Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in Themes & Styles

This edition brings together A Scattering and Anniversary into a single book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of 55. A Scattering was first published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award. This moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences.

The Late Sun asserts a balance between memorialisation of the recently dead and celebration of the vitality of the living. Early in the collection is a set of poems about the poet's mother, who died in great age after a life of exotic travel, and the poet's own travels, his sense of both place and displacement, are vibrantly explored in other pieces.

Kingdomland is the debut poetry collection of Rachael Allen - a writer of rare vision and flair. The world she creates is suffused with surreal images and uncanny incidents. Unexplained violences and strange metamorphoses take shape in the 'glowering dusk'. And yet, all too clearly, we recognise life here on earth, its everyday griefs, dysfunctions and injustices. Where distinctions between murder and bloodletting, corruption and consumption are blurred. Where a pet tarantula or mimic octopus might find itself beside glands and processed meats.

T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections in the world. For the first time in company history a companion volume will be published. Originally conceived by Eliot himself, Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dogs' poems are as witty, varied and exquisitely compiled as Eliot's cats.

A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. This fragmentary vigil anchors a series of narrative sections in which a dramatic voice - which might well be an interior monologue - gives, first, an account of the man, then addresses him directly. We learn of a conflicted childhood, of love lost to circumstance, of the press of death on the protagonist's waking thoughts. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives.

An age-old subject is given new perspectives in Blossomise, a collection with change at its heart. Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholic disappearance. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among skyscrapers and urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored here both as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a nervous marker of our vulnerable climate.

The conversion of a local beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems—composed in short-lined tercets—reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland.