Moderniser, trouble-shooter, king-maker, architect of New Labour, power-broker, agent, asset, confidant: Peter Mandelson is emblematically the major political figure of our age. But who's happy? Whatever happened to happiness as a political imperative? And whatever happened to the public good? This book seeks answers to these questions and more.
The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structures the tree within the leaf, the series of recurrences that unfold to create a fugue add an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, ......
Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was fifty, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful bell tower and its nesting jackdaws turned to a cry in the air.
The bricks go off to salvage and ......
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called 'brilliant' (The Listener), 'dazzling' (The Guardian), 'elegant, rueful and witty' (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.
History and literature seem to be ......
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the greatest German language poet since Goethe, worked for a time as Rodin's secretary at Meudon. This title is a paperback edition of Stephen Cohn's celebrated translations and includes the complete German language text parallel with the English.
John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one.
The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes ......
The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the days immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents' wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child's future growth. The poems draw on a ......
This thematic selection of Lamb's writings not only demonstrates his literary achievements; it forms a self-portrait of the writer: generous, amused, and gregarious, finding imaginative escape from grim circumstances in the teeming life of London and the theatre.
