Plays & Poetry

A passionate defense of slang, jargon, argot, and other forms of nonstandard English, this marvelous volume is full of amusing and even astonishing examples of all sorts of slang.

Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades, plus foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, and a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents.

Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Agee's nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift in a number of world-historical contexts.

The poetry of Patrick Kavanagh offers a radical affirmation not only of the human condition, but of the natural world and of God’s presence in both the majestic and mundane facets of daily life. In this illuminating landmark study of the great Monaghan sage, Una Agnew situates Kavanagh’s life and writings squarely in the tradition of Christian mysticism, exploring how his intensely earthy and accessible poems celebrate the presence of the divine ‘in the bits and pieces of everyday’.

366 poems, one for each day of the year (including leap years). Chosen for their narrative, resonance and rhythm, these are poems to learn by heart or treasure and enjoy. Poets included range from Yeats, Shakespeare, Housman and Kipling, to contemporary poets such as Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Maya Angelou and Thom Gunn.