In her third full-length collection Blood Child, Eleanor Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change - fleeting, elusive or moored in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the 'child' and the 'girl' are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees's poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.

Blood Child (Pavilion Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Rees, Eleanor

Poetry

Pavilion Poetry

Mona Arshi's debut collection, Small Hands, introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the center of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother's death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi's poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi's is a daring, moving and original voice.

Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry)

Arshi, Mona

Set against the charms and vicissitudes of growing up in a family of musicians, Jodie Hollander's beautifully-structured and compelling debut follows the story of a daughter's maturing relationship with her mother. Interspersed with versions of Rimbaud, and always alert to the surreal comedy of the human condition, these powerful and immediate poems chart with huge passion, musicality and insight a complex journey towards familial understanding and reconciliation.

My Dark Horses (Pavilion Poetry)

Hollander, Jodie

In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as 'exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread'. Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.

A Handful of Blue Earth: Poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Pavilion Poetry)

HACKER, MARILYN

Khoury-Ghata, Vénus

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017 A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Claudia Rankine described the poems in Alsadir's first book as 'lawless,' 'provocative, and 'heartbreaking' as they 'converse from the inside out...come alive in the back and forth of a mind attempting to understand what it means to be in relation to.' Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric - and human relationships - in the 21st century.

Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry)

Alsadir, Nuar

History & Criticism

Is nowhere a place we can get closer to? In her compelling second collection, Alice Miller tackles the circularity of thought, the company of the dead, and the lure of alternative futures. These poems rip into pockets of histories, trying to change facts and voices, searching for the word's version of music's home key. They dare you to visit, through a series of cities, the futures we never let happen.

Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion Poetry)

Miller, Alice

Emily Hasler's debut collection moves between the local and the distant, the urban and the rural, and past and present. This is a poetry of emotional density underpinned with a lightness of touch. Hasler's poems are structural but organic, detailed but lively, thoughtful but playful. There is a rare combination of exactitude and wonder which leads the reader in and keeps them there. Often taking their cue from the work of visual artists, these poems probe at the ways we understand and reconstruct our environment. Examining places, objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers and bridges, these poems ask how our world is made, and how it makes us.

The Built Environment (Pavilion Poetry)

Hasler, Emily

On returning north to Amsterdam from a writer's residency in the south of Holland, poet and novelist Lieke Marsman received grave news: the shoulder pain that had been bothering her for years, and that had recently become unbearable, was found to have been caused by a malignant tumour the size of a grapefruit; it was chondrosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. Frank, conversational and suffused with a dry humour, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes is a record of the diagnosis and the events and thoughts that took place around it. But this is also a collection that turns its attention outwards, towards societal ills and their perpetrators, including the political class and Big Pharma. An energising mix of prose and lyric, the poems (many of which share their title with that of the collection, rendering it an at once mundane and threatening refrain) start to feel like scans themselves, offering readings of both the writer and her environment. Beautifully translated by the poet Sophie Collins, the book also includes a translator's note in the form of a letter to her author and friend.

The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion Poetry)

Marsman, Lieke

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues in its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experiences in both past and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting, these poems tune, in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain, to the dangers and unsettling violences of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, at the centre of this book is an overarching commitment to hope, in whatever form it takes, to the earth's tiny creatures, and its 'churning, broken song'.

Dear Big Gods (Pavilion Poetry)

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020. Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca - Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite 'I' - part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet - brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects - the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light - make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.

Citadel (Pavilion Poetry)

Sprackland, Martha

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Books by Pavilion Poetry