Headstones are sliding earthwards. An urban fox forages for slugs. A jogger disappears into a forest of sycamores as high-rise blocks glister with the last of the sun. Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries. Stealing through the shadows, McCabe discovers stories of maritime disasters and the war dead, veers off the path with contemporary poet Stephen Watts, and trawls the archives to uncover one of London's overlooked mavericks, the career criminal-turned-poet William 'Spring' Onions. McCabe's lyrical prose and trademark dark wit are interrupted by a 'disembodied essay', spoken by a poltergeist who has returned to haunt his master's house. In this, the third instalment of McCabe's journey through London's Magnificent Seven, the stakes are raised as he places himself into the foreground of the cemetery as a performer. Can the burial grounds become a space for live theatre? Will the voices of the dead rise to meet the living? What ghosts emerge when darkness falls?

The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the `inscape' of the living world. In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darklycomic and a true original.

Gold Medal Winner for Poetry and Special Honours Award for Best of Anthology at the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards. One language is falling silent every two weeks. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will be lost by the end of this century. With the loss of these languages, we also lose the unique poetic traditions of their speakers and writers. Poems from the Edge of Extinction gathers together 50 poems in languages from around the world that have been identified as endangered; it is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world. With poems by influential, award-winning poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo, Hawad, Valzhyna Mort, and Jackie Kay, this anthology offers a unique insight into both languages and poetry, taking the reader on an emotional, life-affirming journey into the culture of these beautiful languages. Each poem appears in its original form, alongside an English translation, and is accompanied by a commentary about the language, the poet and the poem - in a vibrant celebration of life, diversity, language, and the enduring power of poetry. This timely collection is passionately edited by widely published poet and UK National Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, who is also the founder of the Endangered Poetry Project, a major project launched by London's Southbank Centre to collect poetry in the world's disappearing languages, and introduced by Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London, and Dr Martin Orwin, Senior Lecturer in Somali and Amharic, SOAS University of London. Languages included in the book: Assyrian; Belarusian; Chimiini; Irish Gaelic; Maori; Navajo; Patua; Rotuman; Saami; Scottish Gaelic; Welsh; Yiddish; Zoque. Poets included in the book: Joy Harjo; Hawad; Jackie Kay; Aurelia Lassaque; Nineb Lamassu; Gearoid Mac Lochlainn; Valzhyna Mort; Laura Tohe; Taniel Varoujan; Avrom Sutzkever.

Silver Medal Winner for Poetry at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards. A powerful new anthology depicting how love over the past two-and-a-half millennia has found its expression in the words of the world's greatest poets. No, Love Is Not Dead is a timely affirmation of the great linguistic diversity of poetry and its ability to express passionate love, the most extreme of human emotions. With influential, award-winning poets including Kim Hyesoon, Laura Tohe and Warsan Shire, and languages ranging from Amharic, Akkadian and Ancient Greek to Yankunytjatjara, Yiddish and Yoruba, this unique anthology engages the reader in reflective tales of unlikely love stories and impossible love, love in a time of politics, surrealist love, visual love and free love, offering an intuitive insight into both historical and present-day perceptions of love across cultures. Including over 50 poets, writing on each of the world's continents, this new anthology of poems about love features a diverse range of original poems written in a variety of languages - modern, ancient, endangered and constructed -, accompanied by English translations and commentaries. Poets included in the book: Apollinaire; Nicole Brossard; Augusto de Campos; Catullus; Chaucer; Dante; Robert Desnos; Ali Cobby Eckermann; Goethe; Kim Hyesoon; Louise Labé; Federico Garcia Lorca; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Miklós Radnóti; Kutti Ravathi; Sappho; Warsan Shire; Laura Tohe; Marina Tsvetaeva. Languages included in the book: Akkadian; Amharic; Ancient Greek; Faroese; French; German; Hungarian; Italian; Japanese; Latvian; Maori; Persian; Polari; Portuguese; Russian; Sanskrit; Scots; Scottish Gaelic; Serbian; Spanish; Urdu; Welsh; Yoruba. Foreword by Laura Tohe, the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus with Distinction at Arizona State University, who has won awards including the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, and the Arizona Book Association's Glyph Award for Best Poetry.

In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist. Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.

Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham.Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' and a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.

Gold Medal Winner for Poetry and Special Honours Award for Best of Anthology at the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards. One language is falling silent every two weeks. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will be lost by the end of this century. With the loss of these languages, we also lose the unique poetic traditions of their speakers and writers. Poems from the Edge of Extinction gathers together 50 poems in languages from around the world that have been identified as endangered; it is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world. With poems by influential, award-winning poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo, Hawad, Valzhyna Mort, and Jackie Kay, this anthology offers a unique insight into both languages and poetry, taking the reader on an emotional, life-affirming journey into the culture of these beautiful languages. Each poem appears in its original form, alongside an English translation, and is accompanied by a commentary about the language, the poet and the poem - in a vibrant celebration of life, diversity, language, and the enduring power of poetry. This timely collection is passionately edited by widely published poet and UK National Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, who is also the founder of the Endangered Poetry Project, a major project launched by London's Southbank Centre to collect poetry in the world's disappearing languages, and introduced by Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London, and Dr Martin Orwin, Senior Lecturer in Somali and Amharic, SOAS University of London. Languages included in the book: Assyrian; Belarusian; Chimiini; Irish Gaelic; Maori; Navajo; Patua; Rotuman; Saami; Scottish Gaelic; Welsh; Yiddish; Zoque. Poets included in the book: Joy Harjo; Hawad; Jackie Kay; Aurelia Lassaque; Nineb Lamassu; Gearoid Mac Lochlainn; Valzhyna Mort; Laura Tohe; Taniel Varoujan; Avrom Sutzkever.

Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire's Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood. In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Browning are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.

Silver Medal Winner for Poetry at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards. A powerful new anthology depicting how love over the past two-and-a-half millennia has found its expression in the words of the world's greatest poets. No, Love Is Not Dead is a timely affirmation of the great linguistic diversity of poetry and its ability to express passionate love, the most extreme of human emotions. With influential, award-winning poets including Kim Hyesoon, Laura Tohe and Warsan Shire, and languages ranging from Amharic, Akkadian and Ancient Greek to Yankunytjatjara, Yiddish and Yoruba, this unique anthology engages the reader in reflective tales of unlikely love stories and impossible love, love in a time of politics, surrealist love, visual love and free love, offering an intuitive insight into both historical and present-day perceptions of love across cultures. Including over 50 poets, writing on each of the world's continents, this new anthology of poems about love features a diverse range of original poems written in a variety of languages - modern, ancient, endangered and constructed -, accompanied by English translations and commentaries. Poets included in the book: Apollinaire; Nicole Brossard; Augusto de Campos; Catullus; Chaucer; Dante; Robert Desnos; Ali Cobby Eckermann; Goethe; Kim Hyesoon; Louise Labe; Federico Garcia Lorca; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Miklos Radnoti; Kutti Ravathi; Sappho; Warsan Shire; Laura Tohe; Marina Tsvetaeva. Languages included in the book: Akkadian; Amharic; Ancient Greek; Faroese; French; German; Hungarian; Italian; Japanese; Latvian; Maori; Persian; Polari; Portuguese; Russian; Sanskrit; Scots; Scottish Gaelic; Serbian; Spanish; Urdu; Welsh; Yoruba. Foreword by Laura Tohe, the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus with Distinction at Arizona State University, who has won awards including the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, and the Arizona Book Association's Glyph Award for Best Poetry.