title":"Overlap","description":"Valerie Bence’s latest poetry pamphlet is a testament to ordinary lives, and a meditation on grandmothers. Part memoir, part family history, \u003ci\u003eOverlap \u003c\/i\u003eis a series of vivid vignettes from the poet’s childhood, courtship, motherhood and grandmotherhood, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.  Winifred and Harriet are at the heart of this book: Bence’s grandmothers, whose hardy, steadfast lives she comes to reflect on as she too becomes a grandmother, in very different times. Stranded from her family in the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet conjures up their ghosts, walks in their footsteps and – sometimes – feels herself become them. \n  We mash tealeaves and bran for the rabbit,\n the sweet aroma fogging her glasses,\n and every day, for five shillings a week,  she scrubs bloody butcher’s aprons.  We take the clean ones back on the bus,  until the day she faints outside Boots in the rain,  sliding down the wall like in a cartoon,  her wartime hat slipping over her eyes.  ","brand":"The Emma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584334053454,"sku":"9781912915941","price":6.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_045bb8e1-6c76-48f7-9d35-15fe01afcfe7.jpg?v=1752239122"},{"product_id":"163-days","title":"163 Days","description":" Hannah Hodgson is a seriously ill poet, who uses a panoply of vocabularies to evoke the medical, the poetic and professional to explore what illness, death and dying does to a young person, as both patient and witness . \u003ci\u003e163 Days\u003c\/i\u003e is the longest hospitalisation she has had to date – and so, with this as a scaffold she charts how medical, legal and personal truths clash as loudly as a dropped tray of instruments in a silent operating theatre.  In this long singular poem, she probes what she once thought of as truth, what the law considers the truth, and the traumatic truth, which is something only the body can hold. At the time of this narrative she is sixteen, turning seventeen in a hospital ward decked out in primary colours, clowns who volunteer to visit unwell children, and four Easter Eggs per patient on a ward where only one child can eat. That child is stared at while they eat, as Hannah begins to forget the taste of food.   Doctors struggle to diagnose her overlapping chronic health conditions which began with rapid weight loss and means she cannot eat or absorb nutrients properly. She suffers heart-rending symptoms as well as all numerous, often very painful, tests and procedures that are necessary to keep her alive long enough to figure out what is wrong with her. Each day features two entries, a diary-like poem exploring her version of the day, and another charting notes that could be found within medical notes.  The diary-like entries by the author are distinguished by both clarity and despair. She has a gift for description that brings us, sometimes almost unbearably close, to her suffering.   We feel her sorrow but also her frustration at being undiagnosed, yet subject to hospital routines that sometimes seem arbitrary, like the need to sweep up and dispose of the cards from her friends, deemed an ‘infection risk’. Likewise, hospital staff seem sometimes wonderfully kind and at others, seemingly casually negligent, cold or cruel. The length of time means she goes through numerous shifts, staff rotas and medical student rotations.  The institutional quality of the institution is at question here, as is the freedom of the vulnerable individual in this setting. At one point, at 17, she is ‘too old’ for the children’s hospital yet ‘too young’ for the adult ward. The lobbying involved in solving this dilemma is both impressive and absurd; there are meetings held between adults and children’s hospitals about care responsibilities, meetings she wasn’t allowed to attend.   Beyond the ethics and machinery of care, what the diary entries show most movingly is the author’s coming-of-age story, learning both kind and terrible truths which it takes healthy adults a lifetime to amass.    In the ‘aftercare’ poems we see the author embark on a new version of her life as a disabled young person, a hospice user, a body disintegrating, declining to the extent she has seventeen (diagnosed) issues, falling under the branch of her life limiting diagnosis. Readers will be moved, surprised and enlightened by this compelling debut collection of poems. ","brand":"Seren","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584390578254,"sku":"9781781726471","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_43ef8fd4-d8be-4eb3-997f-3e6eaa77dd0f.jpg?v=1752239988"},{"product_id":"farewell-performance-collected-later-poems","title":"Farewell Performance: Collected Later Poems","description":" Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) was a unique link\nbetween the generation of writers who fought in the Second World War and the post-war\nliterary scene: Fitzrovia in the late 1940s, the Mavericks in the 1950s, the 1960s\njazz and poetry scene and the New Formalism of the 1980s and 1990s. During a long\nand sometimes chaotic life, he earned his living as a professional boxer, teacher,\nnovelist, broadcaster and critic. He published over fifty books of poetry\nacross seven decades.  \n\n   \n\n Although Scannell published the\nmassive \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems \u003c\/i\u003ein 1993, he continued to write for another fourteen\nyears. His last six books – \u003ci\u003eThe Black and White Days\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eViews and\nDistances\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOf Love and War\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBehind the Lines\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Place to\nLive\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLast Post\u003c\/i\u003e – are now collected here for the first time. Published\nto mark the centenary of his birth, this volume shows how his verse remained\naccessible, entertaining and honest to the end of his life, reflecting on love,\nwar, cancer and old age with recognisable wit, wisdom, humour and craft.  ","brand":"Smokestack Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584391037006,"sku":"9781838465339","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_b7b25c37-4b73-4617-9bff-6f9bc13a9ce2.jpg?v=1752239985"},{"product_id":"panic-response","title":"Panic Response","description":"  From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. \u003cem\u003ePanic Response\u003c\/em\u003e puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.      ","brand":"Penned in the Margins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584399327310,"sku":"9781913850050","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_ff76674f-037b-42c8-a262-c0deab943e7f.jpg?v=1752239983"},{"product_id":"the-foxs-wedding","title":"The Fox's Wedding","description":"Rebecca Hurst's debut pamphlet is woven through with fairy tales, folklore and landscape. She uses the natural world, family mythology and the theory of fairy tales to unpack, embroider, and explode traditional tales and tropes, exploring themes of voice, concealment, and transformation.   Prickling with magic and spells, the poems in \u003ci\u003eThe Fox's Wedding\u003c\/i\u003e lead us down a twisty path to find – what? A prince made of needles? A cursed box? A golden key? Take care and keep your wits about you; if you're lucky you might just find your way home.  ***  Describe the box. \n\u003ci\u003e    It is square, carved from elm with a brass hinge and lock.\u003c\/i\u003e \nI see you hold it in your hands. \n\u003ci\u003e    I hold it against my body, so.\u003c\/i\u003e \nIt is a burden. \n\u003ci\u003e    It is the size of a tea-caddy.\u003c\/i\u003e \nIt is an object of beauty. \n\u003ci\u003e    You could call it beautiful. The grain, the glow.\u003c\/i\u003e \nThe box is very old. \n\u003ci\u003e    The box would prefer we not discuss its age.\u003c\/i\u003e  - from 'Her Unbreakable Box'","brand":"The Emma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39584399360078,"sku":"9781912915958","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_a3d79cae-1811-4053-a001-0b612561d63d.jpg?v=1752240453"},{"product_id":"caviar","title":"Caviar","description":"  Associative,\nsensuous, and unstable, \u003ci\u003eCaviar\u003c\/i\u003e explores the line between decadence and\ndepravity. In Fletcher’s third pamphlet, investigations of power and violence\nare no longer limited to the domestic and romantic. She interrogates all dark\nspheres of influence: ‘A word. A woman hit. A nuclear bomb.’ Language is\n‘consumed and mated’, a ‘divine bistro’ that shows her mastery over form.  \n\n  With winking intelligence\nand playful sleaze, this pamphlet is a circus of swans, slapped faces, and the\nsnottiest, most expensive delicacy in the world.    ","brand":"Out-Spoken Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":39960161845326,"sku":"9781838427245","price":9.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_5ad269d7-5942-480b-9f7e-66fc98672f6c.png?v=1752239763"},{"product_id":"you-have-no-normal-country-to-return-to","title":"You have no normal country to return to","description":"  In \u003ci\u003eYou have no normal country to return to\u003c\/i\u003e, Tom Sastry\nexplores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering,\nbleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his\nSeamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted\u003ci\u003e, A Man's House\nCatches Fire\u003c\/i\u003e.   \n\n\n\n  By turns crisply satirical and questioning, \u003ci\u003eYou have\nno normal country to\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ereturn to\u003c\/i\u003e ranges across the legacies of Empire,\npostwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry’s precise,\nbrilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell\nabout them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths\nand the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about\nillusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for\ngranted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of “enchantments\ncollapsing on themselves”.   ","brand":"Nine Arches Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":39907957342286,"sku":"9781913437343","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_8eba1454-1142-4b78-9b1f-e5330aab6e05.jpg?v=1752239972"},{"product_id":"emblem","title":"Emblem","description":"\u003ci\u003eEmblem\u003c\/i\u003e is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. This is a book of ecological poetics, interested in exploring the changing symbols of the natural world in literature. \u003ci\u003eEmblem\u003c\/i\u003e revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior.\n  In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato's emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.  \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eEmblem\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e is the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e ","brand":"Prototype Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39711592185934,"sku":"9781913513221","price":12.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_7d122b5b-17f2-4080-ae7b-110a0c2ce749.png?v=1752241049"},{"product_id":"as-if-to-sing","title":"As If To Sing","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe power of song, to sustain the human spirit, resonates through this new collection from Paul Henry.  In 'Cave Songs', a trapped caver, haunted by a 'ghost choir', crawls back through songs to the sea; Welsh soldiers in 'As if to Sing', pack their hearts into a song, on the eve of the Battle of Passchendaele, 'for safe-keeping'; a woman's grief is 'unconscious of its song' and a child sings 'a song with no beginning or end' as father and son cross a bridge in the mist.\u003c\/p\u003e               \n\n\u003cp\u003eLike the 'river’s trick' in Nightlines, 'at once moving and still', past and present share the same lyric moment in Henry’s work, the same 'torchsong' of music and light.\u003c\/p\u003e \n\n \u003cp\u003eA familiar surrealism pervades 'The Key to Penllain', the collection’s longest poem, set in the 1960’s. Its time-bending dream-sequence sees Greek gods sunbathing on a Ceredigion beach while two children dig for a key that could save the planet.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFull of the musical lyricism admired by readers and fellow poets alike, 'As if to Sing' is an essential addition to this poet's compelling body of work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Seren","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39711592480846,"sku":"9781781726600","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/original_72e76564-2730-4a5c-9f98-9be737b2427e.jpg?v=1752239970"},{"product_id":"a-finger-in-the-fishes-mouth","title":"A Finger in the Fishes Mouth","description":"\u003cp\u003eA facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s sole, early, extremely rare poetry book \u003cem\u003eA Finger in the Fishes Mouth\u003c\/em\u003e, originally published in 1972.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHeavily illustrated from Jarman's collection of postcards, the book combines text and visual imagery in a way which foreshadows his subsequent style as an artist and filmmaker. With the majority of the first edition having been destroyed by Jarman, this makes available a missing, significant piece of his oeuvre.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Prototype Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53592303272321,"sku":"9781913513634","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/files\/jpg_rgb_1500h_d7bfc765-9ef4-4753-bcf6-f698af005a29.jpg?v=1752241359"}],"url":"https:\/\/inpressbooks.co.uk\/collections\/poetry-highlights\/john-mccullough.oembed","provider":"Inpress Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}