SHOPFRONT : NEW BOOKS : April 21st,2007

New books..."new" books? Part of this project is constantly restoring key authors & titles ('contemporary classics' as they say) to the shelves. Presently Collected Works Bookshop is waiting on Shakespeare's Complete Works from Palgrave Macmillan (in association with the RSC). Another Shakespeare? Yes, but...edited by Jonathon Bate (acclaimed biographer of John Claire, in stock) & Eric Rasmussen (associated with the Arden Shakespeares, in stock), based on the 1623 First Folio. Includes the poetry, the thought- to- be doubtful & marginal works, extensive appendices, glossaries, summaries. At $95, hb, ready to go head to head with the Oxford!
Jump three centuries : We have Randall Jarrell back on the shelf. The Complete Poems (FSG), $42-95; No Other Book : Selected Essays (Perennial),$31-95; Poetry & The Age (FSG), $45; Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories (NYRB), $27-95 (great anthology, the introduction alone worth reading). While we're in the jays there's The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford), $65, in Tim Hunt's definitive edition containing long narratives & shorter poems.
Delighted to find Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries : Poems 1923-68 (FSG), $27-95, still available. And it's an occasion of that once-or-twice-a-year that the Complete Poems of e.e.cummings, 1904-62 (Liveright), hb, $95 is in stock. (Selecteds & others, ditto.)
The hb T.S. Eliot Complete Poems & Plays, $85, sometimes seems unavailable but is currently in stock. Coincides with the slim series Cambridge Introduction to T.S. Eliot, $29-95. (Other volumes so far include Yeats, Joyce, Beckett.) Speaking of Eliot, we have a new & elegant hb edition of The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes (trsl by Cardinal Newman), $60. Whilst in that neck of the woods there's John Donne : Man of Flesh & Spirit, $29-95; and in the English Monarchs series from National Archives press, James I, The Masque of Monarchy by Travers, $39-95; James II, the Triumph & the Tragedy by Callow,$39-95.
We've recently scooped something resembling 'the Charles Williams collection' and will follow suit with his fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, soon. The Inklings (the group, their sources from Norse & Old English to the Golden Dawn) lorded over by Tolkein & Lewis, is an endlessly intriguing section of the Shop. Our restored Charles Williams include The Descent of the Dove (A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church) (Regent College)$44-95; Outlines of Romantic Theology (Apocryphile Press), $45; The Place of the Lion (Regent), novel, $38-95; Collected Plays [intro. by the late John Heath-Stubbs](Regent),$49-95. A good introduction to "the mentor of Eliot, Lewis & Sayers"[D. Steere] is Mary Mcdermot Shideler's The Theology of Romantic Love : A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams (Wipf&Stock),$49-95. The same publisher gives us Barbara Reynolds' The Passionate Intellect : Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante, $55. From Harper is Sayers' The Complete Stories, nearly 800 pp, $33-95. Two ancestors of the Inklings, certainly of Tolkein & Lewis, are George MacDonald & William Morris. We're happy to have The George MacDonald Treasury, ed & publ by Glenn Kahley, a 650 page whopper, $49-95; and two from Aegypan Press by Morris, The Wood Beyond the World, $21-95, & The Roots of the Mountains, $34-95.

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THE AVALANCHE [a.k.a. New Australian Poetry]

Suzanne Edgar, The Painted Lady (the latest from Ginninderra's INDIGO imprint), arrives with blurbs from L Murray & J. Owen, $21-95.
Three from the astonishing ginormous SALT : Dennis Haskell's All the Time in the World, $33-95; Paul Hetherington's It Feels Like Disbelief, $24-95; Nicolette Stasko's Glass Cathedrals : New & Selected Poems, $39-95.
Geoff Page, hot on the heels of Agnostic Skies (FIP),$18-95, presents Lawrie & Shirley : The Final Cadenza : A Movie in Verse (Pandanus),$19-95.
Two of the last titles Ron Pretty will see through to press are Michael Sharkey's The Sweeping Plain (FIP),$21-95 (which follows History : Selected Poems, 1978-2002, with FIP) and Louise Crisp's Uplands (FIP),$21-95, her first larger collection since Ruby Camp ten years ago.
Judy Johnson's verse novel Jack, enthusiastically blurbed by Dorothy Porter, who should know about such things, $24-95 from Pandanus.
Kerry Scuffins, Litmus (FIP), her 6th, $18-95, more often heard (like winning the Dorothy Leadbetter Poetry Cup for instance) than seen.
Claire Gaskin's A Bud, one of the new John Leonard Press series, $21-95, continues its splash on the local scene.
Of recent self-produced books Alan Murphy's Somnambulent in Wetlands, $15, collecting published & unpublished poems, a song, some autobiographical material including Raffaella Torresin's splendid portrait from Melbourne poets' exhibition, is recommended.
The Best Australian Poems for 2006, ed. Dorothy Porter (Black Inc) has become a popular anthology, and John Leonard's New Music : An anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (FIP), $29-95, five years on is a showcase good as any (everyone from Elizabeth Campbell, b.1980 to Rosemary Dobson, b.1920)...

--April 21st,2007