The Beautiful Catastrophe of Wind


Book Description

No one ever chooses to stop at Black Rock Mesa, it's too desolate. The brutal wind, ever-present and temperamental, tests the willpower of the most stalwart residents. So, when a mysterious woman impulsively disembarks from a bus and gets blown into the town's general store, her presence causes quite a stir. She says little, but her Asian features earn her the nickname "Tokyo." Deciding to stay in town, she reveals little about her past, and is comforted to find little is asked. Slowly she comes to see that Black Rock is not like other towns -- due to the wind, everything, even time, works a bit differently. Black Rock, she learns, was founded by three prospectors looking for gold -- Noah, Shlomo and Apie. Noah, the most charismatic of the three, attracted quarrymen to this unforgiving place to tirelessly chip and haul the slate down from the mesa. But the big gaps left in the stories of the past hint to Tokyo that the town folk have secrets bigger than her own. No one is talking, not even the man Tokyo takes up with, Luke, Noah's son. This reticence suits Tokyo just fine, until one day a strange man shows up in Black Rock with revelations. Ultimately, no secret is immune.




Yellow Tulips


Book Description

Winner of both the Queen's Gold Medal and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, James Fenton has given readers some of the most memorable lyric verse of the past decades, from the formal skill that marked his debut, 'Terminal Moraine', to the dramatic and political monologues of 'The Memory of War'. This is a new collection of his work.




Selected Poems


Book Description

Publisher description




How to Avoid a Climate Disaster


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.




Poems on the Underground


Book Description

This wonderful new edition of Poems on the Underground is published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Underground in 2013. Here 230 poems old and new, romantic, comic and sublime explore such diverse topics as love, London, exile, families, dreams, war, music and the seasons, and feature poets from Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley, Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott and a host of younger poets. It includes a new foreword and over two dozen poems not included in previous anthologies.




The Beautiful Catastrophe of Wind


Book Description

No one ever chooses to stop at Black Rock Mesa, it's too desolate. The brutal wind, ever-present and temperamental, tests the willpower of the most stalwart residents. So, when a mysterious woman impulsively disembarks from a bus and gets blown into the town's general store, her presence causes quite a stir. She says little, but her Asian features earn her the nickname "Tokyo." Deciding to stay in town, she reveals little about her past, and is comforted to find little is asked. Slowly she comes to see that Black Rock is not like other towns -- due to the wind, everything, even time, works a bit differently. Black Rock, she learns, was founded by three prospectors looking for gold -- Noah, Shlomo and Apie. Noah, the most charismatic of the three, attracted quarrymen to this unforgiving place to tirelessly chip and haul the slate down from the mesa. But the big gaps left in the stories of the past hint to Tokyo that the town folk have secrets bigger than her own. No one is talking, not even the man Tokyo takes up with, Luke, Noah's son. This reticence suits Tokyo just fine, until one day a strange man shows up in Black Rock with revelations. Ultimately, no secret is immune.




Children in Exile


Book Description

Fenton's work is elegant, highly finished, reticent, witty. Disturbing and deeply affecting, Children in Exile remains an exhilarating and memorable performance. "Quite simply, Fenton's poems are frightening." - The New York Times Book Review




Distant Reading


Book Description

A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance. Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition. The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates. Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance--recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen--rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.




Tri-quarterly


Book Description




New British Poetry


Book Description

From established poets such as Andrew Motion and James Fenton, to mid-career poets such as Glyn Maxwell and Kathleen Jamie, to recent T.S. Eliot Prize-winner Alice Oswald, the work is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with traditional forms and an exhilirating range of styles. --Graywolf Press.