Bloodaxe Books: 229 books

A celebrated winner of fiction's Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. As in her fiction, these haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity. Her poems also cast a bright, revealing light...

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive, which became Britain’s most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who’ve...

This enhanced ebook with includes audio files of Brendan Kennelly reading his poems drawn from four classic recordings made in Dublin in 1982, 1998, 1999 and 2002. These include recordings of 32 individual poems as well asfour extracts from his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain. Brendan...

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...

COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 Winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and...

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was both a virtuoso and a paradox. Her fiction, drama, essays and children’s books won her wide acclaim in Denmark and other European countries, but it is her poetry – spanning a forty-year period – that best reveals her versatility and depth. Her poetry reflects...

Barry Maweeney's last book, "The Book of Demons", recorded his fierce fightagainst alcoholism as well as the great love of those who helped save his life -- though only for three more years. When he died in 2000, he had justassembled a retrospective of his work. "Wolf Tongue" is...

Adventurous, searching, interested in the luminous instant of reality that dwells in the perpetual now of the poem, Penelope Shuttle is a poet who clearly shares Picasso's view that 'If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?' This selection - drawn from ten collections...

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in NewYork City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, "Cages", in 1966. Her poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing...

Splash Like Jesus brings together three contrasting but complementary, familial poem sequences by ‘this brilliant lyricist of human darkness’ (Fiona Sampson). Buttercup the Sloth, about mothers; Lobo-Lobo, about sisters; and Behold My Father on His Bicycle about just that. Like all of Selima...

Shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Poetry Prize. People Who Like Meatballs brings together two contrasting poem sequences about rejection by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The title-sequence, People Who Like Meatballs, is about a man's humiliation by a woman. Into my mother's...

This groundbreaking anthology of ten new poets truly reflects the multicultural make-up of contemporary Britain. At a time when less than 1% of all poetry books published in the UK are by black or Asian poets, the work of these writers testifies to the quality and versatility of vital writing that...

Jack Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by Malawi's dictator Hastings Banda for nearly four years, chronicling his prison experiences with boundless wit in his previous books. In Greetings from Grandpa – his sixth collection – Mapanje is still effervescent, with his wry humour defiantly...

Pauline Stainer is a poet ‘working at the margins of the sacred’, conveying sensations ‘with an economy of means that is breath-taking…her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own’ (John Burnside). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection...