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New Poetries VI

Edited by Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey

New Poetries VI
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Series: New Poetries
Categories: 21st Century, Anthologies, British, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (256 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2015)
9781784100377
Out of Stock
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2015)
9781784100384
£12.99 £11.69
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  • Description
  • Editors
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • From the first New Poetries anthology, published in 1994, through to this sixth volume, the series has showcased the work of some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world, many of whom have subsequently gone on to achieve notable success: Sophie Hannah, Vona Groarke, Patrick McGuinness, Kei Miller, Caroline Bird, David Morley, Jane Yeh, William Letford, Tara Bergin, and many others. Crucially, the New Poetries anthologies have never sought to identify a ‘school’, much less a ‘generation’: the poets included employ a wide range of styles, forms and approaches, and ‘new’ need not be taken to imply ‘young’. Poets include Vahni Capildeo, John Clegg, Joey Connolly, Adam Crothers, Eric Langley, Rebecca Watts, Judith Willson, Alex Wong, and more.
    Michael Schmidt
    Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general ... read more
    Helen Tookey
    Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969 and now lives in Liverpool. She studied philosophy at university and subsequently worked in publishing. She currently teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published two previous poetry collections with Carcanet Press, Missel-Chil d (2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney ... read more
    Awards won by Michael Schmidt Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Sasha Dugdale's 'Joy', published in PN Review 227  (PN Review 227 )
    Awards won by Helen Tookey Short-listed, 2019 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (City of Departures) Short-listed, 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection (Missel-Child)
    Praise for Michael Schmidt 'Its pleasures are longer term ones: as you return to it and re-read its substantial selections, you come to appreciate how and what each contributor is working on.'

    Jane Routh, The North 66

    '...this is the joy of New Poetries VIII: time and again you discover refreshing and compelling new styles and subjects'

    Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School

    '...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.'
    John Ashbery
     'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines.'
    Simon Armitage
    'It has attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health.'
    Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement
    Praise for Helen Tookey 'Tookey is a deft poet, working with ekphrasis, the graphic qualities of text and lyrical prose to create ecopoetry that is unlike any other.'
    Sarah Westcott, ARTEMISpoetry
    'Formal variation - itself a kind of textual curiosity - is a source of innovation throughout the book, but it is the 'quiet'-seeming prose blocks that are especially good at holding bolts of unease in their narrative folds.'

    Tiffany Atkison, The Poetry Review
    'Continually enquiring and observing, Tookey's poetic voice is consistently tentative, aware of precariousnesss and the possibility of disintegration. She can see the world with a painter's eye... a haunting and compelling collection'

    D. A. Prince, Orbis

    'In the Quaker Hotel will change the way you perceive the world around you; this is ecopoetry with a psychologically effective perspective shift. Tookey liberates us from the boundaries of our humanness.'

    Ellora Sutton, MsLexia

    'There is an apocalyptic fear coursing through these poems, electrifying them with an often heart-breaking and urgent apprehension of ecological crisis. Through visiting and revisiting, Helen Tookey examines places with a sharp eye, both philosophical and painterly, asking us to attend to their vulnerabilities, their mystery. Behind these carefully made poems, Tookey gives us access to something infinite and disturbing. Delicate, eerie, anxious, prophetic and cinematic, In the Quaker Hotel is a haunting record of our times.'

    Seán Hewitt, author of Tongues of Fire

    'Narratives describing strange, sometimes dreamlike, episodes from a female protagonist's childhood dominate the second section of Helen Tookey's four-part collection of poems and prose poems, City of Departures ... The narrative is clear and secretive at the same time: it prompts questions.'

    Carol Rumens from The Guardian where 'In the Rose Garden' was poem of the week on 3rd Feb 2020

    'For Helen Tookey, place becomes a series of intense encounters with the territories of European artists, in which their settings or personalities - and the poet's - mingle or erode... The book combines poems and prose in a compelling zone of stark atmospheres and richly observed interiors.'

    W. N. Herbert, The Poetry Review


    'The poems are finely crafted and closely observed, describing somewhat unsettling, dream-like landscapes and places of memory, deserted streets in European cities, or taking artworks and objects as inspiration and points of departure... [The] rejection of borders is a fitting ending to a collection that challenges formal and aesthetic boundaries, and engages with a range of European artistic influences to offer a vision of 'belonging as not-belonging' in the face of certain and chaotic political times.'

    Sophie Baldock, The Manchester Review 

    'Reading this book can feel like sliding into that sunken world. Strange things float beneath its beautiful surfaces'
    Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
    'The city in Tookey's City of Departures is full of the excitements of history and chance, and the chances taken to make a kind of radiant sense of the world, in all its breakings-down and might-have-beens, which is exactly what, time and again, these beautiful poems do.'
    Jacob Polley
    'Missel-Child is an exceptional volume. Some of the subject-matter is found, some comes from a powerful and intelligent imagination and from keen observation. All is embodied in a language that is sensuous and strong.'
    Jeffrey Wainwright
    'The diction is unexpected, apt and deeply satisfying, focusing the reader not only on the words chosen, but also on the ghosts and resonances of those that might have been there.'
    Carola Luther
    'Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness. She has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren't separate -- that when we dig up the past it's our own roots we are looking at.'
    Grevel Lindop
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