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  Francesco Petrarch

  Francesco Petrarch

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  This 14th-century Italian poet was a model for many who followed him. His passionate sonnets to Laura became the epitome for love poetry. Over some 40 years he wrote 366 sonnets to Laura, whom he probably never even spoke to, and they remain immediate and affecting even now. Called Rime Sparse (Scattered Rhymes), they influenced Chaucer and many others. This is an unusual addition to ‘The Great Poets’, but part of the intention of the series is to cover the major stepping stones of world poetry. Translated by Joseph Auslander.

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  The Poet Laureates Volume 1

  John Skelton, Ben Jonson, Edmund...

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  Poet Laureates. Volume 1.  The office of Poet Laureate is a high honour amongst poets. The Ancient Greeks had the first idea and their heroes and Poets wore wreaths of Laurel in honour of the god Apollo.  Many countries now have a Laureate as do many societies and organisations.  But perhaps ranked first among them all is that of our own Poet Laureate. Unfortunately no single authentic definitive record exists of the office of Poet Laureate of England.  In some form it can be traced back to 1189 and Richard Canonicus who was employed by Richard I with the title “versificator Regis”.  It is said that Geoffrey Chaucer was called Poet Laureate, being granted in 1389 an annual allowance of wine.   After that there were a succession of ‘volunteer Laureates’.  It is not until 1617 that King James I created the post as it is known today for Ben Jonson, although it appears not to have been a formal appointment. That formality:- The title of Poet Laureate, as a royal office, was first conferred by letters patent on John Dryden in 1670 And from there we have procession of outstanding poets among them William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Alfred Austin.  Among our readers are Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe.

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  Now We Can Talk Openly About Men...

  Martina Evans

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  Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. 
  Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

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  Noughts & Crosses (NHB Modern...

  Malorie Blackman

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  Sephy and Callum sit together on a beach. They are in love. It is forbidden.
  Sephy is a Cross and Callum is a Nought. Between Noughts and Crosses there are racial and social divides. A segregated society teeters on a volatile knife-edge. As violence breaks out, Sephy and Callum draw closer, but this is a romance that will lead them into terrible danger.
  This gripping Romeo and Juliet story by acclaimed writer Malorie Blackman is a captivating drama of love, revolution and what it means to grow up in a divided world.
  Sabrina Mahfouz's stage adaptation first toured the UK in 2019 and won the Excellence in Touring category at the UK Theatre Awards. It was commissioned and presented by Pilot Theatre in co-production with Derby Theatre, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Mercury Theatre Colchester and York Theatre Royal.
  'Malorie Blackman's bestseller leaps off the stage in a fine new adaptation' Observer
  'A searing insight into the injustices of the world… Mahfouz's adaptation highlights some deep truths and sharp parallels with the here and now' The Stage

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  Like a Tree Cut Back

  Michael McCarthy

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  Like a Tree Cut Back weaves a memoir of Michael McCarthy from his boyhood in rural Ireland – overshadowed by an incident that resulted in the death of his brother – to his journey towards priesthood and poetry.
  Interspersed throughout is a brief history of Carlow College, 19th Century Catholic Ireland's answer to Trinity College, Dublin, and – as McCarthy shows – a training ground for priests, apostles and rebels.
  Part history, part memoir and part meditation, this outstanding book of poetry and prose confirms Michael McCarthy as a powerful storyteller and an acute observer of the human condition.

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  Amsterdam (NHB Modern Plays)

  Maya Arad Yasur

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  An Israeli violinist. Living in her trendy canal-side Amsterdam apartment. Nine months pregnant.
  One day a mysterious unpaid gas bill from 1944 arrives.
  Slid her an envelope right under the door and then just walked away.
  It awakens unsettling feelings of collective identity, foreignness and alienation. Stories of a devastating past are compellingly reconstructed to try and make sense of the present.
  Maya Arad Yasur's play Amsterdam is a strikingly original, audacious thriller. It received its UK premiere in this English translation by Eran Edry at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in September 2019.

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