This anthology is the record of a revolution in Chinese poetry. As the Cultural Revolution gave way to the post-Mao era - years of political turmoil, economic boom and the return of Hong Kong - the present period has been one of extraordinary and deeply problematic growth. Chinese poets, driven by alienation, trauma and exile, have responded with one of the most thorough and exciting experiments in world poetry. Jade Ladder shows authoritatively for the first time in English the diversity of Chinese poetry as it renegotiates its relationship with Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, and re-engages with its Classical heritage. Misty, post-Misty, Fourth Generation; publication in samizdat, publication in exile, publication on the internet - in a nation of billions, it sometimes seems that there are a million ways to write poetry. This selection provides a concise series of perspectives on a proliferating scene. It focusses on key figures and key poems. It moves beyond the lyric to showcase an astonishing diversity of genres including narrative poetry, neo-Classical writing, the sequence, experimental poetry and the long poem. Through detailed introductions, it examines how contemporary poetry grew from both the fertile Classical tradition and the stony ground of the Communist period, only to rewrite that tradition, and resist that regime. Jade Ladder is the most comprehensive single volume guide to what has been happening and what is happening now in a culture of undeniably global significance. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the future not just of China, but of poetry.

This volume presents new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specialising in writing poetry. It offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from the work of well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. Using his experience and expertise as a teacher as well as a poet, Bill Herbert guides aspiring writers through such key writing skills as: drafting voice imagery rhyme form theme. The volume is further updated to include never-before published dialogues with prominent poets such as Vicki Feaver, Gillian Allnutt, Kathleen Jamie, Linda France, Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien and Jo Shapcott. Concise and practical, Writing Poetry offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of this challenging and rewarding genre and is a must-read for aspiring poets.

This volume presents new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specialising in writing poetry. It offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from the work of well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. Using his experience and expertise as a teacher as well as a poet, Bill Herbert guides aspiring writers through such key writing skills as: drafting voice imagery rhyme form theme. The volume is further updated to include never-before published dialogues with prominent poets such as Vicki Feaver, Gillian Allnutt, Kathleen Jamie, Linda France, Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien and Jo Shapcott. Concise and practical, Writing Poetry offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of this challenging and rewarding genre and is a must-read for aspiring poets.

Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to someone who knew something about it.' That's exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this judicious and comprehensive selection of British, Irish and American manifestos by some of modern poetry's finest practitioners. Opening the 20th century account with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the book moves through key later figures including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Dylan Thomas. America is richly represented too, from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to the influential New England poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. Strong Words then brings the issues fully up to date with over 30 specially commissioned statements from contemporary writers including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Selima Hill, Paul Muldoon and Douglas Dunn, amounting to a new overview of the poetry being written at the start of the 21st century. For poets and readers, for critics, teachers and students of creative writing and contemporary poetry, this is essential reading. As well as representing many of the most important poets of the last hundred years, Strong Words also charts many different stances and movements, from Modernism to Postmodernism, from Futurism to the future theories of poetry. This landmark book champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the poem.

For nearly three hundred years Scotland and England were the Laurel and Hardy of nations. For nearly two hundred years The Prelude was a poem by Wordsworth. Something had to give. As Britain begins to resemble a cut-up by William Burroughs, and the heritage of Robert Burns is flushed down a lavvie in Leith, one verse-monger steps forward to do battle with (or possibly for) cultural chaos. Bill Herbert's Laurelude is in three sections: The Laurelude is a blank verse myth about Ulverston's Idiot Boy, Stan Laurel. Othermoor depicts a cubist version of the North where the Wild Boy himself, the late Bill Burroughs, rewrites the rules. And The Madmen of Elgin squashes both Lost Boys and Solitary Reapers into Middle Scots verse forms for a pre-millennial song-and-dance. Like Oliver Hardy this volume refuses to be slim: it bursts all borders, literary and political, creating a zone where the Hollywood musical meets the Jolly Beggars, where lament bumps into love lyric, where the dictionaries go to die. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the 'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity. Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading?

The northern word for hometown, 'toon', flickers in meaning between 'tune' and 'cartoon'. In Bill Herbert's big bumper book, the title toon is Troy: the first lost home. Exiled to a lighthouse on the River Tyne, the wily Scots maestro has written a book in love with lost and difficult things. Sometimes reflective, sometimes subversively mischievous, he registers or rails against displacement and resettlement, lamenting the passing of relatives, cities, furniture, and the odd lemur. Plugged in to the poetry zeitgeist as ever, Herbert has revived a medieval publishing craze: the Troybook. Painstaking excavation of old comics establishes that the original site of Troytoon is Dundee. Or Madrid. Or possibly St Petersburg. The search for traces of Troy leads to Donegal, Crete, and, at the heart of his grand tour, a vivid verse journal set in post-perestroika Moscow. Dust off your highest brow and fasten your seatbelt, we're flying Economy to Byzantium. The Big Bumper Book of Troy is driven by sudden shifts of register - English to Scots, free verse to antique stanza, page to performance, narrative to lyric. Everything has become a dialect, yet - cheekily borrowing the Russian composer Schnittke's term - Herbert aims at a disrespectful polystylist unity. It is his most unorthodox rebellion yet against the dictatorship of the slim volume. A riot of colourful humour, a revolution in poetic taste.

'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the 'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity. Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading?

Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. "Lee Valley Poems" is his first book to be wholly conceived and written in London, once his place of exile and now his permanent home. It includes an extended sequence, "When Water Confirms", translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan, and a suite of shorter poems translated by several poets, most of these working with Yang Lian: Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, W.N. Herbert, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson and Arthur Sze. The book's preface, A Wild Goose Speaks to me, takes as its springboard Yang Lian's comment 'There is no international, only different locals'. With this perspective, the Lee Valley of his first London poems becomes the international inside the local: the poet may travel far but never really leaves the ground of his own inner self, and the value and joy of poetry is seen as fishing in the deep sea of existence. This title is published in a dual language Chinese-English edition.

Alireza Abiz is a multi-award-winning Iranian poet, literary scholar, and translator. Born in South Khorasan, Iran in 1968, Abiz studied English Literature in Mashhad and Tehran universities and received his PhD in Creative Writing-Poetry from Newcastle University in the UK. Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979 was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian; Stop! We Should Get Off!, Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce, I Hear My Desk as a Tree, 13/1 Koohsangee Street, and Black Line - London Underground. The latest collection published in 2017 was awarded the most prestigious independent poetry award in Iran, the Shamlou Award. His sixth collection, The Desert Monitor, will be published in 2021. Abiz is has translated many leading poets including Rilke, Bunting, Walcott, Kerouac, and C.K. Williams into Persian. His translation of African Contemporary Art won him the Iranian Book of the Season Award for the best translation in visual arts in 2007. English, German and Arabic translations of his poetry have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and have been showcased in public places including Stuttgart subway in Germany. He has performed at many international festivals and acted as judge in numerous Persian language literary prizes. He is a board member of the Poetry Translation Centre and chaired the judges for the Sarah Maguire Poetry in Translation Prize 2020-2021. Abiz is the co-founder of MAHA, a Persian language online platform for art and literature and Editor of Radio Now podcasts. He lives in London where he works as a creative writing teacher, translator and researcher.

Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a flat overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s de�ning modern disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands – becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy flounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s flotsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reflected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Den�ends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s later trade of precision engineer, it �ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.

Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets come together to translate each other's work. The Chinese poets involved are: Jiang Tao, Leng Shuang, Tang Xiaodu, Wang Xaoni, Xiao Kaiyu, Xi Chuan, Yan Li, Yang Lian, Yang Xiaobin, Yu Jian, Zang Di, Zhai Yongming, Zhang Wei and Zhou Zan, while the Western representatives are: Nicholas Admussen, Tony Barnstone, Polly Clark, Jennifer Crawford, Antony Dunn, W.N. Herbert, Sean O'Brien, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson, Arthur Sze, George Szirtes and Joshua Weiner.

This exciting anthology maps a singular encounter between two groups of poets, one based in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, the other in the North East of England. Over a period of four years, these eight poets, working together as writers, editors and teachers, maintained a creative dialoge. The result is a diverse body of work including original poetry and new translations. Bulgarian poetry, liberated by the casting off of communism, now looks coolly at an uncertain cultural and economic transition. The Bulgarian poets -- Kristin Dimitroval Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and VBV -- are all leaders in a remarkable resurgence of Balkan literature. Their British counterparts -- Andy Croft, Mark Robinson, Linda France and W.N. Herbert -- are all highly-regarded and widely-published poets in the UK whose original work in this anthology is marked by formal ingenuity and conceptual daring and is a fitting response to Bulgaria's new poetic voice.

Sailor's Home is a miscellany (or anthology) of poems by six poets who came together for a private festival in London in October 2005. The poets are Arjen Duinker (Netherlands), W.N. Herbert (UK), Uwe Kolbe (Germany), Peter Laugesen (Denmark), Karine Martel (France) and Yang Lian (China), whose idea the festival was. Each poet takes the phrase "Sailor's Home" and builds a work from it in his or her own language. The festival, featuring the six poets and invited guest, and the book as a record of the event, demonstrate how the poets interact acroos languages and cultures. All the poems are presented in their original languages and in English translation. While the festival was a one-off event, the poems remain, and the book stands testimony to the creative impulse amongst friends whose poetry can cross borders. A fascinating document.