A Commonplace Book
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publishing:19th Nov '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 19th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In a commonplace book, you’d write a recipe, copy a proverb, jot down housekeeping advice, making a precious object out of ordinary things. Maitreyabandhu’s Commonplace Book, his first book-length poem, follows a year from the death of his Buddhist teacher while he navigates his own spiritual life and smarts at lost love. Part epyllion, part diary, it mingles tradition with innovation, comedy with tragedy, traversing the bardo between this life and the next. Maitreyabandhu is a Buddhist teacher and writer. His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road (2013), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was followed by Yarn (2015) and After Cézanne (2019).
The best of these poems speak as much of psychological harm, uncertainty and the divisions we create as they do of unity, beauty, or well-adjusted contentment... In the end, though, the impression is of a poet who combines a self-effacing, observational stance with often searing, complicated feeling... Yarn is a collection where the transcendent promise of Buddhist enlightenment meets with the blunt reality of flawed humanity.
-- Ben Wilkinson * The Poetry Review, on YaISBN: 9781780378008
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 90mm
Weight: unknown
96 pages