A fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons, unravelling the millennia of myth woven around girls.
'A sensual exploration of two female archetypes' Guardian
'One of our most gifted poets ... This is tender and exquisite poetry' Mona Arshi, author of Small Hands
In Girl, Ruth Padel presents a triptych of interlocking sequences. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist.
Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet’s own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary: girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. ‘Listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy’, Girl is an urgent, revelatory work for today.
**A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation**
'Dazzling' Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married
'Beautiful' Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvedge
Selected and introduced by J. M. Coetzee and Alissa Valles, an essential gathering of poetry from one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent literary voices
be courageous when reason fails you be courageous
in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts
Born in Poland, Zbigniew Herbert was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, moved throughout his work by a powerful sense of humanity in the darkest of times. This new selection brings together poems from across the whole of his writing life, from his first volume Chord of Light in 1956, to works published posthumously in 2024. Direct, lucid, sometimes impish in his ironic humour, and deeply informed not only by the history of his own time, but by the Classical world, here is a poet of huge imaginative range and profundity, who desires always to ‘touch the essence’: to get to the heart of life.
"He offers what we all need in an age of darkening anxiety and mistrust: a voice of lucid, truly humane observation and integrity. Ethical, often ironical, full of self-doubt; quick, original and vivid." Ruth Padel
*A Times Literary Supplement and Financial Times Book of the Year 2024*
An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age
Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood – a writer who has fundamentally shaped our contemporary literary landscapes – Paper Boat assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume.
In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters – mythological figures, animals and everyday people – all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. ‘How can one live with such a heart?’ Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the reader, and ferrying us through life, death and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood’s journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears.
Spanning six decades of work – from her earliest beginnings to brand new poems – this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors.
‘We should regard Atwood as a poet first and foremost – just one who happens to be a highly regarded novelist’ Sunday Herald
Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry.
In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar—but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane’s essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation?
If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is the scholar’s art,” My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet’s art. Punctuated with McLane’s poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.
Hannah Lavery's Unwritten Woman is a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves. It is a celebration of Lavery's home city, but also an exploration of gender, race and belonging.
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
In this 'graceful, elegant translation' (Guardian), Poet Laureate Simon Armitage communicates the energy and humour of the Middle English tale with all the cut and thrust of the original.
This is one of the greatest collections of love poetry ever published. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's youthful relationships and injected with an expressive eroticism, these poems are as accomplished as they are evocative and sensual. First published in 1924 to international acclaim when Neruda was just nineteen, this book is still adored the world over for being one of the most memorable, intense and romantic works of poetry ever written.
It is a work of poetry to be cherished by lovers old and new. The perfect Valentine's Day present.
INTRODUCED BY LEO BOIX
'The poems today remain as urgently gorgeous as freshly picked flowers' Carol Ann Duffy
The Vintage Classics Love Poems series brings together some of the most sensual, heart-breaking and romantic poetry ever written. Working in collaboration with Vintage Creative Director Suzanne Dean this edition has been created by Spanish illustrator Jesús Cisneros.
One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now.
*Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025*
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest' ANDREW MCMILLAN
'Original, essential... An unforgettable collection' FIONA BENSON
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world.
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"readthe now-famous words above the gate through which Dante, the protagonist of Inferno, crosses the threshold. But that forbidding inscription applies only to those without faith; and though Dante's journey through the nine circles of Hellbegins withterror and confusion.
Stunning debut collection, bringing the ghettoised working class into contemporary Irish poetry. Noisy, dark, but shot through with humour, Gub heralds a wholly new voice out of Belfast.
Virgula is an award-winning collection by acclaimed Dutch poet Sasja Janssen, and her second collection to be published in English, translated by Michele Hutchison.
