Granta Poetry – The Bell Bookshop

The lights

Emma — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From the celebrated author of The Topeka School, a collection of poetry that is dazzlingly intelligent, moving and speaks directly to our complex times.The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice memos and vignettes, songs and silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to the forces that shape human society and to the rhythms of the natural world, to the power of new technologies and the wonder of our timeless planet. Sometimes the scale is intimate and quiet and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the “collectivization of feeling”: “I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones.”Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights records the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises. And, even while alert to the darkness, it is the light in the book that remains, in dusk, in images from space, in old poems, in power cuts, in the flickering connections between people. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, illuminating new possibilities of thought and feeling.

We play here

Emma — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Four female friends navigate the political turbulence of North Belfast in the late 80s in this extraordinary, evocative verse novelWe Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect.This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class childhood, and a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships,in the years before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known.

Brother poem

Emma — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG. At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed.The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others.From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can’t be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.

Heritage Aesthetics

Emma — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What does it mean to have ‘heritage’, and how do we perform or undo it?In these daring and sonorous poems, Anaxagorou conducts a researched unpacking of two countries whose dividing lines of a colonial past are still visible and felt. Uniquely engaged with the complexities of Cyprus and the diasporic experience, these poems map both an island’s public history alongside a person’s private reckoning. They offer a ferocious and uncompromising look towards the damaging historical structures that have led to now. Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony’s gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.