{"title":"Smokestack Books","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781739772291","title":"The Advantages of Nearly Dying","description":"\u003cp\u003eMichael Rosen was dangerously ill from COVID at the beginning of 2020 and as doctors told him, if he hadn’t received treatment, he would have ‘gone’. While he was in hospital, 42% of the patients on his intensive care ward died. He spent three months in hospital, of which nearly seven weeks were in an induced coma, followed by several weeks recovering in an ordinary ward and then in a Rehabilitation Hospital. He couldn’t walk and his memory was damaged. Three years later his hearing and eyesight are still badly affected (‘I can’t hear with my left eye, I can’t see with my left ear and I get muddled’).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing his best-selling COVID memoirs \u003ci\u003eMany Different Kinds of Love: a story of life, death and the NHS \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eSticky McStickstick: the friend who helped me walk again, \u003c\/i\u003ehis new collection for grown-ups records his bewilderment with what’s happened, and shares his thoughts about the politics of the pandemic – the ‘crazed incompetence’ of the Tory government and the war against the ‘Oldies’ that led to over 200,000 dead in the UK. Unforgiving, whimsical, grim, warm, philosophical and comical, \u003ci\u003eThe Advantages of Nearly Dying \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about hospital appointments, waiting-rooms, blood-tests, brain-scans, eye-tests – and a song of praise for the NHS.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128581521586,"sku":"9781739772291","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772291.jpg?v=1786024211"},{"product_id":"9781739772253","title":"The Love Songs of Late Capitalism","description":"\u003cp\u003eAward winning cartoonist, graphic novelist and poet \u003cb\u003eMartin Rowson\u003c\/b\u003e slows down a bit to weave together his customary fusion of fury \u0026amp; poignancy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSitting in the back of a minicab driving round London at 2am in the rain, and listening to the commercial radio’s endless easy-listening playlist, the award-winning cartoonist, graphic novelist and poet Martin Rowson reflects on the commodification of music, art, death, memory, funerals, love, bucket lists and dreams in the twenty-first century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128581685426,"sku":"9781739772253","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772253_7c249340-d54e-49b9-91dc-7c56bbd6750b.jpg?v=1786024209"},{"product_id":"9781739173012","title":"The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater","description":"\u003cp\u003eMontagu Slater (1902-1956) is best-known today as the librettist of Benjamin Britten’s opera \u003ci\u003ePeter Grimes \u003c\/i\u003e(1945). But he was also a novelist, playwright, journalist, scriptwriter – and a poet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA committed communist from the late 1920s, he was a leading figure in the cultural world of the mid-century left, and co-founded and edited \u003ci\u003eLeft Review\u003c\/i\u003e in the 1930s and was theatre editor of \u003ci\u003eOur Time \u003c\/i\u003ein the 1940s. He worked with Britten, John Grierson, W.H. Auden and Alberto Cavalcanti at the GPO Film Unit, where he scripted the influential \u003ci\u003eCoal Face \u003c\/i\u003e(1935). His novels included \u003ci\u003eHaunting Europe\u003c\/i\u003e (1934) about the rise of Hitler, \u003ci\u003eOnce a Jolly Swagman \u003c\/i\u003e(1944) about speedway racing (filmed starring Dirk Bogarde) and \u003ci\u003eEnglishmen with Swords \u003c\/i\u003e(1949) about the English Civil War. His abiding anti-imperialism found expression in the play, \u003ci\u003eEaster: 1916 \u003c\/i\u003e(1936), and in his last book, \u003ci\u003eThe Trial of Jomo Kenyatta \u003c\/i\u003e(1955).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Collected Poems of Montagu Slater \u003c\/i\u003eincludes the poems from Slater’s only published collection, \u003ci\u003ePeter Grimes and other Poems \u003c\/i\u003e(1946), alongside poetry originally published in periodicals and newspapers. It also brings into print previously unpublished poems from Slater’s papers at the University of Nottingham.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128582734002,"sku":"9781739173012","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173012.jpg?v=1786024543"},{"product_id":"9781739173036","title":"Black Bullets in the Sweet Jar","description":"Durham writer Alison Carr looks back to the childhood she lost when she was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver when she was eight years-old. Written with a beautiful melancholy, the poems are constructed around iterative images of lost childhood pleasures, of falling apples and seasonal change, connecting personal feelings of loss with larger narratives of the Fall – mythical, anthropological and economic.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43172950966450,"sku":"9781739173036","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173036.jpg?v=1786024546"},{"product_id":"9781739173005","title":"The Selected Poems of Clive Branson","description":"\u003cp\u003eClive Branson (1907-1944) was born in Ahmednagar, India, the son of a major in the Indian army. He studied at the Slade School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was just 23. Five of his paintings are today in the Tate. His daughter is the painter Rosa Branson.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Selected Poems of Clive Branson\u003c\/i\u003e brings together, for the first time, the best of his surviving poetry. Passionate and committed, it’s a first-hand account of the most violent years of the twentieth-century – Britain in the Slump, Spain during the civil-war, Fascist prisons, the London Blitz, the cultural shock of India and its poverty, the war against Japan – recorded with a painterly eye and a communist faith in the power of the people.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43173350015154,"sku":"9781739173005","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173005.jpg?v=1786024542"},{"product_id":"9781739173074","title":"Cromwell's Head","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1661 Charles II ordered Oliver Cromwell’s corpse to be exhumed and decapitated. The head was displayed for over twenty years on the roof of Westminster Hall as a warning to republicans everywhere. Cromwell’s Head looks at history through the eyes of Britain’s first and only republican leader, telling the story of a ‘headless people’ forced to march to the top of the hill and marched back down again – Flodden, Bannockburn, Culloden, Iraq, Afghanistan, the violent end of empire, black shirts on the march again, the coronation of Charles III.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204869849266,"sku":"9781739173074","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173074.jpg?v=1786024549"},{"product_id":"9781739173067","title":"Eftwyrd","description":"An epic poem set in seventh-century Northumbria on the eve of the Synod of Whitby. Brother Oswin (who first appeared in Beagrie’s Leásungspell) travels to Streanæshealh across a wild landscape steeped in magic and folklore. There he is shunned as a boggart, elf-king, merman and the cursed puck responsible for spreading the pandemic that rages through the kingdom. Meanwhile the politics of faith, fealty, liberty and power play out through the lives of the people he encounters. Written in a hybrid of Old English and Northern vernaculars, the book conjures a sense of place that runs deep into the collective imagination.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204913103026,"sku":"9781739173067","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173067.jpg?v=1786024548"},{"product_id":"9781838465315","title":"Underneath","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMartin Hayes\u003c\/b\u003e’ third Smokestack collection is a hymn to the invisible workers everywhere who hold up the sky – specifically the couriers and support staff who have been working 15-hours a day to distribute PPE and test kits up and down the UK.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eUnderneath\u003c\/i\u003e is a brutally funny collection about work, comradeship and community, the deals we do to stay human in the dehumanising conditions of the twenty-first century, the years we exchange for a fridge full of food, a well-stocked medicine cabinet and the chance to swim in the sea once a year. It’s a book about work-mates and neighbours, warnings and redundancies, managers with their ‘Moray eel smiles’ and the alien rich who think that the world belongs to them. Martin Hayes gives a voice to everyone at the bottom of the pile, below the salt, \u003ci\u003eunderneath\u003c\/i\u003e, defiantly asserting that we are not defeated – at least not just yet.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205578883250,"sku":"9781838465315","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781838465315_34ba81f8-8b97-4d44-8d3b-826bd65173f5.jpg?v=1786027802"},{"product_id":"9781916312173","title":"Plague Songs","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn May 2020 the award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson set himself the challenge of writing a Lockdown Diary in verse. The result is Plague Songs, a unique cycle of furious, bleakly comic and often offensive poems about COVID-19, fiercely inventive and desperately funny. Rowson, who recovered from the virus at the start of the year (‘sweating in freezing fits, embalmed in bed\/ In sulphurous miasmata, my joints like broken walnuts,\/ With hogtied eyeballs and less energy than dissipating smoke’) records in manic verse the long lockdown Summer of 2020 – coughs and sneezes, lockdown-haircuts, funerals and furloughs, hangovers and hauntings, track and trace, when Death and Pestilence were playing on the swings, or visiting the elderly in their Care Homes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePlague Songs is also book about living in Banarnia – a nightmarish world of jingoism and xenophobia, hierarchy and inequality, government incompetence, Boris Johnson’s world-beating wet dreams, and the deadly twin viruses of stupidity and selfishness. What rhymes with COVID except bovid? Is Matt Hancock the Tory Party’s answer to Fred West? Does every shroud have a silver lining?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205680791730,"sku":"9781916312173","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312173.jpg?v=1786030171"},{"product_id":"9781999827687","title":"Pastrami Faced Racist","description":"\u003cp\u003eUndeterred by the embarrassing success of his ridiculous four-volume verse epic \u003ci\u003eThe Limerickiad, \u003c\/i\u003eaward-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson continues to lower the tone with a series of metrical rants and cautionary tales about contemporary political and literary life. Accompanied by the ghosts of Chesterton, Shelley, Burns and Browning, Rowson casts his gaze across the satirical spectrum from governments, gammon-faced racists, class war and the harsh realities of child rearing to the world of literary festivals, international book fairs, best-sellers, book launches, holiday reading lists, bottom lines, liggers, bloggers, blaggers, book-signings and book-burnings.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205846728882,"sku":"9781999827687","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999827687_331264e1-793e-4128-ae72-a1fb3b810450.jpg?v=1786031883"},{"product_id":"9781999674298","title":"Eating Thistles","description":"\u003cp\u003eLike the donkey in the Aesop fable, the US-Scottish writer\u003cb\u003e Deborah Moffatt\u003c\/b\u003e speaks a language ‘sharp and barbed’. She knows it is ‘better to eat thistles’ than ‘to survive in a nation born of vanity.’ And that those who close borders, soon turn against their own, ‘maddened by power, powered by madness.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on Scottish and Irish Gaelic poetry and other literary and folk traditions, \u003ci\u003eEating Thistles \u003c\/i\u003etransplants, transforms and re-imagines contemporary and historical events through Aesopian language, slipping between history, myth and memory – Syria, St Kilda, the Sudan, Latin American\u003ci\u003e dictadura\u003c\/i\u003e and the mass-executions by the SS of Soviet Jews, Roma and prisoners of war. \u003ci\u003eEating Thistles\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful and original study of guilt, denial, innocence and complicity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205942837426,"sku":"9781999674298","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999674298_6e737213-a048-4323-933b-4368b857ce6f.jpg?v=1786031774"},{"product_id":"9781739473419","title":"Babi Yar and Other Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eA bilingual selection of poems by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth-century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44203799347378,"sku":"9781739473419","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473419_10560078-2f1a-41e3-b66d-7e78ca5677ad.jpg?v=1786024854"},{"product_id":"9781739473488","title":"Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges","description":"\u003cp\u003eWriting in northern time through lockdowns and into the meta-crises since, Stephen Sawyer asks urgent questions about what it is that makes us human in the face of so many threats to life and what sustains it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges is a forest of stories and voices, a portrait of the uprooted, unheard, locked in and locked out of place and time, a soulful, luminous meditation to reaffirm bonds and identities that cross borders and epochs, now more than ever under siege.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44583274578098,"sku":"9781739473488","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473488_a4ffd716-3a10-4528-bea4-8808555f1500.jpg?v=1786024862"},{"product_id":"9780956814418","title":"His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHis Hands Were Gentle\u003c\/em\u003e brings together, for the first time in both Spanish and English, the best of Víctor Jara's lyrics, from early songs like 'El arado' ('The Plow') to 'Estadio Chile' ('In the Stadium'), written in the hours before his execution. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith a Preface by the actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson. Click on Extracts above to read the Preface in full, for free.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"For me, Victor was everything an activist-musician should be.\" \u003cbr\u003eEmma Thompson \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"As long as we sing his songs, as long as his courage can inspire us to greater courage, Víctor Jara will never die.\" \u003cbr\u003ePete Seeger, American folk-singer \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVíctor Jara\u003c\/strong\u003e (1932-73) was a legendary Chilean singer, songwriter, guitarist and theatre director. A leader of the New Song Movement, in the aftermath of the military coup of 1973, Jara was arrested, imprisoned and executed. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMartín Espada\u003c\/strong\u003e has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including the poetry collection \u003cem\u003eCrucifixion in the Plaza de Armas \u003c\/em\u003e(Smokestack, 2008).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295156777333,"sku":"9780956814418","price":8.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780956814418_faca9505-741a-4c25-9d59-e0f71af09d30.jpg?v=1786016403"},{"product_id":"9780992740962","title":"Epitaphios","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn 10 May 1936 the 27-year old Greek poet \u003cstrong\u003eYiannis Ritsos\u003c\/strong\u003e saw a newspaper photograph of a woman weeping over the body of her son, a Salonica tobacco-factory worker killed by police during a strike. Two days later the Communist Party newspaper \u003cem\u003eRizospastis\u003c\/em\u003e published a long poem by Ritsos. Dedicated 'to the heroic workers of Salonika' and drawing on the fourteenth-century Greek Orthodox Epitaphios Thrinos, the poem combines Mary's lament at Christ's tomb with popular Greek folk traditions of resurrection and Spring to create a universal lament sung by every bereaved mother 'who sits and mourns on the blood-stained street with her heart flayed, her wing broken.'\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295173718389,"sku":"9780992740962","price":8.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780992740962_557aa199-348a-45e1-a263-6829907188cc.jpg?v=1786016317"},{"product_id":"9780995767522","title":"Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘Poetry can stick up for the weak’ according to \u003cb\u003eMichael Rosen\u003c\/b\u003e, or it can ‘mock the mighty’; it can ‘glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.’ In these powerful new poems Rosen is clear about his own choices.\u003ci\u003e Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio\u003c\/i\u003e is a book about anti-Semitism, racism, Fascism and war, Trump, le Pen, and the Tory assaults on the NHS and education – the stupid and the sinister, the ridiculous and the revolting. In his first collection for grown-ups since \u003ci\u003eDon’t Mention the Children\u003c\/i\u003e (2015), Michael Rosen confirms his reputation as the heir to Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness, or dare to ask, like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, why the silly emperor is not wearing any clothes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295259505013,"sku":"9780995767522","price":8.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780995767522_42a5beeb-ed67-4209-9e8b-7b920c9f7955.jpg?v=1786016099"},{"product_id":"9780995767560","title":"If the Symptoms Persist","description":"\u003cp\u003eIf modern French poetry began with Rimbaud’s observation that ‘je est un autre,’\u003cb\u003e Francis Combes\u003c\/b\u003e believes that poets should now say, ‘je suis tous les autres’. Drawing on the tradition of Hugo and Aragon, the idea of une poésie d’utilité publique runs through Francis Combes stunning new collection, from poèmes sans domicile fixe to poèmes moraux et politiques. It is a book about poverty, homelessness, inequality, racism and the endless wars of the twenty-first century. It’s a book of gentle humour and savage irony. It is that rare thing, a collection of poetry that is both useful and necessary.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295377764725,"sku":"9780995767560","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780995767560_43a503e1-e4df-44d1-843d-0a57ca90bd8a.jpg?v=1786016101"},{"product_id":"9780992958183","title":"Looking for Trouble","description":"\u003cp\u003eRoque Dalton (1935-1975) is one of the best-known and best-loved poets of twentieth-century Latin America. He studied law in Chile and then at the University of El Salvador, where he helped found the Committed Generation of Poets. A member of the Salvadorean Communist Party, Dalton was imprisoned in 1959 and sentenced to death for organising students and peasants against the local landowners. On the day of his execution his life was saved when the military dictatorship was overthrown in a coup. Dalton escaped death a second time in 1965 when the prison was hit by an earthquake. He spent several years in exile in Mexico, Cuba and Czechoslovakia, where he quickly established a reputation as one of the best young Latin American poets of his generation, publishing poetry, essays, fiction and biography and winning the 1969 Casa de las Américas poetry prize. In 1975 Dalton returned to El Salvador and joined the underground Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (the Revolutionary Army of the People). Accused by the ERP of being a CIA spy, Dalton was murdered four days before his fortieth birthday.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRoque Dalton was an extraordinary poet of rebellion and humour, fierce militancy and painful tenderness, whose work should be read alongside other guerrilla poets like Otto René Castillo, Javier Heraud, Ernesto Cardenal and Daisy Zamora. Although his poetry has been widely published in Cuba, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia and the US, \u003cem\u003eLooking for Trouble\u003c\/em\u003e is the first time his work has been published in the UK.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295537672565,"sku":"9780992958183","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780992958183_954d38d2-8109-4914-a130-b04e0b9b76a8.jpg?v=1786016406"},{"product_id":"9780992740900","title":"Romiosini","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe word romiosini (ρωμιοσύνη) or 'Greekness' derives from the Byzantine idea that the Greeks are the true Romioi, the heirs of the Roman Empire. For hundreds of years under the Turkish occupation the flame of romiosini was kept alive in codes of honour, loyalty, bravery, love of the land, religious devotion and patriotism. For Yiannis Ritsos, the Greek Partisans of EAM\/ELAS in the Second World War were the heroic heirs to the romiosini of the mountain klephtes, the medieval epic hero Digenis Akritas, and the revolutionaries who fought against the Turks in the 1820s. First published in 1954, Romiosini was later set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYiannis Ritsos\u003c\/strong\u003e (1909-1990) was one of most prolific European poets of the 20th century. The author of more than a hundred books of poems, plays, fiction, translations and essays, his work has been translated into over forty different languages. Because of his politics – Ritsos was a life-long member of the Greek Communist Party – the Metaxas dictatorship burned his books at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens in 1936. During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) he was a member of EAM (National Liberation Front). After the Civil War he was imprisoned for four years on the concentration-camp islands of Lemnos and Makronisos. His books were banned until 1954. In the 1960s he was imprisoned on Samos for three years by the military junta.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295617036661,"sku":"9780992740900","price":8.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780992740900_60eaf5ad-56d9-47d4-b9f1-909a6afe0fa8.jpg?v=1786016314"},{"product_id":"9780995767539","title":"A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘Against barbarity,’ wrote the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) ‘poetry can resist only by cultivating an attachment to human fragility, like a blade of grass growing on a wall as armies march by.’ A Blade of Grass brings together, in English and in Arabic, new work by poets from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, from the Palestinian diaspora and from within the disputed borders of Israel. Including poems by Maya Abu Alhayyat, Shahid NWA and Fady Joudah, it represents part of the flourishing cultural resistance of the Palestinian people to decades of displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Voices fresh and seasoned converse with history, sing to the land, and courageously nurture an attachment to human fragility. Written in hip-hop rhythms, free verse and in traditional forms, these poems bear witness both to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlades of Grass\u003c\/i\u003e includes new poems by \u003cb\u003eAshraf Fayadh\u003c\/b\u003e, currently imprisoned in Saudi Arabia on charges of apostasy, sentenced to eight years and 800 lashes. A percentage of the sales of this book will be donated to English PEN’s campaign for Fayadh’s release.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295660421493,"sku":"9780995767539","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780995767539_483b6a12-4e47-4920-b660-f88a34ecb6b7.jpg?v=1786016100"},{"product_id":"9781739772222","title":"Great Fugue","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGreat Fugue\u003c\/i\u003e is \u003cb\u003eVolker Braun\u003c\/b\u003e’s most recent collection, an attempt to understand the strange, silent world of 2020 and the COVID pandemic. Drawing on Dante, Beethoven and Pound, the book examines the catastrophic conflict between Progress and Nature in the Anthropocene Age. A book about the day the world stood still in 2020, when our cities were sedated, the streets fell silent and Nature refused to submit to human ideas of Progress. In the Anthropocene era, the Mekong no longer finds its delta, fires burn in the dry forests, and the seas and the skies are fatally poisoned. German writer Volker Braun tries to measure a world caught between climate emergency and global instability, economic growth and social decay.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302652752245,"sku":"9781739772222","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772222_f0302e5d-626c-4961-9b20-cf49edc2cb51.jpg?v=1786024207"},{"product_id":"9781739772208","title":"Grace Note","description":"\u003cp\u003ePeter Godfrey’s first collection is a book of reports from the front-line, messages sent from over the border, beyond the edge of the map – Madrid 1939, Oradour 1944, Hiroshima 1945, Santiago 1973, San Carlos Bay 1982. It’s a celebration of those who – like Dom Helder Câmara, René Magritte, Oscar Neimeyer, Wat Tyler and Jacques Brel – have understood ‘the glory of pedalling the wrong way on a one-way street’. And it’s a hymn to the patient humility of those who believe that life does not have to be like this, and who imbue the world with grace.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302653440373,"sku":"9781739772208","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772208_55492c9b-7d7e-4eb3-ac64-5e69052634b4.jpg?v=1786024206"},{"product_id":"9781739173043","title":"Chagall’s Moon","description":"\u003cp\u003eWritten with characteristic craft and wit, many of the poems in \u003ci\u003eChagall’s Moon\u003c\/i\u003e reflect the changed world in which we find ourselves, as rockets rain nightly on Ukrainian cities, refugees drown in the channel, and post-Brexit chaos reigns.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eChagall’s Moon\u003c\/i\u003e movingly creates a world of love and loss, identity and laughter, dreams and nightmares, where Beethoven and Picasso rub shoulders with Billie Holiday, Chagall’s lovers still fly in a cloudless sky, the ghosts and horrors of recent Jewish history are never far away, friendship and childhood memories still stir, and love presides\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302772814197,"sku":"9781739173043","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173043_be1485a5-d674-4249-8038-97219c4e9f20.jpg?v=1786024547"},{"product_id":"9781739772284","title":"Someday There Will be Machine Shops Full of Roses","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1973 Fred Voss abandoned a PhD in English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and went to work as a machinist in a steel-mill. \u003ci\u003eSomeday There Will be Machine Shops Full of Roses\u003c\/i\u003e looks back on fifty years of working on machine-shop floors up and down the West Coast – the noise and the silence, long shifts and short tempers, old-timers and pushy young machinists, profits in the boardrooms and wage-cuts on the cold shop-floor, the bravado, the boredom and the comradeship. These new poems confirm Voss as the heir to Charles Bukowski, Philip Levine and Robert Tressell, beautiful hymns of praise to skilled workers everywhere who handle the dangerous Promethean gift of fire:\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302791623029,"sku":"9781739772284","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772284_7c491ffb-2ea2-431d-afaf-add345bd84a6.jpg?v=1786024210"},{"product_id":"9781739473464","title":"Being Gemini","description":"\u003cp\u003eBorn under the star sign Gemini, thrust into an adult secular world from an unquestioning faith background, Marilyn Longstaff lives somewhere between the miraculous, the magical and the everyday. Being Gemini is a book about the two sides of everything – lockdowns, ageing, deafness, politics and bereavement – and learning to be ‘neither one thing nor the other.’\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303308931445,"sku":"9781739473464","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473464_7efc809c-30be-4b4e-977c-06409f4c1b99.jpg?v=1786024860"},{"product_id":"9781739173081","title":"The Infinite Town","description":"What happens when the news gets into your dreams and unravels the work of the day? When you feel homesick, especially when you are at home? What happens when the future tracks you down and corners you? Who blinks first? The Infinite Town is a painful – and playful – mapping of public spaces and private places under assault. Exploring history, home, hurt, and hope in four interconnected sequences, Robinson’s search for the infinite possibilities of the everyday, of empathy and solidarity, leads to his most intricately structured and musical collection yet.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303691825525,"sku":"9781739173081","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173081_bf195e72-7a71-4f04-b8aa-a249328277c5.jpg?v=1786024550"},{"product_id":"9781739473433","title":"Bigger on the Inside","description":"\u003cp\u003eBigger on the Inside is a neuroqueer imaginary of Timelords, psychologists, octopuses, sparkly things and mushrooms. Kate Fox travels through time and space in search of solutions to the Double Empathy Problem. Along the way she encounters monotropists, labels, stigmas and people with differently wired brains. In this poetic exploration of neurodiversity, terms like Autism and ADHD can be bestowed, refused, fought for, resisted, queered or overturned. As the Doctor once said, ‘a straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting…’\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303718859125,"sku":"9781739473433","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473433_599c8909-6ea2-4727-b353-f13155dedd10.jpg?v=1786024857"},{"product_id":"9781739473402","title":"Unselected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor many poets there comes a point in their careers when a Selected Poems seems a logical step. Their style is now established, their subject-matter is their own, and their greatest hits lend themselves to a succinct introduction to their career. But for WN Herbert, that was never what it was all about. The idea that he has had a career, let alone that it was ‘about’ anything, strikes him as extremely unlikely. Instead, he has always enjoyed the opportunity to head off in as many directions as possible. Usually at the same time.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn addition to his main collections, WN Herbert has been involved in many collaborative side projects, arising from travel, dialogue, translation and the challenge of a new sequence or form. This book contains the best of his ‘unselected’ poems, including On Your Nerve: A Wake for Frank O’Hara, Don Juan’s Pilgrimage and his award-winning pamphlet, Murder Bear. Unselected Poems is an invitation to consider the less-travelled tracks we might have taken and could yet follow, whether as writers or readers. Set off, if you would – follow that bear!\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303718924661,"sku":"9781739473402","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473402_9d305fef-c2e1-428c-9f20-e4f459ead243.jpg?v=1786024853"},{"product_id":"9781739772246","title":"More Bloody Clerihews","description":"\u003cp\u003eFollowing their widely ignored 2019 anthology \u003ci\u003eThe Call of the Clerihew\u003c\/i\u003e, George Szirtes and Andy Jackson make another doomed attempt to interest the world in the ridiculous four-line biographical poetic form known as the Clerihew. Invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) when he was a schoolboy, the Clerihew is a childish and pointless anti-Panegyric consisting of flat-footed, Hudibrastic quatrains designed to lower the tone and cut everyone down to size. Some have called the Clerihew a mini-epic in four lines. Others have called it the Limerick’s smarter cousin. WH Auden once wrote an entire book of the bloody things.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis new selection of short, satirical and often scurrilous poems throws together poets like Michael Rosen, WN Herbert, Jacqueline Saphra, Tom Deveson, Mark Totterdell, Adam Horovitz and Anne Berkeley as they take down various actors, architects, chefs, comedians, detectives, puppets and philosophers\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303730098549,"sku":"9781739772246","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772246_2da7280f-0780-40d3-95c3-946828739cbe.jpg?v=1786024208"},{"product_id":"9781739473457","title":"Out of Gaza","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt the beginning of the Fifth Gaza War, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer defiantly promised that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers’. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the building.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSince the outbreak of the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ in October 2023, over 20k Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, almost all of them civilians. Four thousand children were killed in the first few weeks of the war. A third of all the houses have been destroyed, together with the water and electricity infrastructure, 300 schools, 26 hospitals and 88 mosques, turning Gaza into what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called a ‘graveyard’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOut of Gaza brings together responses to the current crisis by Palestinian poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Farid Bitar, Deema Shehabi, Hala Alyan, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. These are poems of rubble and resilience, death and resistance; they speak about displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Angry with the world’s silence in the face of such tragedy, these poems bear witness to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA percentage of the sales of this book go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303909339509,"sku":"9781739473457","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473457_d6d553a5-bc4f-4900-a27c-a1ff0fcc8a2d.jpg?v=1786024859"},{"product_id":"9781739173029","title":"The Dogs","description":"\u003cp\u003eA book about what humans have done to the world and what we have done to ourselves. Specifically, it is a book about ‘Man’s best friends’ – their origin-myths, and their place in the world before they were coopted into human society and ideas of pure breeding and dysgenics. The Dogs also imagines a future where dogs develop the power of speech; led by the non-violent UnderDogs and the more radical Der Uberhünd, the animals of the world begin demanding their rights.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303931687285,"sku":"9781739173029","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739173029_39422ba3-bd94-4739-a242-d276407f3ae8.jpg?v=1786024544"},{"product_id":"9781739473426","title":"Love and War","description":"\u003cp\u003eA selection, in English, of the work of forty-five contemporary Kurdish women poets, including Bejan Matur, Sara Aktas, Fadwa Kilani and Sînîn Çaycî.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304075014517,"sku":"9781739473426","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473426_ab407a39-e0d9-4198-9d46-698caeed0d1d.jpg?v=1786024855"},{"product_id":"9781838198855","title":"Ferocious","description":"\u003cp\u003eSelina Rodrigues’ much-anticipated first collection takes a long look at the invisible ecology of contemporary urban living and working – call-centres, computer screens, night-shift cleaners, building sites – and the competing structures of time and money, labour and desire. It’s a book about online desires, migratory workers and childcare, and the flat-packed silences of alienation, all framed by city skylines.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307516342645,"sku":"9781838198855","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"9781838198879","title":"Greedy Cow","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn her early sixties Fiona Sinclair decided to become a ‘biker-chick’. Despite the disapproval of her friends and her own anxieties, she suddenly found herself in ‘full biker armour’, doing a ton down the M2, the wind in her hair, learning to lean into the corners.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGreedy Cow \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about new lovers and old habits, first dates and second chances, Espresso highs and gourmet sex, in which riding pillion is a metaphor for the risks of love and desire in middle-age – speed, danger and reckless adventure, his ‘Steve McQueen cool’, and her ‘disobedient body’.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307743523189,"sku":"9781838198879","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"9781838465384","title":"Dummy!","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘I am the man who abandoned Alan Bennett under a bus shelter in Armley,’ writes Jim Greenhalf in his new collection. It’s partly an instruction manual for dummies on how to hack out a kind of contentment in spite of the times, even if you have an inflated prostate and ‘a pig’s bladder of piss’ strapped to your leg. \u003ci\u003eDummy!\u003c\/i\u003e is also a book about History. It’s a reverie of times passing – ‘when peace was love\/and love was free for all\/who could afford it’ – a howl of mockery, and a refusal to join in the triumphal march of post-Modernity. It’s a study in difficulty and dismay, and an attempt to praise the mutilated world in spite of all its disappointments.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307829506421,"sku":"9781838465384","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781838465384_7cc67d06-69ab-4397-a3fd-d6e2be740b1b.jpg?v=1786027805"},{"product_id":"9781838465377","title":"The Knucklebone Floor","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Knucklebone Floor\u003c\/i\u003e is partly a verse biography of Susan Davidson (1796-1877), who spent thirty years landscaping and developing the grounds of Allen Banks in Northumberland, including woodland, paths, rustic bridges and a summerhouse with a knucklebone floor. It is also a book about boundaries and wilderness, fragility and resilience, flora and fauna, people and places, then and now, women and men, the human world and the natural world. Richly and formally inventive, it offers a collective perspective of history, identity and ecology at a time of global fragmentation and ecological crisis.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308004290933,"sku":"9781838465377","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781838465377_a6293ff0-f7a9-4a5d-8b60-93aed909bd2d.jpg?v=1786027806"},{"product_id":"9781916312135","title":"Chips, Paracetemols and Wine","description":"\u003cp\u003eChips, paracetamol and wine. The things we need to keep us alive, and the things we need to dull the pain of being alive.These are poems about the weakness, foolishness and brilliance of human life, places rarely visited, poems without convenient endings. Hopeful and hopeless, detached and engaged, this is a book about dunderheids and smackheads, lost cats and stuffed dogs, Charles Bukowski, Jimmy Johnstone and Kylie’s golden pants. \u003ci\u003eChips, Paracetamol and Wine\u003c\/i\u003e holds up a mirror to the world, reflecting the chaos just below the surface; just the way things are.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309013479797,"sku":"9781916312135","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312135_12b48458-c01e-4a76-ad20-c6a1547b0c6b.jpg?v=1786030169"},{"product_id":"9781999827656","title":"Les Chambres","description":"\u003cp\u003ePublished in 1969, \u003ci\u003eLes Chambres \u003c\/i\u003ewas\u003cb\u003e Louis Aragon\u003c\/b\u003e’s last collection. Subtitled \u003ci\u003epoème du temps qui ne passe pas\u003c\/i\u003e, it is a beautiful and melancholy meditation on time, age and love, a last gift to his wife Elsa Triolet who died the following year: ‘\u003ci\u003eC’est le dernier cadeau que j’ai fait à Elsa, histoire d’avouer que tout entre nous n’a pas été si ensoleillé qu’on se plaisait, qu’on se plaît à le croire, qu’il y a eu entre nous des journées comme celle-là par exemple où je t’avais perdue, dont il est question dans Les Chambres. Cette phrase tourne sur elle-même. Ainsi la vie et la mémoire\u003c\/i\u003e.’\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309485044085,"sku":"9781999827656","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999827656_93b4573a-9016-4dc0-aa07-f58e409f31ca.jpg?v=1786031881"},{"product_id":"9781999827670","title":"Song of Stars","description":"\u003cp\u003eBetween 1940 and 1945 over 100,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands and murdered (three quarters of the Dutch-Jewish population). One of these was Sientje Abram, an eleven year-old girl from Amsterdam who was killed at Auschwitz in 1942. \u003cb\u003eGuus Luijters\u003c\/b\u003e first came across Sientje’s name when he was writing a book about the 18,000 Dutch children murdered during the German Occupation. But he could find out nothing about her. All those who knew her were also killed. And unlike Anne Frank, she left no written records. Then one night Sientje started a poetic dialogue with Luijters. The result is Song of Stars, in which Sientje recalls the street where she spent her childhood and the lost world of old Jewish Amsterdam. The final section contains the names of the 331 children from Rapenburgerstraat who were killed by the Nazis. \u003ci\u003eSong of Stars\u003c\/i\u003e is a compelling and terrible book about xenophobia, cultural amnesia and public memory.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309485371765,"sku":"9781999827670","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999827670_015801b4-a672-4fda-9395-be64ba53a4a2.jpg?v=1786031882"},{"product_id":"9781916312128","title":"Anxious Corporals","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAnxious Corporals\u003c\/i\u003e is a celebration of the lost world of the self-educating working-class, from Mr Kipps, Leonard Bast and the Age of Hooper to Workington Man. Taking its title from Arthur Koestler's idea of the culture-thirsty conscript, Morrison recalls the men and women who once sought 'self-improvement' through correspondence courses, adult education, political parties and Pelican paperbacks. It’s an essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, Reason and Reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the post-war consensus.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309534425461,"sku":"9781916312128","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312128_3d360cb9-73d6-41b5-aa91-6d1454bb8f56.jpg?v=1786030168"},{"product_id":"9781916139299","title":"Accursed Poets","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAccursed Poets: Dissident Poetry from Soviet Russia 1960-80 \u003c\/i\u003eis an anthology of dissident and samizdat poetry in Russian and English translation, featuring work by Gennady Aigi, Yuri Aikhenvald, Yuli Daniel, Vladimir Earle, Yuri Galanskov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Igor Kholin, Victor Krivulin, Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Rea Nikonova, Victor Nekipelov, Grigory Podyapolsky, Genrikh Sapgir, Ian Satunovsky, Mikhail Sokovnin and Kari Unksova.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAccursed Poets captures the frustration, suppressed ambitions and hidden energy of the ‘accursed’ generation of poets living a life outside or against society. Because so many of these authors not allowed to publish their work openly, they had to write ‘into the table.’ The work collected here documents Russian poetry in the 1970s and 1980s responding to the challenges of the time by forging a radical new poetic, reconsidering writing techniques and the purpose of language itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309667856757,"sku":"9781916139299","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916139299_cb7dd66c-4780-4f1f-b518-f8d3d3eed764.jpg?v=1786030991"},{"product_id":"9781916312197","title":"Nomad","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eNomad \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about Time – geological, mythic, historical and familial.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing the long journey from a pre-human world to the Gates of Grief,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePaul Mills’ new collection tells a story of antler-bone spears, virgin forests,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003estone-tools, hand-prints on rock, ancestors and grandchildren. It’s about\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003epeople together, the importance of art and story-making, of compassion and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eempathy. Above all, \u003ci\u003eNomad \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about learning to use technology to\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esurvive the natural world without destroying it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309672640885,"sku":"9781916312197","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312197_518cdb48-762b-42d1-a39f-3713157063f1.jpg?v=1786030172"},{"product_id":"9780993454752","title":"New Boots and Pantisocracies","description":"\u003cp\u003eWelcome poets, polemicists and disbelieving masses! New pants for old! The 2015 General Election made manifest changes that have been taking place in UK politics this century. Previous certainties like Labour’s Scottish hegemony are no more. Older patterns like the Conservative dominance of England have reasserted themselves. The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of national, regional, generational and class identities.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe week after the election Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson decided to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators of the world – poets – to the new dispensation. For the first 100 days of the new government they published a poem a day on their \u003cem\u003eNew Boots and Pantisocracies\u003c\/em\u003e blog, recording life under the new unrealpolitik. Now it is a book by over a hundred of the most compelling and distinguished poets of our time, including Sean O’Brien, Sheenagh Pugh, Daljit Nagra, Claudia Daventry, Ian Duhig, Michael Rosen, Polly Clark, Ian McMillan, George Szirtes and Malika Booker.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNew Boots and Pantisocracies\u003c\/em\u003e takes its name from the idealistic plans of Coleridge and Southey for a social utopia or ‘pantisocracy’, and from Ian Dury’s iconic first album, with its ironic and melancholy celebration of working class identity on the eve of the Thatcherite \u003cem\u003erevanche\u003c\/em\u003e. It is a book of poems and polemics, contraries and resistances, appalled but not entirely despairing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312015454581,"sku":"9780993454752","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780993454752_b6a99ebd-1590-448f-8ff5-a86d8a06486d.jpg?v=1786015706"},{"product_id":"9781739473440","title":"Pebbles","description":"\u003cp\u003eMichael Rosen has been, for many years, a prodigious and prolific user of Twitter (now known as 'Eggs'). Unlike the armies of ‘anonymous tweeters \/ raging in the twilight’, his Tweets are variously fables, squibs, musings, daily observations and lifelong preoccupations – pitted prunes, anteaters, Sisyphus, the sound of rain stopping, garlic pickle, blocked sinks, lost suitcases, legs, hummus and bagels, Sats tests, Runcorn, grief, saggy jumpers, chicken soup, Eurovision, COVID, labyrinthitis, kookaburras, fringe-magnets, cucumber raita, sneezing, shamans, raisins, armpit scratching, Rishi Sunak’s maths, pest-control, Dominic Raab and Franz Kafka, skip-wrestling, the after-life, the icing on the cake, antisemitism, Gaza…\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePebbles\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of some of Michael Rosen’s most recent poetry-tweets. Sharp, pithy and eloquent, serious and comical, wise and perplexed, these are the everyday reports of an ‘optimistic nihilist' –someone who doesn’t believe there is any point to existence, but thinks that this is a good reason to make the most of this life while we can.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312778195317,"sku":"9781739473440","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739473440_bc69ddb0-fc38-4b70-854e-b112247f9c4c.jpg?v=1786024858"},{"product_id":"9781739772215","title":"Mad Parade","description":"\u003cp\u003eA collection of white-hot political satirical poems taking the piss out of some of the knaves and fools who parade their poisonous egos across the stage – Tony Blair, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Shelley, Burns and Johnny Cash help put Neil Fulwood the boot in on sycophantic royalists, blue passports, Margaret Thatcher’s monument and the immortal heroes of Change UK. Funny, furious and profane, it’s a book of hit-and-run poems, take-no-prisoners, drive-by attacks in verse on the Ancient Regime.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312779309429,"sku":"9781739772215","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772215_0c2b0679-9a37-4cdf-a333-5e9d01828d73.jpg?v=1786024206"},{"product_id":"9781838465360","title":"The Blockade Swallow","description":"\u003cp\u003eOlga Berggolts (1910-1975) was a Soviet poet, playwright and journalist, whose daily broadcasts on Leningrad radio during the Nazi blockade of the city (1941-44) became a symbol of the city's refusal to surrender. One and a half million people starved to death during the siege, including Berggolts’ husband. In 1943 she was awarded the Defence of Leningrad medal. After the War, the publication of Berggolts’ writings about the suffering of ordinary Leningraders were an important part of the Khrushchev Thaw. The Leningrad memorial to those who died during the Blockade quotes her famous line, ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Blockade Swallow\u003c\/i\u003e is a representative selection of Berggolts’ work from 1925-60 – the NEP years, the Terror (when she was imprisoned for two years), War and Blockade, to the Zhdanovchina and the Thaw, bearing eloquent witness to some of the most tragic events of the twentieth century. Veniamin Gushchin’s translations beautifully capture the defiance, anguish and vulnerability of her poetry for English readers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313009832309,"sku":"9781838465360","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781838465360_bd4b01d3-47bf-42ff-86a3-27aceb738ff8.jpg?v=1786027803"},{"product_id":"9781916312111","title":"Subsidence","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe ground gives, the walls crack and our foundations are laid bare, revealing fragments of history, myth and memory we had forgotten once were ours.\u003ci\u003e Subsidence\u003c\/i\u003e is about the post-industrial Black Country landscape, where houses sink into old mines and the present collapses into the past beneath our feet. Written just before and after the 2016 Brexit referendum, these poems are love-songs to the dialect and culture of the Black Country, odes to working-class communities, and laments for the unwanted, the strange and off-kilter.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313188221301,"sku":"9781916312111","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312111_605c9c62-86f0-4685-bf80-45313f91646e.jpg?v=1786030167"},{"product_id":"9781916312159","title":"Attempts on Death","description":"\u003cp\u003eBaghdad 2003. The city is in flames, caught between a violent dictatorship and an illegal invasion. For the US it is ‘mission accomplished’. For Iraqis it is the beginning of a nightmare apocalypse in which over half a million people will die. Meanwhile the world’s cameras ‘stuff themselves with dust and human flesh.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAttempts on Death \u003c\/i\u003eis an attempt by the Iraqi poet and diplomat Chawki Abdelamir to understand the historic destruction of his country and the breaking of its millennia-old past into fragments. It’s a book about oil and sand, soldiers and civilians, heroes and martyrs, the innocent and the dead. Drawing on Sumerian mythology, Islamic history, Arab poetry and the everyday horror of twenty-first century warfare, Chawki tries to explain how Mesopotamia – the legendary paradise of palm-trees and vineyards, and the birthplace of human civilisation –is reduced to a delirious hell ‘where the dead are dying of thirst and the living of madness’. Grim, despairing and desperate, \u003ci\u003eAttempts on Death \u003c\/i\u003eis also a rich, sensual and ultimately optimistic book.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313188647285,"sku":"9781916312159","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916312159_9e5d36f4-f0f9-46fd-bfbd-715be1180bc6.jpg?v=1786030170"},{"product_id":"subject-matters","title":"Subject Matters","description":"\u003cp\u003eAfter breaking a thirty-five year writer’s block with \u003cem\u003eBlues in the Park\u003c\/em\u003e, Jeremy Robson’s new collection of poems is his second book in three years. \u003cem\u003eSubject Matters\u003c\/em\u003e takes us into a world that is both contemporary and timeless. Many of these poems are personal, recalling the pleasure of a smile, a landscape or a song, and the lives of friends like Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Others evoke scenes and subjects from an earlier era – Dick Barton, Roy Rogers, Paris in the 1950s, London jazz clubs, CND rallies, telephone exchanges with sexy names – occasionally drawing on his Jewish experience to give context to his depiction of a modern world where violence explodes with increasing fury and the sirens rarely stop. All subjects that matter.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57483536892277,"sku":"9780995563520","price":12.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780995563520.jpg?v=1786178712"},{"product_id":"separated-from-the-sun","title":"Separated from the Sun","description":"\u003cp\u003eA selection of poems by the Kurdish writer\u003cb\u003e İlhan Sami Çomak\u003c\/b\u003e, imprisoned in Turkey since 1994. He was arrested when he was a student, tortured and charged with membership of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party. The European Court of Human Rights has since ruled that Çomak's conviction was unlawful. He has twice appealed against his conviction; both appeals were unsuccessful. In prison he has published eight books of poetry and become one of Turkey's longest serving political prisoners. In 2018, Çomak won the Sennur Sezer poetry prize for Geldim Sana (I Came to You).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57487732146549,"sku":"9781739772239","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781739772239.jpg?v=1786354957"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-smokestack-books.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}