Owen Sheers Book order (chronological)

Die Poesie lebt – doch die ungeheure Vielfalt der Dichter aller Sprachen, aller Länder von Albanien bis Zypern ist nahezu unbekannt. So ist es höchste Zeit für eine neue, aufregende Bestandaufnahme: Nach den legendären Vorgängern „Museum der modernen Poesie“ von Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1960) und „Atlas der neuen Poesie“ von Joachim Sartorius (1995) machen sich Jan Wagner und Federico Italiano auf eine faszinierende Reise. Die „Grand Tour“ durch die junge Lyrik Europas gibt poetischen Proviant für Jahre: Unbekanntes, Überraschendes und Unerhörtes - in Original und Übersetzung. Eine Entdeckungsreise für wache Geister.

Pink Mist is a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan. School friends still in their teens, Arthur, Hads and Taff each have their own reasons for enlisting. Within a short space of time they return to the women in their lives (a mother, a wife, a girlfriend), all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of their service. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity and emotional intensity, Pink Mist uses everyday yet heightened speech to excavate the human cost of modern warfare. Drawing upon interviews with soldiers and their families, as well as ancient texts such as the medieval Welsh poem Y Gododdin , it is the first extended lyric narrative to emerge from the devastating conflict in Afghanistan.

After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London to start again. Living on a quiet street in Hampstead, he develops a close bond with the Nelson family next door: Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters. The friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a devastating event changes all their lives, and Michael finds himself bearing the burden of grief and a terrible secret.

1944. Sarah Lewis wakes to find her husband has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the women in the isolated Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence they regroup as an all-female community and wait, hoping for news.

When Owen Sheers discovers a book in his father's study he stumbles upon the life of an obscure relative: Arthur Cripps, lyric poet and maverick missionary to Rhodesia. Compelled by the description of Cripps' extraordinary life in Africa, Sheers embarks on a journey through contemporary Zimbabwe in an attempt to better understand his ancestor's devotion to the country and its people and the dramatic, often bloody, differences that echo across the years.

The Blue Book includes poems on a range of themes, from recollections of time spent in Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence spent in the tough streets of a small, rural town; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems.