Showing results by publisher "Picador" in Themes & Styles

It’s that time of year again. With his signature wit, Brian Bilston returns with And So This is Christmas, fifty-one poems in celebration of the festive season: from bizarre family traditions to the office Christmas party; from voting day for turkeys to the impossible art of gift-giving. So hang your stockings, grab your mistletoe and curl up with this heart-warming collection of Christmas crackers.

Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.

The Keelie Hawk is a landmark collection from Kathleen Jamie, the current Makar (National Poet) of Scotland. For the first time, Kathleen Jamie has brought her astonishing lyric talent to the language of her homeland, with outstanding results. The Keelie Hawk is a deeply resonant collection written in Scots, with each poem accompanied by a translation into English.

A family cohabits with a horse; three riots are tucked up safely in their beds; a tumbleweed takes up a career in comedy; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those underneath; a rampaging fifty-foot poem brings terror to a city… As always in Paul Farley’s work, the quotidian and the cosmic are braided together in surprising, funny, or disconcerting ways. And as always, his poems inhabit and explore intermediate, uncertain spaces, a fertile terrain found between the obscurity of the cave and the light of knowledge linked to power.

bandit country is written in the very particular dialect of the Irish border, as Ulster Scots and Ulster Gaelic shade into the language and culture of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Spectres of characters both mythic and real thread through these poems, giving them a slippery, ghostly quality. bandit country is a haunting exploration of this place and its people, looking back to the Troubles and forward towards Brexit—and to the ever-looming fences and boundaries with which we must reckon, collectively and urgently.

Centred around two lyric poems on imminent fatherhood and the birth of a child, Signs, Music is a book about masculinity, fatherhood, and love. The speaker, looking backwards to his late father and forwards to his new son, prepares to become a parent for the first time. Meditating on the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the ‘hypothetical’ and the ‘real’ of becoming a father, this irreversible transition causes the poet’s ‘lines [to] lead towards my father (again!)’.

Alexa, What Is There to Know About Love? is a wonderful collection of poems about love in all its forms, covering everything from romantic love to familial love, to long-distance love and even love on the internet. The collection also features poems about the true passions for many booklovers, reading and literature, and the odd one about the subject causing many of us heartbreak: politics. With titles like ‘Hold My Hand While We Jump Off This Cliff’ and ‘Remembrance of Things Pasta’, there’s something for even the most jaded romantic within.

Acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey turns to poetry in emphatically striking style via a true crime podcast with this, her debut collection. Isdal is comprised of three parts, the first a very funny poetic stalking of the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about a long-unsolved murder mystery, as they ruminate over meagre evidence and reach, well, very few conclusions. It is crafted in Dickey’s intellectually agile and witty rhyming style. At the centre of the book is a prose philosophical enquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, ‘sexiness’, and death.

In each of the short poems in Billy Collins’s Musical Tables, the former United States Poet Laureate tempers his characteristically jocular voice with what he calls the “thrill of mortality” – flashes of profundity amongst the mundane, startling reminders of the wonder of being alive. Through the brevity of these poems, Collins’ knack for coaxing the poetry out of the everyday becomes ever more refined.

Osmond has written a powerful and challenging collection of original poems representing the complex, fragmentary nature of traumatic experience. Interleaved with these are translated excerpts of two very different texts: the Anglo Saxon epic poem Beowulf and the Qur'an. Osmond's translations from the Qur'an, in contrast to the stereotype of the Qur'an as a monolithic book full of judgment and proscription, focus on its vivid lyricism and the surprisingly riddling nature of its philosophy.

Rachel Long’s much anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, announces the arrival of a thrilling new presence in poetry. Each poem has a vivid story to tell - of family quirks, the perils of dating, the grip of religion or sexual awakening - stories that are, by turn, emotionally insightful, politically conscious, wise, funny and outrageous.

Colliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal beautifully evoke the poet's Jamaican childhood and reach beyond to explore history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic and intricately woven.

Jackie Kay's first collection as Scottish Makar is an audiobook about the fighting spirit - one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus - Kay's own, her father's, and his own father's - to show us how the body holds its own story. Kay shows how old injuries can emerge years later; how we bear and absorb the loss of friends; how we celebrate and welcome new life; and how we embody our times, whether we want to or not.

Bread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imagining to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens. Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on the author’s archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.

In more than sixty new poems, 'America's favourite poet' (New York Times) Billy Collins writes with joy and wonder about the beauty and irony of daily life. The best poetry, he believes, begins with clarity and ends in mystery, and in Water, Water we encounter a writer endlessly astonished by the world all around.

In But & Though, Jake Hawkey scrutinizes the impact of parental addiction on families, its title a nod to the language of dependency, its circles of prevarication and excuse. Hawkey’s poems chart the loss of a father and the resilient love between siblings, and take an unflinching look at a parent–child relationship sometimes painfully inverted through alcoholism.