In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.

In Spills Angela Leighton combines poetry, memoir, libretto, short story, prose-poetry and translation, slipping between genres while hearing the conversations between them. 'You start from who you are, and walk and walk', she writes, in the spirit of free-voyaging that defines this collection. The prose tells, semi-fictionally, of the poet's life as the daughter of a composer-father and Italian mother, a life split between languages and places, north and south, often among curious and memorable characters. The poems address related themes of place and language, war and peace, the landscape of southern Italy and the Christian story of the Passion. The conversations between different forms and motifs are a result of Leighton's approach to writing almost as a strain of musical composition. The writing is often about music, but it is also a search for music in writing. The collection closes with a significant new body of translations and adaptations of the Sicilian poet Leonardo Sciascia, Spills's luminous other voice, 'seeking its own heart of music'

Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.

Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden.

There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves.

Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.

Umberto Saba (1883-1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation. National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet's use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction.

This acclaimed book recovers and explores an important tradition of 19th-century women's poetry - from Felicia Hemans to Charlotte Mew. Angela Leighton not only discussed the work o many neglected poets (including Augusta Webster and `Michael Field'), she also charts the development of women's poetry form the sentimentalism of Hemans and L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon)) to the various strategies of self-displacement employed by the best of the Victorians, especially Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti. The work combines biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, and offers new reinterpretations of some original and intriguing literature. Much of this had been by passed or forgotten before Angela Leighton's work. â It is impressive in scope, is highly original in its aims, and is established as the chief critical work in its field.

European Intertexts is the first fruit of an ongoing collaborative study aiming to challenge the isolationism of much critical work on English literature by exploring the interdependence of English and continental European literatures in writing by women. While later volumes will deal with specific texts, this introductory volume provides a descriptive framework and a theoretical basis for studies in the field. Covering issues such as the role of English as a world language, the definition of 'Europe', and the current state of Translation Studies, the book also surveys theories of intertextuality and demonstrates intertextual links between written and visual and film texts. This book is itself pioneering in making a systematic approach to women's writings in English in the context of other European cultures. Although Europe is a political reality, this cultural interpenetration remains largely unexamined, and these essays represent an important first step towards revealing that unexplored richness.

This book recovers and explores an important tradition of nineteenth-century women's poetry from Felicia Hemans to Charlotte Mew. Angela Leighton not only discusses the work of neglected poets such as Augusta Webster and "Michael Field," but also charts the development of women's poetry from sentimentalism of Hemans and L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) to the various strategies of self-displacement employed by the best of the Victorians, especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.

Combining biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, Angela Leighton offers a reinterpretation not only of some original and intriguing literature, but also of the very canon of Victorian poetry. Impressive in scope and highly original in its aims, this study will serve as the main critical work in this area for many years to come.

This book presents a major reassessment of Shelley's poetry. Whereas other criticism has stressed the philosophical and political concerns of his poetry in isolation, Angela Leighton argues that Shelley's philosophy and politics are presented as problems of poetic utterance and are this inseparable from his aesthetics. The author begins by tracing the origins of Shelley's poetic theory in eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime. She then discusses the effect of such a theory on the language of seven of Shelley's most important poems including 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', Prometheus Unbound, 'Ode to the West Wind', 'To a Skylark' and Adonais. In these poems the task of political change is expressed as the prerogative of the inspired poet, who desires to reunite the fallen language of poetry with the original impulse of inspiration that it supplants. This significant contribution to Shelley studies will interest all serious students of English Romantic poetry and aesthetics.

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.

This acclaimed book recovers and explores an important tradition of 19th-century women's poetry - from Felicia Hemans to Charlotte Mew. Angela Leighton not only discusses the work of many neglected poets (including Augusta Webster and `Michael Field'), she also charts the development of women's poetry form the sentimentalism of Hemans and L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon)) to the various strategies of self-displacement employed by the best of the Victorians, especially Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti. The work combines biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, and offers new reinterpretations of some original and intriguing literature. Much of this had been by-passed or forgotten before Angela Leighton's work. â It is impressive in scope, is highly original in its aims, and is established as the chief critical work in its field.