Our pick of the latest releases
Human Chain
By Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber, £7.99
The current running through this magnificent collection is the connectedness of things: between past and present, husband and wife, father and son. If there is a dominant season here, it is the season of loss, or the "age of ghosts" – of family, friends, fellow artists. There is still, however, the celebratory impulse to credit the everyday marvels, and Heaney does so with intensified attentiveness, as well as with master strokes of sound and image. There is, too, remarkable freshness in the way he returns to home ground in poems imbued with memory and recollection. He knows it's the poet's duty to "set his hands to tasks / To preserve" such blessed memories. With vigour and inventiveness, Virgil is preserved and ferried into the breathing space of a contemporary setting in Route 110,one of the book's many memorable accomplishments. Gerard Smyth
Zeitoun
By Dave Eggers
Penguin, £8.99
Dave Eggers adopts an admirably restrained tone in this convincing account of the real-life ordeal of one Abdulrahman Zeitoun – painting contractor, father of four and New Orleans resident – in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His family safely evacuated, Syrian-born Zeitoun spent his time navigating the flooded streets in his old canoe, helping and rescuing neighbours and strangers and feeding trapped dogs, until he was picked up and arrested. He was detained for nearly a month, first in an extraordinary Guantánamo-style prison set up at the Greyhound bus station in the city and later in a maximum-security prison. He was denied access to a lawyer and even denied a call to his wife, Kathy, who, understandably, presumed him dead. In his description of this terrifying odyssey Eggers captures the chaos that followed the disaster, and the incompetence and often brutality that characterised the Bush government's response. It's a shocking tale, expertly told. Cathy Dillon
The Poetry of Birds
Edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee
Penguin, £9.99
Tim Dee suggest that birds have "apparentness", while Simon Armitage believes that "poets seek and find in the world of birds unlimited and unequalled reflections of their own world". Through this unified vision the editors have compiled the most wonderful collection of ornithological poetry. They categorise sections by species, and we find that, for example, John Clare was one of the most prolific writers on birds, that there are 10,000 species in the world, with perhaps only 1,000 enshrined in poetry (this book covers about 100), that the blackbird was the most common subject in the poetry of 2005 and that the first birdwatchers to leave descriptions were poets, from Homer onwards. There are contributions from Burns to Keats, Dickinson to Heaney, surveying the most beloved and familiar of birds. The book is a heartening subsong (the out-of-season warm-up singing that birds do), rightfully elevating the bird as muse, because, as Armitage writes, "what we find in them we would hope for our work – that sense of soaring otherness". Siobhán Kane
A Preparation for Death
By Greg Baxter
Penguin, £8.99
Greg Baxter's memoir recounts his time in Dublin as an unpublished writer in the latter half of his 30s. The Texan never ceases to engage the reader, whether through his vivid prose, his Sebastian Dangerfield-esque drinking or his easily engineered sexual encounters with women. Indeed, Baxter may have written passages of this book to show sections of late-Celtic Tiger Ireland that they had not cleansed themselves of their Catholic capacity for shock. That would be a fine purpose, but the truth is that Baxter would have been writing a different book had he left out the sex: he seems compelled towards an exhausted honesty in all aspects of his writing. Baxter refreshingly eschews a parasitical relationship with Dublin, where most of the book is set, taking in memories of Texas and Vienna and his grandparents' experiences during the second World War. His memoir is an entertaining and challenging take on strength, bravery and, ultimately, artistic and human seclusion. Jack Horgan-Jones
Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth
By Oliver Hilmes, translated by Stewart Spencer
Yale University Press, £12.99
Cosima Wagner claimed to have "turned music into a religion". Indeed, the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, who married the conductor Hans von Bülow, was enmeshed in Europe's 19th-century cultural elite. Yet Cosima was mainly interested in the promotion of a particular brand of music, that of Richard Wagner. An adulterous affair with him produced three children before Cosima left von Bülow to devote herself to the cult of Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival. Cosima dealt well with the Bayreuth coterie, a reactionary social elite that was nationalist, anti-progressive and anti-Semitic. The Wagner fold was so tight that access to the vast family archive was restricted until recently, but here Oliver Hilmes uses the archive to research Cosima's life through her correspondence and diaries. From high-society shenanigans to the dark days of the rise of Hitler, this is an absorbing account, not just of an extraordinary character but also of the times and milieu in which she operated. Sarah McMonagle
