Two Rivers Press

The poems in Threads, Ruth O’Callaghan’s seventeenth collection of poetry, address both the personal and political. They are sometimes ironical and at others metaphorical, but they consistently engage the reader in contemplating the fact that ‘Ours are simply steps that have disturbed / dust others have left’.

Against Gravity: the title alludes to our struggle with mortality as we age and, by contrast, the pleasures of play, imagination, creativity. Robert Saxton’s latest poetry book is dedicated to a friend whose heart gave out on a Scottish mountain. But in counterpoint to the elegaic, it offers humour too, often with dark overtones. The subject matter is wide-ranging – from the late Queen to the pitfalls of indexing, from Nero’s theatre to trouser suits for modern brides, from a bat roost in a Portuguese library to the Hollywood Sign. The book concludes with a visit to Vita Sackvillle-West’s garden at Sissinghurst, exploring intergenerational friendship as well as Vita’s visionary genius and unconventional love life. Wherever his focus falls, Saxton shows accomplished craftsmanship and an eye for telling detail, with surprises on every page.

Pomona’s Orchard, Adrian Blamires’ third collection, is dedicated to the arts of peace. Its tutelary spirits include Caliban tending to the dying Prospero, a great-aunt rescuing cats and dogs in the Blitz, the enlightened schoolmaster to an orphaned John Keats, and Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitful propagation, as the genius loci of a Herefordshire orchard. Miracles of love and healing are conjured in the face of violence and rapacity. Lament and dissent are sounded, alongside poems of witty, sensual profusion. The collection closes with a Tudor-themed sequence which presents pressing encounters – highly politicized, highly eroticized – between the Virgin Queen and her subjects. Drawing on Elizabethan lyric, symbolism, realia and innuendo, the poet offers a tragicomic vision of queen and country, a resonant blend of history and myth.

In Sublime Lungs Kate Noakes turns her attention to the breath. For the first time, she explores her lifelong asthma and explains the impact of this chronic and disabling condition. The breath and breathing are subjects for poems from many chronologies and geographies in this her ninth collection. ‘If one measure of a poet’s line is their breath, then you’d expect a poet with asthma to be a little curtailed by it. Not so Kate Noakes. Sublime Lungs finds poem after poem burgeoning out of the condition and leading her to find no trace of Keats in Rome, but allegories in witchcraft, Kent Marsh Frogs or Blade Runner, and to have a double-edged view of nature, which for her can be kill or cure. Whether in Machu Picchu or Boston Library, referencing Charles Olson in Gloucester, or relating to lovers and children, Noakes starts from the breath in her lungs and takes off into air.’ — MATTHEW CALEY‘From Egyptian breath cures to Katherine Mansfield’s inhaler to the thin air of the Rocky Mountains and Machu Picchu, Kate Noakes’ latest collection evokes all the elements of a life lived with asthma. With each successive poem, Sublime Lungs expands the scope of how this condition affects one’s experience of the world in poems by turns witty and moving. This is poetry that attunes us to the nuances of our own embodiment.’ — CARRIE ETTER

Kant and marmalade, a solemn talk with a lift, an existential struggle with something from IKEA, an absurdist discussion of meaning in poetry, or a disquisition on the nature of windows: Robin Thomas is a poet of high imagination, always looking for the unusual angle and finding it over and over in this, his latest collection.Giant Crabs and Spiders ranges across philosophy, painting, music, literature, politics, history, science, and what it’s like to be alive. The poet explores knowledge, ethics, meaning, mortality, and writes of loss and grief. Bubbling away through these intense, sometimes quirky, always compassionate poems is a joy in language, its musical resources and endless possibilities.

“Greetings! I’m Matilda -- you may know me as Empress Matilda -- and I was so nearly the first Queen of England. William the Conqueror was my grandfather, and I should have succeeded my father, King Henry I. For many years I ruled in the southern counties of England and came very close to seizing the crown back from my cousin, Stephen. However, it was not to be. This is my story.”So begins this colourfully illustrated book telling the story of Empress Matilda, a medieval feminist who fought to gain her rightful place as Queen of England.With a foreword by Lindy Grant, Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of Reading, and an expert in Kingship and Queenship in the High Middle Ages.

In The Third City, his most remarkable collection to date, James Peake once more offers us his unique combination of dream-like fluency and intellectual rigour. New and returning readers will discover an even more expansive poet in these pages, one who in poem after poem uncovers our capacity to love in full knowledge of the odds.Here Peake confirms his reputation for ‘pin-sharp and trance-like poems’ (Wild Court) which ‘show us different ways of seeing’ (Raceme). He is a poet of deep originality whose works of artful indirection fully realise our daily world, even as they transform its familiar constraints into staging posts for larger, less comprehensible, places.

Kitty Hawkins’ first collection These Yellow Days is haunted by the birth and death of an idealised adulthood. Its extinction, in the form of a dead woman, haunts the poems, observing erosion, dunescapes, femininity, rebirth.Set largely in the blustery yet desolate expanses of a coastal landscape, These Yellow Days uses speculative and imaginative juxtapositions as a means of rewriting memories, particularly interactions with those the poet holds most dear. A ghost-like water leaks through the pages, giving and taking life simultaneously. What remains is the sharp and vulnerable, which, like an onshore breeze, scours the natural for hope.

1976: just as the Sex Pistols are about to release ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, James Harpur arrives at Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. As if stepping onstage in the strangest of theatres, he finds himself acting in a play without knowing what his part is to be.Changing to study English, the poet finds an education in unlikely places: a broken love affair; excruciating meetings with professors (and his father); initiations into Brahms and Rubens; writing a play about computer dating; and gatecrashing May Balls. Compelling, humorous and poignant, The Magic Theatre is an enthralling rite of passage amid the ‘full catastrophe’ of university life.‘The Magic Theatre is at once an entertainment and a mystical progress, sharp-edged, brilliant, and original. The snakes of Harpur’s Cambridge slither powerfully and fast’—from the forward by PENELOPE BUCKLEY‘Succeeding Harpur’s award-winning portrayal of boarding school in The Examined Life, these are poems of rare subtlety, of heartbreaking poignancy and laugh-out-loud humour, of pitch-perfect craft and the most marvellous music’— MARK ROPER