New Releases

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire.

This unique collection of poems from the poet laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology. Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk. The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore. Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends and - most movingly - the poet's own mother. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee.

A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable - and unclassifiable - audiobooks of recent years. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish.

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is an audiobook-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive.

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12th October 1875 to wealthy parents in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire. Life for Crowley was to abandon his parents’ Christian faith and instead to inject himself into Western esotericism. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was trained in ceremonial magic before studying both Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. His literary works were both prolific and covered many topics. In the early part of his career he published many poetry books, even plays, before his darker and more forceful works.

In life’s kitbag of essentials food and drink are right at the top. Their variety and ways to consume are a wonder, both of nature’s offerings and human creativity. For our classic poets ranging from Ancient Romans to Elinor Wylie and Rainer Maria Rilke, their recipes for verse using the simple ingredients of words and imagination are a wonderful and enduring example of their craft and art applied to the one thing mankind looks forward to each and every day.

Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica on the 15th September 1890, He was the youngest son to parents who had gathered enough assets to secure them the right to vote. As a boy he was fascinated by English Poetry and literature, although at 17 he took on work as an apprentice woodcutter for two years before becoming a police constable in the capital, Kingston. In this mainly white and affluent town racism was rife and its nature awakened his political instincts and pursuit of social justice. He soon returned home and published his first two poetry collections in 1912.

The night he took me, Enzo shattered everything I knew. Kidnapped, stripped of my freedom, and thrown into his brutal underground world as a fighter. I hate him for it. I fight him with every breath. But every glance, every touch, sets me on fire in ways I can’t ignore. I crave him, as much as I despise him. Enzo thinks I’m here to make him money, that I’m just a pawn to feed his empire. But the closer we get, the harder it is for both of us to keep up the fight. He’s torn between his need for control and something darker, something he won’t admit. And I can’t stop the way my ...

This collection contains 201 lively little poems by the most playful of English Golden Age writers, Robert Herrick.

Alexander Pope was the most influential and most admired writer of his time, famous for satirical and reflective poems such as The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Man. His lyrical poems are tantalizingly few in number but predictably high in quality, with all the beauty of sound and incisiveness of sense familiar from his other works.