Plays & Poetry

'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill.

A remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been the poet's home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. This title features his love poems and elegies and includes reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles.

Pattern-book is a collection about grief, time, art, friendship, and the ways that language can and can't hold what we lose.

Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize, Marjorie Lotfi's debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives, spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland.

"What happens when the man of your dreams turns out to be a nightmare with sharp teeth and claws?"

Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are 'The Kids', her students, the teenagers she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son's experience.