Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism,...

Explores the difficulties associated with having your heart in Europe and your life in Japan, across the shadowy terrains of a world grown decidedly more at risk, dangerous, and violent. This work contains poetry that celebrates all it can by means of the poet's rhythm, dexterity, and eye for the energized processes of landscape and atmosphere.

This cutting-edge volume describes the implications of Cognitive Linguistics for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). The first two sections identify theoretical and empirical strands of Cognitive Linguistics, presenting them as a coherent whole. The third section discusses the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics to SLA and defines a research agenda linking these fields with implications for language instruction. Its comprehensive range and tutorial-style chapters make this handbook a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.

When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader, 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling...

Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It begins with an unofficial gathering of poems and prose pieces covering the writer's entire career, none of which are to be found in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005, his most recent collected edition. This is followed by a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following among significant contemporaries and juniors, including Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, Laurie Duggan, August Kleinzahler,...

Peter Robinson's new collection, The Returning Sky, carefully sequences the poems written over the four years from the time he left Japan and returned to England, through the global financial crisis, and into our current austerity culture. Opening with a sequence inspired by an unexpected visit to the United States, The Returning Sky then explores experiences of repatriation with the vividness and freshness of a reverse culture shock. The book takes up the inextricably financial, cultural, and emotional themes that Robinson had first scouted in collections from the years before his long...

For Inspector Banks and Superintendent Gristhorpe, the abduction of a young girl brings back dreadful memories of the Moors Murders . . .
When two social workers investigating reports of child abuse appear at Brenda Scupham's door, her fear of authority leads her to comply meekly with their requests. Even when they say that they must take her seven-year-old daughter Gemma away for tests . . .
It is only when they fail to return Gemma the following day that Brenda realises something has gone terribly wrong. Particularly worrying is the calculated manner of the abduction, and the fact...

These essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

Ex-college lecturer Gavin Miller is found dead; his distorted body strewn across a disused railway track near his home. There's no sign of a struggle, and no concrete evidence except for one distinguishing package: GBP5,000 of cash, tucked inside the man's pocket. But when DCI Banks delves into Miller's past, he uncovers a troubled existence tarnished by accusations of abuse and misconduct which throws up an array of puzzling questions. What really occurred at the college where the victim used to teach? How was he embroiled in political activism at Essex University, over forty years ago? And...

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing...