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Poetry Bookshop Online is owned by the Poetry Book Society, the book club for poetry lovers. PBS members enjoy discounts on all poetry books they buy. Click on the logo below for more information about the PBS.

Stolen Love Behaviour 

Stammers, John £8.99  <convert> 

John Stammers brings an American sensibility and freedom to bear on a very English - or rather, since Stammers is as Cockney as Keats, a very London - landscape. Like Walt Whitman, he aims to be 'large ... contain multitudes': his poems are packed, straining to break the bounds of the moment and the form of the poem by cramming in a plethora of sensual impressions, uninhibited thoughts and bizarre references. Stolen Love Behaviour is funny, clever and terrifically cool. Fortunately, it is also very warm.

Collected Poems  

Fanthrope, U A £25.00  <convert> 

Fanthorpe's Collected Poems gathers together ten volumes of the human and the humane, and catalogues her recurring concerns with the individual dignity of people and places. She is one of our great preservers, distilling histories of individuals both famous and unknown into wise, succinct portraits. She is a great mistress of voice, and speaks to us in many guises from many times. Whether her work concerns our earliest ancestors or our nearest neighbours, their failings and strengths are always sharply delineated and immediately recognisable. Her work is always approachable, indeed never happier than when it draws us into caring for some neglected aspect of learning or landscape, each deserving of our love. This makes her one of our finest public poets, capable of addressing us all in terms we at once recognise and are constantly surprised by. She is a writer of commanding intimacy, always involving us in her tenderness (there is a nourishing warmth to her love poetry), or catching us up with the acuity of her accusations. But it is her capacity to refigure what is worth preserving about Englishness which makes this book a crowded and companionable mirror to the present.

Apology for Absence 

Darling, Julia; Shapcott, Jo (ed.) £6.95  <convert> 

The late Julia Darling's first book, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, grew from her experiences of being treated for breast cancer; "[it] helped me to step out of the difficult present and to use my imagination to be somewhere else." Her second collection looks at the world beyond the hospital, though still from the viewpoint of a cancer patient in the advanced stages of the illness. The themes are familiar, but here she writes with a wider perspective, a deeper understanding which reach out to the heart of the human condition and the greater mysteries of life, albeit in an understated way. This is a powerful and deeply affecting book, completely unsentimental yet charged with emotion - indeed, one of those rare books that have a profound and lasting effect.

Toast of the Kitkat Club 

France, Linda £7.95  <convert> 

Prodigal 

Walcott, Derek £12.99  <convert> 

Beginning on America's East Coast, the poem journeys restlessly through the European continent, exploring the inheritance of the Old World upon Walcott's native St Lucia, and sees the poet wondering about his own sense of abandonment, as if to leave a place is to lose it. The Prodigal is a compelling steer between exile and belonging, Europe and the New World, wanderlust and the inevitable pull of home.

Shorter Life 

Jenkins, Alan £8.99  <convert> 

Alan Jenkins’ work has always relished exposure, whether pulling back the sheet, lifting up the stone, or reopening the old wound, then commenting with great elegance and self-deprecating irony on what is revealed. This latest book deepens the note of pathos in his blacker humours, and does so in poetry which is never less than brilliantly crafted. The elegy dominates, and these poems are unflinching equally in their exploration of the dead, their dying, and the thoughts and feelings of the survivor. Parents, lovers, friends all pass, and their passing is registered in a virtuosic series of memento mori after memento mori as the poet stares down his own ageing process.

Buffalo Bills 

Stammers, John £5.00  <convert> 

In Buffalo Bills, John Stammers picks up where e.e. cummings' famous poem 'Buffalo Bill's/defunct' left off. With a sly smile and swagger, he takes a stroll through the boulevards and back alleys of our culture, reflecting on a range of its icons. Keats, Freud, Ghandi, Garbo, Sergeant Bilko and Helen of Troy are among those encountered along the way