In My Own Shire

Highlights the importance of regional consciousness in British literature in the Victorian and modern periods.

On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, W. S. Graham is now recognized one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In the first concerted study of Graham's poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith argues that Graham is exemplary for the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the heft and evanescence of poetry's medium. Drawing on newly unearthed archival materials, Nowell Smith orients Graham's poetics around the question of the 'art object'. Graham sought to craft his poems into honed, finished 'objects'; yet he was also aware that the poem's 'finished object' is never wholly finished. Graham's work thus facilitates a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.

From the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote "danger zones." Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world's rich and poor. Risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger, resulting in a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us no matter where we are. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us. From back cover.

In a world where humanity bear wings and racial tension divides a city, things are... Complicated. Daneel just wants her family safe but was never meant to be the one protecting them; Jedekiah is busy trying to burn out the voices in his head while his home is falling apart; and North isn't even sure what's happening, but he's pretty certain it won't end in diplomacy. But after an unfortunate "accident" throws these three unlikely - and unwilling - allies out of their comfort zones and into each others' worlds, they are going to have to learn very quickly the meaning of teamwork and cooperation, to ensure their survival through the city's notorious Disciplines, a (usually) optional gladatorial tournament. Victory will involve breaking boundaries, breaking bones, and occasionally breaking North's glasses - but the stakes might be higher than any of them realise. It's more than just their wings that they're fighting for.

Includes section: "Some Michigan books."

Catherine Ross rallies her neighbors to openly resist the mass evictions, which empty the glens of her people and replace them with sheep. Constable Ian Macgregor finds duty conflicts with his love for Catherine.

This collection of essays was conceived as part of the centenary celebrations of the first publication in 1896 of one of the most popular collections of poetry ever written - A Shropshire Lad - a collection never out of print in a hundred years. Yet Housman was a recluse, an austere classicist of great renown who devoted his academic life to the correction of ancient texts. He filled his poems with the lives, loves, and deaths of simple country people whose emotions are intense and often violent, but lived his own life in stoic acceptance of his loveless, arid existence. Why his life should have been so intentionally empty of emotion raises questions about Housman's own sexuality and the relationship he had with his friend Moses Jackson and Jackson's brother Afalbert. Housman's poetry, like his life, is deceptively simple: this volume shows some of the complex currents below the surface.

Selfless widow Lauren Applegate Harris is determined to retrieve the deed to her beloved father-in-law’s estate, lost during one of his drunken gambling spells, even if it means offering herself as a courtesan to the Earl of Sutton, who seized the land. No one need know Lauren’s other motive: secretly, she’s always longed to dabble, just a little, in sin! The handsome earl is frankly amused. Clearly this winsome and delicate lady has no experience at such wicked behavior. Yet drawn by her beauty and thinking to teach her a lesson, he agrees. But after a few weeks of pleasure, it’s the earl who finds he has the most to learn, as an outrageous proposal turns into a delightfully amorous tryst with possibilities no one could have predicted. But can love grow from such shocking—and duplicitous—beginnings?