Are you thinking about applying to teacher training in England? Not sure where to start or what to expect? This is your comprehensive go-to guide with helpful information and advice to help you on this very special journey ahead! Written by experts on initial teacher training in England, this guide: helps you understand the many different routes in to teaching provides essential information about the education sector and the different types of state schools offers advice and practice tests to pass the mandatory Professional Skills tests in numeracy and literacy gives insight about the application process and helpful tips to confidently face your interview Everything you need to know to secure your place on a teacher training course - now in one easy accessible guide!

The clock is ticking and before you know, it will be September! Use our popular study guides Passing the Numeracy Skills Test and Passing the Literacy Skills Test to get those pesky skills tests done and dusted asap. This fifth edition includes a full practice test, more practice questions and more question and answer commentary. Also included is more guidance on grammar, punctuation and spelling practice for the test. You'll be more confident These books are authored by experts who know the QTS skills tests inside out and used by thousands and thousands of aspiring teachers just like you. You'll know what's coming Hints, tips and handy Q&As help you fully understand the format and structure of the tests and know what to expect on the day of the test. You'll secure your place sooner With full practice tests and loads of practice questions these books will help you get a great score, pass the first time and secure your place on the course sooner rather than later. You can do this!

"The poems in Bruce Bond's new collection "Peal "probe music's deepest sources. These beautifully crafted lyrics lead us down into intricate and sonoruous paths where we meet out own uncertain songs, at once ghostly, elegiac, and ecstatic. This is a work of exquisite complexity by one of our best poets writing today."--Molly Bendall

"The speculative drive of these poems pushes the reader to the very limits of reflection."--Daniel Tiffany

"Poets have ever sought a seamless integration of art and life: think of Keats's 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' or Yeats's 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' In Bruce Bond's "Peal," as in the work of this best predecessors, 'it is impossible to know/where music ends, the world begins.'"--H.L. Hix

In Bruce Bond's seventh book, we see a sustained exploration of mortality and its embodiment in the consolations of beauty, most notably in music.

"As if even the respite of song is action,
its silence no less. Even the bend and reach
of architecture that rises out of the smolder
and back, even the legs of the arc that return
the way the sun returns to a black well,
its trespass quiet, slow, a ghost, a coin,
a wish gone deep as the day grows old."

Bruce Bond teaches at the University of North Texas and is poetry editor for "American Literary Review."

Are you thinking about applying to teacher training in England? Not sure where to start or what to expect? This is your comprehensive go-to guide with helpful information and advice to help you on this very special journey ahead! Written by experts on initial teacher training in England, this guide: helps you understand the many different routes in to teaching provides essential information about the education sector and the different types of state schools offers advice and practice tests to pass the mandatory Professional Skills tests in numeracy and literacy gives insight about the application process and helpful tips to confidently face your interview Everything you need to know to secure your place on a teacher training course - now in one easy accessible guide!

Blackout Starlight brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence. In Bond's telling, the lines between real and unreal, living and dead, blur together in the poet's imagination, casting an equally compassionate eye upon ""the man we see writhing in the marble"" of an uncarved statue and the son at a funeral trying to face ""the other half of life, the part / without my father in it."" Taken together, the selections in this book represent the highlights of a dazzling career in poetry and leave the reader eager for many more years of Bond's verses to come.

The clock is ticking and before you know, it will be September! Use our popular study guides Passing the Numeracy Skills Test and Passing the Literacy Skills Test to get those pesky skills tests done and dusted asap. This fifth edition includes a full practice test, more practice questions and more question and answer commentary. Also included is more guidance on grammar, punctuation and spelling practice for the test. You'll be more confident These books are authored by experts who know the QTS skills tests inside out and used by thousands and thousands of aspiring teachers just like you. You'll know what's coming Hints, tips and handy Q&As help you fully understand the format and structure of the tests and know what to expect on the day of the test. You'll secure your place sooner With full practice tests and loads of practice questions these books will help you get a great score, pass the first time and secure your place on the course sooner rather than later. You can do this!

For the Lost Cathedral delves deeply into the human relationship with the divine and its capacity for empathy, transformation, and the tolerance of difference and doubt. Bruce Bond seeks neither to praise nor to attack institutional religions, instead choosing to explore their interactions with the inner lives of those who hold them sacred. Faith can offer comfort and security in difficult times, yet it may also create the temptation to hold to absolutes. For the Lost Cathedral examines the tensions inherent in spiritual devotion as well as the impact of such devotion on our most defining conflicts, creativities, and acts of sacrifice. In poems whose formal simplicity belies the depth of their complexity and insight, Bond explores a dialogue between the spiritual and the religious. A tour de force of emotional truth and focus, For the Lost Cathedral embodies a spirit of wonder in the face of difficulties that might otherwise appear intractable.

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page -- the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see.

Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand."

In his newest collection, Blind Rain, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time. Bond opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which consoles paradoxically, since it is a form of loss itself. The work includes a long meditation, ""The Return,"" that hinges on the double sense of the word ""true"" as suggesting both ""the real"" and ""the loyal,"" and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a postmodern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the world at hand. From Wake: ""One day now since my father last tried to speak, // since the outer provinces of his body shut // down like small cities when the power goes, // just the enormity of starlight to guide them // on their cold journey into dawn. I am writing // at the edge of the other half of life, the part // without my father in it; I feel the strange // sure pull of the earth I walk here, // the polish of the grass, the distance between me // and my students who look up and wait // for my first questions, knowing so little // of my life, just as I know so little of theirs, // only a poem at a time to hold us together // like children before a fire in the woods.

In Invention of the Wilderness, Bruce Bond explores the wilderness as a spiritual, psychological, and ecological realm-a territory that, depending on our tolerances and affections, calls out for order, exploitation, expansion, or preservation. Although to talk of "inventing" the wilderness seems paradoxical, the book seeks to reclaim the etymological root of "invention" as a "venturing in." To invent a wilderness is to go inward by way of attentive engagement in the natural world, to affirm and liberate imaginative expression as no mere mirror of nature, but a force of it. At times meditative and melancholic, though also vibrant and full of life, Invention of the Wilderness proposes an embodied and reflective way of being in the world.

The dead are never far from the living in Patmos, the end is always nigh, and the cultural symptoms of denial and reconciliation, unresolved shame and loneliness, remain just beneath the surface: ""It is how, these many / years, we survived. In our rooms, alone, at the end of time."" In this book-length poetic sequence, Bruce Bond explores the psychology of endings as a living presence that haunts our spiritual, moral, and ecological imaginations, elevates its summons, and draws us to question its significance. The horrors and glories in the revelations of John of Patmos provide a lens into a wound, a crisis of values, a longing to heal a visionary brokenness that is fundamentally solitary and yet contemporary, written against a door that will not open.

Bruce Bond's new collection, Words Written Against the Walls of the City, confronts problems of collectivity and individual freedom in ways that bring the historical into conjunction with the personal details of everyday lives. This luminous work approaches cities, real and symbolic, as both metaphors for and embodiments of the social self, inescapably embedded in a contemporary world and yet removed, summoned by the same technical connectivity that conspires to pull us further apart, one from another. In the end, Bond's assured verse reveals how a sense of some communal whole inspires its share of indebtedness and awe in an individual's efforts to navigate the environments that enfold us.

Gold Bee takes its cue from Wallace Stevens's Harmonium, bringing a finely honed talent to classic poetic questions concerning music, the march of progress, and the relationship between reality and the imagination. Blending humor and pathos, Bruce Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life and explores the various roles music and art play in the human experience.

In these essays, Bruce Bond interrogates the commonly accepted notion that all poetry since modernism tends toward one of two traditions: that of a more architectural sensibility with its resistance to metaphysics, and that of a latter-day Romantic sensibility, which finds its authority in a metaphysics authenticated by the individual imagination. Poetry, whether self-consciously or not, has always thrived on the paradox of the distant in the immanent and the other in the self; as such, it is driven by both a metaphysical hunger and a resistance to metaphysical certainty. Hidden resources of being animate the language of the near, just as near things beckon from an elusive and inarticulate distance. Bond revalidates the role of poetry and, more broadly, of the poetic imagination as both models for and embodiments of a transfigurative process, an imperfectly mimetic yet ontological engendering of consciousness at the limits of a language that must-if cognizant of its psychological, ethical, and epistemological summons-honor that which lies beyond it.

"With the luminous precision of music, Bruce Bond has crafted, in "Cinder," a generous and urgent collection of poems, a work that celebrates the human condition and terrifies us with it in equal measure. The result is a book of poems weighted with dark vision, set loose. Bruce Bond is one of our generation's best poets, and this is his best book."--Laura Kasischke

"Choir of the Wells "is a tetralogy of new books that cohere as an exploration of the mind-body enigma.

"Light, we know, is an invisible thing.
The beam that falls through the theaters
of a childhood-- we trust it's there"

"thanks only to the dust that floats inside it,
and the screen, of course, the stuff that takes
the dark of light and makes of it a story."

Bruce Bond is the author of eight previous books of poetry. He is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and poetry editor for "American Literary Review."