Bloodaxe Books: 229 books

The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke's debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural...

Art, landscape and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' latest collection, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The book opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, The Weeping Woman. The poem's...

Grace Nichols' poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some 25 years of her writing.

This powerful new collection combines Katie Donovan's unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gifts. The years of her late husband's throat cancer are charted in poems by turns tender, harsh and darkly humorous. Donovan gives voice to the carer's duty of being the...

In this, her first poetry collection since the award-winning Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, but extends beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of...

Few English poets have quite Kit Wright's range. From heart-felt lyricism to blistering satire, from the ribald to the grief-stricken, his poems cover almost everything life can throw at anyone, quite literally from the sublime to the ridiculous. Entertaining and engaging, writing with wit, panache...

The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith’s first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. ‘A single crow falling from the mind’...

Friedrich Hölderlin was one of Europe’s greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine’s widely-praised Hölderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing...

Hoard brings together poems Fleur Adcock had to keep under wraps for several years because they didn’t suit the themes of her last two collections, The Land Ballot and Glass Wings. They include reflections on the tools of her trade (handwriting, typewriters), snatches of autobiography (a brief,...

The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing -not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively...

The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's poems in Mappa Mundi are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveller's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each...

In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him -through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation...

Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's...

For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry’s most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a love poet, or so he thought, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker in...