New collection of poems from prizewinning poet and translator.

With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.

Archipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly, and they keep the silence with them. This stringent, ferrous element sets her at odds with the eloquence and lyricism characteristic of the Italian poetic tradition, and may owe something to an alternative nationality, a different landscape. Though born in Rome, she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia, and the languages she was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena - and of late she has found herself also writing a number of poems in Logudorese. While her poems have a geographical sweep, there is also an insistence on domestic detail - balconies, crockery, sewing, cooking: elements often considered too humble to warrant poetic attention. But even here they are often set against a backdrop of war and insecurity, and a poem in these surroundings, such as her 'Kitchen', is as likely to be the site of a haunting. Her first book, Winter Residences, already posited an elsewhere, that of St Petersburg, and an elective affinity with another culture. With time, and with the emergence of her next four books of poetry, this sense of apartness has increased, as has the force and particularity of her language - and has made her, along with Valerio Magrelli, one of the most valued and original poets of her generation.

Drawn from thirty years of work, this selection, made by the poet himself, gathers from the best of Jamie McKendrick's six acclaimed collections, including some translations, from 1991's debut The Sirocco Room to Out There (2012, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize) by way of The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ink Stone, shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. Sky Nails, his selected poems, was published by Faber in 2000, and selections of his poems have been translated and published in Holland and in Italy. Throughout, McKendrick has been concerned with the charting of space, of the distances between homeland and edgeland, the far-flung and the near-at-hand, the past and present, the familiar and the strange in poems which cast a sharp eye over their subject matter and return with wry, unsettling observations. There is remembrance, here, and salvage, a bringing to light of that which is obscured or lost, not only the ink stones in Chinese riverbeds, but extinct species, spacecraft and flooded houses, as well as historical figures, including a 10th-century physicist from Basra, Irish activist Roger Casement, and artists Gaudi, Hoech and Piranesi.

Italy has produced some of the most inventive and controversial poetry of the past one hundred years. In this new anthology, all the major Italian poets of the early part of the century are well represented - Montale, Ungaretti, Saba, Quasimodo and D'Annunzio among them - poets who have filtered through to the English speaking world, and are already influential and appreciated. But many of their contemporaries from the mid-century and later are far less known - and deserve to be known - and Jamie McKendrick turns the light to them as well, including the work of Sereni, Passolini, Bertolucci and many others. 20th-Century Italian Poems is a stimulating sift through the key poets and poems of this fascinating period in European literature.

Crocodiles and obelisks are ancient symbols of empire. The poems in Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new collection sift the debris of power and range from Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain to the Belgian Congo and to the Roman, the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. But 'crocodiles' and 'obelisks' are also terms used for newspaper obituaries - for tributes which either monumentalize the dead or shed false tears for them. Crocodiles & Obelisks is McKendrick's most individual work to date, and experiments with different ways of remembering, offering conclusions that are both cunning and drole.

Valerio Magrelli was born in Rome in 1957. Among many other awards for his poems, he has won the Mondello Prize (1980), the Viareggio (1987), the Montale Prize (2002) and the Feltrinelli Prize (2002) and the Cetona Prize (2007). A lecturer on French literature at the University of Cassino, he has also published critical works on Dadaism, on Paul Valery and Joseph Joubert, as well as notable translations of Mallarme, Valery, Jarry, Char and Ponge. He is also the author of two plays and one collection of short prose pieces, Nel condominio della carne, a poignant, often witty meditation on his own body and the ills it is heir and host to. He is currently working on a critical study of Baudelaire. Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He taught at the University of Salerno in Italy and is the author of five collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Ink Stone (2003), which was shortlisted for the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award; and Crocodiles & Obelisks, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. A selection of his poems was published as Sky Nails (2000), and he is editor of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).

'It was useless to think I'd ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding ... Not now. Not ever.' School is a place of unspoken hierarchies and rivalries for a young teenage boy growing up in the provincial town of Ferrara. But as the everyday classroom and playground dramas are played out, they begin to reflect the disturbing undertones of 1930s Italy, and the narrator realizes that being Jewish means he will always be excluded. The fourth book in Bassani's Romanzo di Ferrara cycle, Behind the Door is a luminous portrayal of childhood friendship and the loss of innocence. A new translation by Jamie McKendrick 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian 'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the Romanzo di Ferrara, his suite of novels depicting life in the city. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as Cinque Storie Ferraresi in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian 'The most uncompromising, merciful and merciless writer' Ali Smith

The renowned Italian poet Valerio Magrelli has forged a unique approach for exploring the subtleties of language, a poetry of perception that takes the measure of its own veerings, "the exact degree / of deviation." His poems are histories of the inner life that turn into X-rays of the urban and the global, and press the intelligence into the service of the senses. Magrelli's poems condense the abstract and the intensely physical, subjecting modern experience to a minute and naked scrutiny. Not since Eugenio Montale has a poet brought together in one voice so many strands of the Italian lyric tradition and handled them with such originality.

'Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force' The New York Times 'It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces' Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara. As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here. Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grace. Then he sees a way out. The fifth book in Bassani's Novel of Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with his life.

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith. Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these memorable stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man's unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life's brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and featuring people and places from these novels, The Smell of Hay is told with a voice that is by turns intimate, ironic, elegiac and rueful. This new translation contains two pieces, added by Bassani to his earlier collection, which have never appeared in English before. 'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was an Italian poet, novelist and editor. The Smell of Hay is the last in a series of six works collected together as Il romanzo di Ferrara. Other works in the cycle include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the Viareggio Prize and inspired an Academy Award-winning film adaptation by Vittorio de Sica, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Within the Walls (originally published as Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize. Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator. His translations of Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles are already available as Penguin Modern Classics, and he is in the process of translating the rest of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle anew.