Bloodaxe Books

This second, expanded edition of Josephine Balmer's classic translation of the Greek poet Sappho has new, recently-discovered fragments, including the Brothers Poem, the Kypris Song and the Cologne...

Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life...

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of...

Edna Longley's latest collection of critical essays marks a move back from Irish culture and politics to poetry itself as the critic's central concern. She considers how poets are read and received...

'There are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss, ' says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses: a whole...

Czech writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. "Prague with Fingers of Rain" is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague's many-sided life -...

Propa Propaganda was Benjamin Zephaniah's second collection from Bloodaxe. It includes some of his best-known poems, including 'I Have a Scheme', 'The Death of Joy Gardner', 'White Comedy' and 'The...

George Szirtes is a leading figure in contemporary poetry in England and in Hungary, the country of his birth. His poems explore - in a wide variety of complex, skilfully handled forms - his origins,...

Much of Brendan Kennelly's poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of...

Katie Donovan writes about the hungers which haunt our flesh and our fantasies, the conjunction of myth and the physical world of body and earth. Her visceral poems render new sensations, landscapes...

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966. Her poems...

A number of years back, our author went to seek out a book by some ancient Greek thinker - the name starting with an L, or perhaps a C - called On Delight of the Nature of Things, or maybe In Delight...

All Peter Didsbury's books have had wildly enthusiastic reviews. The Classical Farm won him a Cholmondeley Award, and his last two collections were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Despite...

Shadow of the OwlAuthor: Matthew SweeneyPublisher: Bloodaxe BooksPublication Date: January 12, 2021Number of Pages: 104 pagesLanguage: EnglishBinding: PaperbackISBN-10: 1780375425ISBN-13:...

Beautifully illustrated in Imtiaz Dharker's distinctive style, Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an...

Shall We Go?Author: Annemarie. AustinPublisher: Bloodaxe BooksPublication Date: Jan 11, 2022Number of Pages: 72 pagesLanguage: EnglishBinding: PaperbackISBN-10: 1780375530ISBN-13: 9781780375533

In Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through...

"Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this...

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) is one of the notable travellers of modern French poetry: not only to the Amazon and the Far East, but into the strange hinterland of his own inner space, the surprises and...

Moniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In her early work, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are 'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious...

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are...

Stone Fruit - 9781780375687Author: Rebecca PerryPublisher: Bloodaxe BooksPublication Date: August 10, 2021Number of Pages: 72 pagesLanguage: EnglishBinding: PaperbackISBN-10: 1780375689ISBN-13:...

Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An...

Straight Ahead is Clare Shaw's first collection. Firmly located in the social and physical landscape of northern England, the poems capture intimacy, loss, fragmentation and delight - being alive in...

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is now widely viewed as Japan's greatest poet of the 20th century. Little known in his lifetime, he died at 37 from tuberculosis, but has since become a much loved...

Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to...

Although Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf has lived in exile in the UK for 20 years, she is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali poets, as well as a powerful woman poet in a literary tradition...

Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple, from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best...

An Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus...

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at...