Plays & Poetry

This collection moves from secrecy to candour, as the poet begins to remember the things, people and events that made and marred him.

This second collection from one of Britain's most innovative poets is an exploration of identity in the face of loss. At its heart is a series of poems about the desolation of miscarriage. Chrissy Williams' first collection Bear (Bloodaxe) was one of The Telegraph's 50 Best Books of the Year in 2017.

Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories.

Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley.

GLEN WILSON, from Portadown, Co Armagh, is the winner of the 2017 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. There are moments here of epiphany and rites of passage where the poet becomes a portal through which events scurry. Wilson finds something enduring in the transitory, picks out signals that often go unheard. — Mel McMahon

In this highly accomplished debut collection Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through pit villages and the haunt of the Miners' Strike, to the subliminal of everyday - with poems on typists, pencil sharpeners and learning to drive in a Ford Capri.

In We Say We Will, Martha Woodcock’s first collection of poems, she takes us on a journey through the everyday, the exotic, the life-changing and the heart-breaking. Her work has a deep integrity and these poems are filled with an honesty and a directness that make them immediately familiar, yet deeply personal.