Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life. 'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it. Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'

Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.

Joan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain's major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but over the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and was Spain's most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. He was awarded both the 2019 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, and the Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award in for Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. In his later collection, Strangely Happy (2011), he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. In Love Is a Place, which brings together the poems of three recent collections, he finds himself face to face with the prospect of his own death, while rediscovering love. 'Death is the final solitude,' he writes in 'On the ground', but the image at the end of the poem is one of hope, of love, and of home, not 'the skeleton with the scythe that Durer engraved' but 'a brightly-lit window in a dark street.' The three collections see him moving from despair to self-knowledge, confronting his old demons with honesty and courage. Love, it seems, is not after all 'hard or far away', nor was the signal lost, because, in the poet's words,, 'Love is a place. / It endures beyond everything: from there we come. / And it's the place where life remains.'

A poetry anthology to aid the work of MACMILLAN CANCER SUPPORT Including 2012 T S Eliot Prize Winner SHARON OLDS Nobel Prize in Literature winner SEAMUS HEANEY Supporters BOB DYLAN, LEONARD COHEN and JONI MITCHELL Grammy Award winning Renaissance Woman MAYA ANGELOU 2010 T S Eliot shortlisted poet PASCALE PETIT Cholmondeley Award winners PENELOPE SHUTTLE and MONIZA ALVI World renowned poet and performer BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH Classic poets including Betjeman, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Wordsworth, Byron, Pushkin, Housman, Browning, Keats, Clare, Donne and many more... PLUS established and new poets who believe in the cause... Heart Shoots has 'love' as the general theme of the majority of poems. It has been compiled by us to reach all members of the buying public, from those who are familiar with the best poets writing today, the millions of fans that follow Bob Dylan et al, and those millions of people who support the work of Macmillan and want to read accessible poetry that they can relate to.

First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds' Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as "a daring and elegant first book. This is a poetry which affirms and redeems the art."

"A collection of poems that give rich drama to ordinary experience, deepening our sense of what it means to be human."--Pulitzer Prize finalist citation

"There is a broad, powerful streak of independence--even disobedience--that runs through Stone's writing and has inspired a great number of women after her."--"Guardian"

Finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this retrospective of Ruth Stone's poetry combines the best work from twelve previous volumes with an abundance of new poems. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide and her own blindness. As Sharon Olds says in her foreword, "A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands--ardent, independent, restless." "What Love Comes To" is a necessary collection from an American original.

"Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze--
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is--
hanging at the window
of an empty room."

Ruth Stone is the author of twelve books of poetry. Among her many awards are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award, a Whiting Award, and she was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE*

Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us a new collection of poems that sing of a woman’s intimate life and political conscience. The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, the cervix, Trayvon Martin, her mother’s return from the dead: the peerless Sharon Olds once again takes up subject matter that is both difficult and ordinary, elusive and everywhere.

Each aria is shaped by its unique melody and moral logic, as Olds stands centre stage to account for her own late romance and chance wisdom, and faces the tragic life of our nation and our planet. ‘I cannot say I did not ask / to be born,’ begins one aria, which considers how, with what actions, with what thirst, we each ask for a turn, and receive our portion on earth. Olds delivers these pieces with all the passion, anguish, and solo force that make a great performance, in the process enlarging the soul of her readers.

‘Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die’ Fiona Benson

**Featured in the Guardian’s Season’s Reading, selected by Fiona Benson**

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'. Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

'Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring.' Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of the Year Opening with a powerful and tender 'Ode to the Hymen', Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as 'Ode to My Sister', 'Ode of Broken Loyalty', 'Ode to My Whiteness', 'Blow Job Ode', 'Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window', Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her - the 'Sheffield Mountain Ode' for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here - Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

The latest volume in Penguin Modern Poets series - moving and unflinchingly honest poems from three different cultures about experiences of the female body, the family, sexual politics and conflict Your Family, Your Body features the work of Malika Booker, the Guyanese-British writer and performer behind London- and Chicago-based collective Malika's Kitchen; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sharon Olds, one of America's most brilliant, beloved and candid voices; and Warsan Shire, the award-winning poet and first ever Young Poetry Laureate of London who also lent her words to Beyonce's visual album Lemonade. Inspired by Penguin's enormously successful '60s series of the same name, the Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry fan and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices.

"Stag's Leap" is stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.
In this wise and intimate telling--which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending--Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable "Stag's Leap," "When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver." Olds's propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music--sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.

From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.

These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.



From the Hardcover edition.

Originally published in 1965 as a novel, due (as the current publisher notes) to issues of privacy and political concerns in Ireland and the US, poet Muriel Rukeyser's memoir is here presented as its author intended. As Sharon Olds notes in her Preface, "The Orgy", set during Rukeyser's visit at the request of a friend to Puck Fair in County Kerry, Ireland, the last pagan festival, where "the goat is the king of all", is "the story of a search less for sexual experience than for knowledge of the meaning of sexual experience.... It is an odyssey written at a crossroads. It is a tale in which issues of loneliness, autonomy, oppression, sexual identity, prejudice, and sexual preference lie on or just under the surface.... "The Orgy" has layers, and secrets.... It is a message in a bottle -- a brilliant packet of messages in a far-traveled bottle".