Plays & Poetry International

A guide that explains and celebrates various parallel poetry projects. It examines the range of contemporary tendencies - from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists.

When Eva's parents fail to escape Germany, the child changes her name and begins the process of denial of her roots. It is only when her own daughter discovers some letters in their attic that Eva is forced to confront the truth about the past.

Internationally acclaimed play of cross-cultural friendship

more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.

In this edition, R.A. Foakes brings to bear a number of historical perspectives and critically addresses recent explorations of "King Lear" as a play of redemption, a play of despair and a play that destabilises all commentary.

Clare Shaw's fourth collection shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are - and especially how we feel - as psychology. The book is inhabited by the character of Monkey, who shows by example how early attachments and trauma may shape us, but how ultimately we come to realise our own general theory and practice of love.

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but becomes an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change in Penelope Shuttle's new poems. The second part of the book, New Lamps for Old, is a collection of poems searching for meaning in life after bereavement.