Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Twinning is well embedded in Lawrence Sail’s family: himself the son of a twin, he also has a twin sister and – youngest of his four children – twin daughters. His book's title Double Takes reflects the poems’ central concern with many aspects of duality – whether manifested in the context of human relations, translations, ‘the moment saved from time’ or the touchstone of mortality. In some instances, juxtapositions and counterpoints bring affinities to light; in others, distance and difference. A number of the poems address the political and the public: the plight of refugees, a photo of Putin beside Gorbachev’s coffin, Brecht’s take on the ways of the world. Others confront the hard consequences of illness. Most of all, these are poems that pay proper attention to their subjects, and which amount to an appreciation of beauty and balance, however precarious, as in ‘Moving Out’, where it is only being ‘on the brink of removal’ that makes it possible to ‘engage with the ins and outs’, and to benefit from ‘the startle of those double takes / which reinterpret truth’. Lawrence Sail's retrospective, Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010, and followed by his later collections The Quick (2015), Guises (2020), and now, Double Takes (2026).

The rural terrain of John Challis’s second collection provides a new lens for exploring history, class and work, our relationship to the natural world, and cycles of growth and decay. Much of his debut collection The Resurrectionists concerned working lives in the city: his father a London cabbie, his grandfather a market porter. Here his focus shifts to a crumbling stately home in Northumberland brought to life through the voices of the grounds as well as those who inhabit it and maintain it. London is at a distance. We find ourselves beyond, in backyards, on motorways, in fields, searching for the green patch in Kent, where an East End family picked hops in the summer. Despatches from the early years of fatherhood reflect on ageing, loss and patience. Poems set in the American west consider the idea of freedom. And on the eve of his execution, thief and folk hero Jack Sheppard flees into the forest of his mind. Confronting the tension between wanting to belong and the desire to escape, these poems acknowledge and reckon with the people and places that haunt us.

Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among the furrows. Elsewhere in the collection, Frank Ormsby demonstrates his skill with the resonant short poem. These pieces, mostly in haiku form, constitute a running tribute to the Japanese and Chinese poets he claims as his ‘oriental fathers’. Frank Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined to allow death its dominion in the face of mortality and his experience of Parkinson’s disease. Frank Ormsby's retrospective, Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015, and followed by his later collections The Darkness of Snow (2017), The Rain Barrel (2019), and now, The Tumbling Paddy (2026).

America's Patricia Smith is one of the most indispensable, groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a 'masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard' (Poetry Foundation). The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across her career. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry – all the careful witness, embodied experience and bristling pleasure that it bestows – and of Patricia Smith's necessary voice. Lyrical, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living, presenting a rapturous ode to life. Collections drawn upon include her Pulitzer finalist Incendiary Art – published by Bloodaxe in the UK – featuring her compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length poetry book is a compelling narrative exploring family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss, migration and belonging from the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity.  Melete interweaves dual cultures and heritages, moving from China and Hong Kong to Liverpool. The mythic structure of the book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses – Melete, Mneme and Aoede. Named after the Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence. This expansive book establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.

‘A sense of adventure hardly to be paralleled in contemporary poetry’ – London MagazinePublished to celebrate his 80th birthday, this expanded edition of Peter Didsbury’s Scenes from a Long Sleep (2003) includes a later collection, A Fire Shared (2020), as well as new, previously uncollected poems. Didsbury’s staggering powers of invention, outrageous ?outing of convention and subversive humour are fully and flagrantly displayed in this new collected edition of the poetry of this ‘secular mystic with the lugubrious tongue’ (Independent on Sunday). All the poems from The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987), That Old-Time Religion (1997) and A Natural History (2003) are included.

John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals – disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners. To be common here is to share not only qualities but stories with many others – to be classed alongside people with similar origins and become connected also to what is commonplace in the world of animals and plants, days and tables. Sky and sea dominate as the speakers search for oneness and completion, confronted by vast silences and the shadow of Brighton’s collapsing West Pier. John McCullough has published four previous collections, one with Salt and three with Penned in the Margins, most recently, the Costa-shortlisted Reckless Paper Birds (2019), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Panic Response (2022), which included his long poem 'Flowers of Sulphur', shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Life Immediately is a pacy, dynamic debut collection containing all the preoccupations of Lily Blacksell’s work, from womanhood, to music, to the natural world and our calamitous dealings with it, to the calamity and comedy of human relationships, romantic or otherwise. Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures: communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger, in eclectic, formally confident poems where observation is balanced with insouciance.

Jiving with Wasps is a new retrospective from Rita Ann Higgins drawing on a dozen books of poetry published over four decades, from Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986) to The Long Weekend (2024), in addition to new poems appearing here for the first time. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles. Defiantly mischievous, playfully subversive, this irreverent iconoclast has been achieving even wider popularity through her regular appearances on RTÉ's Brendan O'Connor Show: 'Rita Ann Higgins is the people's poet. She's magic. She's a one-off.'

Polly Clark’s poetry inhabits a world that is strange, unsettling, and edged with danger. Her debut, Kiss (2000), journeys inward, exploring the self with an unflinching gaze, before Take Me with You (2005) turns outward to question how we connect – with others, with the wider world, with the unknown. In these collections, her characters, both human and animal, speak in many voices, illuminating the moments when we are most alive – and most alone. Farewell My Lovely (2009) grapples with the price of survival, charting the experience of leaving one's life behind and returning as a stranger. By turns moving and darkly comic, these poems examine the ways we cling to who we were, even as certainty dissolves and the past slips beyond reach. This retrospective of her poetry opens with a magical new collection – also called Afterlife – in which there are no physical limits, nothing is stable and the world is distilled to its elements. The traumatic experience of rape transforms a girl into a tiger, and a tiger into a girl; a whale embraces both air and water until forced to inhabit only one by jealous fish. The poems grapple with the inexplicable nature of some experience, suggesting that we are most real in that mysterious space between living and dying. Polly Clark is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her first collection, Kiss, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second,Take Me with You, a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language, creating a bridge between our own times and a Connemara community on the margins of Europe. Drawing on classic forms within literary and oral traditions, Ethnology becomes a love song for Connemara, witness to vivid encounters: between the living and the dead and between the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agendas. In her first full-length book of poetry, fragility and strength are finely balanced, focused on the ruins of an island cottage built by her great-grandfather. Here, Cathy Galvin locates both mourning, humour and joy. The poems give a vivid, original voice to the tradition of keening, of honouring the loss of those we love.

History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book’s themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, guided by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space. The first of its four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ?The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. ?The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ? It introduces an ‘alternative girl child self’, inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove’s dream of such a girl (‘my death, and she is my soul’), and by a friend’s fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ? The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. ?Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of ‘being’ through fiery language and elemental imagery. ? She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘potentive space’ where play, fantasy and reality intersect.

The Taste of Lightning is a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lalic, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia?s most crucial poets. Lalic?s poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world ? a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love ? a love for his wife Branka that ?matures like wine? over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where ?We are twin foci of the same ellipse? Which links two other foci: death and love.?But for Lalic, the seen and the felt need to be held in memory if they are to last beyond the instant. This means putting them into words, in speech or a poem, though doing so distances us from the raw freshness of experience: ?Images I barter for the right to pronounce them, / Names I slip as a bribe to time?. Memory, for Lalic, is also cultural. Many of his poems speak about Yugoslavia?s Eastern and Western heritages. About his native Serbia?s history and landscape, and its roots in Byzantium and ultimately in Ancient Greece. But also the seascapes and culture of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalic?s poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalic?s poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lalic?s death in 1996, on what God?s purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: ?may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image?. Francis R. Jones, the book?s editor and translator, knew Lalic well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones?s 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lalic?s poetry.

This new translation of three collections from one of Denmark?s leading poets completes the remarkable Senses Quintet in English. Pia Tafdrup has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called ?a cathedral of the soul? and ?the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years?.Bloodaxe published David McDuff?s translation of the first two collections in the quintet, The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, in one volume in 2021. This edition brings together his translations of the third, fourth and fifth parts, The Sight of Light, The Sound of Clouds and The Touch of Skin.All parts of life are mediated through the five senses in the five books, including the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives ? the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one?s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.

The poems in Menna Elfyn''s new collection offer a voice to those whose liberty or dignity have been undermined, seeking religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance for all, and not shying away from the effects of (in)humanity on our environment, histories and lives.In Welsh, ?parch? (the ?ch? is guttural) simply means respect. But it is also the common word for a chapel minister (a ?reverend?). Menna Elfyn?s collection explores the many ways in which respect can be expressed, as well as how our world can so often feel parched of simple kindnesses.Glimpses of parch in action reveal the best of who we are. Humour found in difficult times, solace in shared grief or steadfast defiance in the face of oppression. Following many years of campaigning, Menna Elfyn is moving towards her own sense of resolution as the Welsh language is now accepted and respected as an official language in Wales. For the first time in a Bloodaxe collection, she has translated or written many of the original poems in English and describes herself as a ?proud bilingual?.Menna Elfyn shares Herta Müller?s belief that ?holding one?s own language up to the eyes of another leads to a solid relationship, a relaxed kind of love?. This distils the essence of Parch: respect as refuge; the triumph of compassion over conflict.

Selima Hill?s twenty-second collection A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large. Self-portrait with a Bucket: On being an artist?s model. The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree. A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua: Different people?s senses of bafflement with each other. Baby Peter: A homeless man and his mother. Agatha: An afternoon in a care home. Room 17: A 70-year-old woman, baffled but determined. Men in Shorts and Bonkers: Out walking with dogs and their humans. Until the Tears Roll Down My Cheeks like Honey: Two strangers in a field. The Surly Mothers of Successful Men: Short pieces of memoir.