A light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman, who works in the Dylan Thomas Centre, meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn't really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter. Fluent and entertaining the story is written with all the confidence and panache you would expect from the former national poet, also a playwright and award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. Alongside the humour there is a warmth and pathos, and some pithy observations on poets and poetry and the nature of fame.

One of the most dramatic changes to women's lives in the twentieth century was the advent of safe childbirth, reducing the maternal mortality rate from 1 in 400 births to 1 in 10,000 in just 80 years. The impetus behind this change was the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Death (CEMD), now the world's longest running self-audit of a healthcare service. Here, leading authors in the CEMD tell the story of the pioneering clinicians behind the push for improvements, who received little recognition for their work despite its far-reaching consequences. One by one, the leading causes of maternal death were identified and resolved, from sepsis to safe abortions and more recently psychiatric illness and social and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Global maternal mortality is still too high; this valuable book shows how significant advances in maternal healthcare are possible when clinicians, politicians and the public work together.

In her forties Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis decided to trade in her landlubber life - a nice house in Cardiff and a sensible job at the BBC - for life aboard a small yacht with her husband Leighton, a former bosun with the Merchant Navy and now in his mid-sixties. "We bought our first sailing boat by accident... She was a twenty-three-foot Intro class racer called Nitro, had a yellow hull and was totally unsuitable for beginners, so we bought her and started to learn how to sail in the Bristol Channel. Not long afterwards we were talking about renting out the house and sailing around the world." After buying a yacht - Jameeleh - and teaching themselves to sail it (a process not without its fair share of disasters, from psychotic seas off St. Govan's Head to broken ribs off Ballycotton), Gwyneth and Leighton set out to cross the Atlantic. Unfortunately Gwyneth's incessant seasickness and Leighton's daily deterioration into a moody Captain Bastard were not the only catastrophes with which they had to contend. This strange, stirring and often hilarious account of their voyage is as much a beginner's guide to sailing as it is a portrait of a marriage under the pressure of depression, both medical and meteorological. Gwyneth Lewis's training as a poet and film-maker lends her prose a wonderfully visual quality, and her contagious optimism in the face of inconceivable adversity - not much more could possibly have gone wrong - makes this unique book both touchingly witty and incredibly wise.

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Gwyneth Lewis's three lectures explore the connection linking form and politics with the content of poetry while exploring how each of these changes our understanding of time. She argues that the poet steers a path between making music and making sense - not at the level of the line, but in the deep structures of meaning which are poetry's terrain. The accuracy of what they say is just as important as its expression, both for their own well-being and for its worth to the reader. Taken together, her lectures begin to posit not the science in poetry but a science of the art form. 'The Stronger Life': Much has been made of the volatility of poets, which is largely a myth. Because it can be "confessional", poetry is often assumed to be therapeutic, but it can, equally, be toxic. The lives and work of poets are distinct but not unrelated. Using examples from Laura Riding and George Herbert, Gwyneth Lewis argues in this lecture that poets are more, not less resilient than the rest of the population. Looking at her own modern epic, A Hospital Odyssey, she questions how form is essential to health. 'What Country, Friends, is This?': Using Illyria in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a starting point, this lecture explores language politics and writing, describing how far poets will go to negotiate safe passage between one and the other. Fluent in Welsh and English, Gwyneth Lewis reflects on writing in two opposed traditions at the same time and reflects on what light the work of poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Anne Carson, among others, throws on the nature of poetry as a whole. 'Quantum Poetics': Form is the science of poetry. Because of its peculiar relationship with time, poetry's history isn't linear. Language works with a quantum indeterminacy. With special reference to the early Welsh tradition's extreme formalism, Gwyneth Lewis discusses in this lecture how what seems like ornament conjures probability waves into being, adding an extra, unheard, dimension to the sound of metre.

The great work of Welsh literature, translated in full for the first time in over 100 years by two of its country's foremost poets Tennyson portrayed him, and wrote at least one poem under his name. Robert Graves was fascinated by what he saw as his work's connection to a lost world of deeply buried folkloric memory. He is a shapeshifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; a 6th-century Brythonic bard; and a legendary collective project spanning the centuries up to The Book of Taliesin's compilation in 14th-century North Wales. He is, above all, no single 'he'. The figure of Taliesin is a mystery. But of the variety and quality of the poems written under his sign, of their power as exemplars of the force of ecstatic poetic imagination, and of the fascinating window they offer us onto a strange and visionary world, there can be no question. In the first volume to gather all of the poems from The Book of Taliesin since 1915, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams's accessible translation makes these outrageous, arrogant, stumbling and joyful poems available to a new generation of readers.

Gwyneth Lewis's highly inventive Sparrow Tree puts nature writing in a spin, presenting a huge variety of birds, both British and American: blue tits, blackbirds, egrets, juncos, starlings, herons and hummingbirds as well as the sparrows of the title. The book explores birds as mouthpieces for inhuman song and the wild inside the mind. Launching flights of avian fancy or fantasy on several levels, Sparrow Tree moves from birdsong as proto-language to birds as decorative beings. The collection includes her already well-known How to Knit a Poem, commissioned by BBC Radio 4, and ends with images of the human word as a form of love. Winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).

A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: Dr Who meets Paradise Lost. The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill? Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014.

Gwyneth Lewis was made National Poet of Wales in 2005, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She is a bilingual virtuoso, and has published six other books of poetry, three in each of her two languages. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her first three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998) and Keeping Mum (2003). Her modern epic A Hospital Odyssey (Bloodaxe, 2010) and later collection Sparrow Tree (2011) are published separately.

The last of the "Christmas Numbers" compiled by Charles Dickens, this is a charming and highly entertaining series of stories from one of England's best-known and most widely read novelists. Named after the man who delivered him as a baby, Doctor Marigold is a poor hawker who, after a dreadful turn of events, finds happiness with his adopted daughter Sophy. She is a deaf mute, and to help her learn to read and communicate, Doctor Marigold "prescribes" her various stories, which he collects into a book while she is at school. These prescriptions, written by Dickens and five other distinguished Victorian writers, are tales of adventure and romance, featuring thieves, kidnappings, and witchcraft. Together they form a wonderful selection of tales that are told with the clever wit and brilliant description that characterize Dickens' writing.

The use of creative writing as a route to personal or professional development is a powerful therapeutic tool, yet often the most difficult part is knowing how and where to begin. The experiences of others, and the strategies and approaches they have used in their own writing, can provide tried-and-tested models for practice, and 'ways in' that facilitators might wish to recommend to others. "Writing Routes" is an essential roadmap for anybody setting out on the journey of self-discovery through words. This diverse collection of short pieces introduce and demonstrate many different ways of getting into and thinking about creative writing for personal or professional development. Seventy contributors from a variety of different backgrounds and circumstances explain how they came to write a particular piece and why, how they found ways of transforming their experience into writing, and how it was beneficial to them. Their writing ranges widely, from journal entries and stream of consciousness to autobiography, poetry, fiction and drama, and the pieces are organised by theme and genre for ease of navigation, designed to be 'dipped into' as and when they are needed. This rich and varied collection will provide writing practitioners, counsellors and other related professionals with ideas and techniques to share with their clients, and is a useful resource that individuals who write for their own personal and professional development will return to again and again.