Bloodaxe Books: 229 books

Richard Murphy, now in his eighties, is one of Ireland's most distinguished poets, known particularly for poems drawing on the people and history of the west of Ireland with classical rigour and 'unvarnished' clarity. He emerged in the 1950s with John Montague and Thomas Kinsella as one of the three...

A number of years back, our author went to seek out a book by some ancient Greek thinker – the name starting with an L, or perhaps a C – called On Delight of the Nature of Things, or maybe In Delight at the Nature of Things. Either way, it turned out the book didn’t exist. Our author found lots...

Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Clare Pollard's fourth collection is steeped in folktale and ballads, and looks at the stories we tell about ourselves. From the Pendle witch-trials in 17th-century Lancashire to the gangs of modern-day east London, Changeling takes on our myths and monsters. These...

Benjamin Zephaniah is an oral poet, novelist, playwright, children's writer and reggae artist. Born in 1958 in Birmingham, he grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth, where he was sent to an approved school for being uncontrollable, rebellious and 'a born failure', ending up in jail for burglary. After...

When Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work ‘has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life’. Her latest collection, wake, shows the two beginning to meld into one: to speak for, even as, one another....

War never ends. There have been two world wars since 1914 lasting for ten years, but wars have continued for a hundred years since then in many parts of the world: wars between nations, tribes and factions, wars over religion and beliefs, wars fought for land or oil or history or power, civil wars,...

Chan is a mercurial name, representing the travellers and shape-shifters of the poems in this collection. It is one of the many nicknames of Hannah Lowe’s Chinese-Jamaican father, borrowed from the Polish émigré card magician Chan Canasta. It is also a name from China, where her grandfather’s...

Almana: a mythic scrapbook, bag of cats, a one-man band. Almana is concerned with lists, rules and archetypes and what they don't account for. It takes as its subjects the Tarot, the lore of Full Moons, weather myths and travellers' tales. The central sequence 'Lorelei's Lore' is a road movie in poems,...

Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English is full of murmurings, such as the need 'to walk the earth as if there's a baby sleeping next door'. Murmur is a poetry of meditation, from the reverberations of dead poets to murmurs of the heart which force the poet to dwell on the irregular beat...

Matthew Sweeney’s palette in My Life as a Painter – his twelfth collection – features a wild mix of birds and animals: lizards, snakes, rats, camels, donkeys, feral cats, dogs and owls. One dog transmits telepathic requests for the food he wants, and there’s a parrot who speaks as ambassador...

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new collection, he puts on the mask of Moses Maimonides (aka the Rambam), the medieval Jewish rabbi and physician who wrote his Guide...

Brendan Kennelly's Guff is both mouthpiece and mouthed off, Devil's advocate and self critic, everyman and every writer consumed by self-doubt and self-questioning. The book of Guff is about words writing the man. Words drive him into the cave of himself where he questions everything including words...

Even in peacetime, many women find themselves isolated in a wartime of their own when their loved ones are involved in conflicts overseas. As mothers or wives they live in a state of separation, from husbands, sons or daughters in permanent danger – or so they feel – as well as from an often alienating...

From the direct trajectory of her first collection, Straight Ahead, Clare Shaw's second collection Head On turns an unflinching gaze into startling new territories. Structured by interweaving themes of political and personal conflict, the book begins and ends with the recurrent necessity of speaking...