BLOODAXE BOOKS

(P/B) SELECTED POEMS
This comprehensive edition of Russia's greatest modern poet, Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966), includes the complete texts of her major works Requiem, commemorating all of Stalin's victims, and Poem Without a Hero. Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was Russia's greatest modern poet. She published her first book of poems in 1912, and in the same year founded the Acmeist movement with her husband, the poet Gumilev. Her intense, highly personal love lyrics were later attacked as anti-revolutionary, and in 1925 her poetry was banned. Gumilev was shot in 19...
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(P/B) BURNING SEASON
Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance. Yvonne Reddick's understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad's gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father...
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THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN
Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) was the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. One of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world, he was also a prominent spokesman for human rights who spent most of his life in exile. In his early work, the features of his beloved land - its flowers and birds, towns and waters - were an integral part of poems witnessing a string of political and humanitarian tragedies afflicting his people. In his most recent books, his writing stands at the border of earth and sky, reality and myth, poetry and ...
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SAPPHO: POEMS & FRAGMENTS
The Greek poet Sappho was one of the greatest poets in classical literature. Her lyric poetry is among the finest ever written, and although little of her work has survived and little is known about her, she is regarded not just as one of the greatest women poets but often as the greatest woman poet in world literature. She lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC, and even in her lifetime her work was widely known and admired in the Greek world. Plato called her 'the tenth muse', and she was a major influence on other poets, from Horac...
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(P/B) STRONG IN THE RAIN
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 children's author whose magical tales have been translated into many languages, adapted for the stage and turned into films and animations. Recognition for his poetry came much later. 'Strong in the Rain' - the title-poem of this selection - is now arguably the most memorised and quoted modern poem in Japan. Both intensely lyrical and permeated with a ...
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TRANSTROMER: NEW COLLECTED POEMS
Tomas Transtromer is Sweden's most important poet. This book includes all the poems he has written during the past forty years, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often ...
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(P/B) MY VOICE
Multilingual Edition / Co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre As this gloriously diverse, revelatory selection of translations from the Poetry Translation Centre’s first decade proves, nothing has invigorated poetry in English more than translation. Here you will find 111 brilliant poems translated from 23 different languages (ranging from Arabic to Zapotec: all the original scripts are included) by 45 of the world's leading poets. Arranged on a journey from exile to ecstasy, these powerful poems have been co-translated by some of...
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(P/B) THE GIRL AQUARIUM
Jen Campbell's first collection The Girl Aquarium explores the realm of rotten fairy tales, the possession of body and the definition of beauty. Weaving between whispered science and circus, she turns a cracked mirror on society and asks who gets to control the twisted tales hiding in the wings. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) COUNTING BACKWARDS
Winner of the Costa Book of the Year for her final collection, Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore was as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her prose. Many of her haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity, while all her poetry also casts a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss. Counting Backwards is a retrospective covering ten collections written over four decades, bringing together all the poems she included in her earlier...
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(P/B) TRANSGRESSIONS
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) was a major figure in American poetry, but was always a total outsider, defiantly unfashionable and publishing only five collections in five decades. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with Views of Jeopardy in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands. His second collection, Monolithos, appeared twenty years later in 1982, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with two later collections, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusi...
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(P/B) THE ADOPTION PAPERS
"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. This unique and honest volume of poems has been adapted for radio. Also included in the book are new poems reflecting issues of sexuality, Scottishness and being working-class" -- Spare Rib "Jackie Kay has been gathering a reputation for a few years as an outstanding young talent in British poetry and playwriting... The Adoption Papers could well become a key work of feminism in...
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(P/B) THE ESSENTIAL HAIKU
The Essential Haiku brings together Robert Hass's beautifully fresh translations of the three great masters of the Japanese haiku tradition: Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker, and the haiku poet most familiar to English readers; Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, a painter renowned for his visually expressive poetry; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist, whose haiku are known for their poignant or ironic wit. Each haiku master's section of the book is prefaced with an eloquent and informative introduction by Robert Hass...
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(H/B) ANTIGONICK
Antigonick is a comic-book presentation of Sophokles' Antigone in a new translation by Anne Carson, with text blocks hand-inked on the page by Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie. On separate translucent vellum pages, the artist Bianca Stone has created stunning drawings to overlay the text. Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. Sophokles' luminous and ...
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(P/B) LOVE SONGS OF CARBON
Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross's 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age - inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as - especially as - it faces entropy and decay. (From the publisher) "At the heart of all of Gross's collections has...
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(P/B) FIRST PERSON SORROWFUL
Ko Un has long been a living legend in Korea, both as a poet and as a person. Allen Ginsberg once wrote, 'Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.' When a writer has published as much as Ko Un has in the course of more than fifty years of writing, it is hard to know where to begin, what to translate. For this collection, his translators have selected a hundred or so poems from the five collections published since the year 2002, collections acclaimed by Kor...
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(P/B) POEMS BEFORE AND AFTER
This work is translated from the Czech by Ian & Jarmila Milner, Ewald Osers, George Theiner, David Young, Dana Habova, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub. "Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere" - Ted Hughes. "One of the sanest voices of our time" - A. Alvarez. Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's foremost modern poet, and one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. "Poems Before and After" covers...
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THE MOSCOW AND VORONEZH NOTEBOOKS
Mandelstam was one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. The Moscow Notebooks contain poems from his years of persecution. Exiled for his poem on Stalin's 'cockroach moustache', he wrote the 90 poems in the Voronezh notebooks in a last, late flowering. This new edition brings together translations originally published in separate books. (From the publisher)...
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ON THE MOTION AND IMMOBILITY OF DOUVE
Yves Bonnefoy is a central figure in post-war French culture. Born in 1923, he has had a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, is a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involves him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellec...
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(P/B) COME ON EVERYBODY
Come On Everybody brings together poems from a dozen collections published by Adrian Mitchell over five decades, from Poems (1964) to his final collection, Tell Me Lies (2008). His poetry's simplicity, clarity, passion and humour show his allegiance to a vital, popular tradition embracing William Blake as well as the ballads and the blues. His most nakedly political poems - about war, Vietnam, prisons and racism - became part of the folklore of the Left, sung and recited at demonstrations and mass rallies. His childlike questioning was a c...
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(P/B) STAYING ALIVE
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 poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems a...
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