Most Popular Books by Charles Boyle

Campaign is an award-winning course in English for the military. This teacher''s book contains units that feature background briefings for civilian teachers and guidance on teaching English in a military context.

As a street beggar (Tamerlaine?) in the opening poem warns, a life is no simple narrative with a beginning, middle and end. The Very Man, Charles Boyle''s fourth Carcanet collection, is rich in unexpected digressions and conjunctions: Yuri Gagarin and a star of the silent screen, American films and the Eastern Bloc revolutions, D.H. Lawrence and deep-frozen fish, religion and a self-assembly bookshelves kit, Masai initiation rites and suburban adultery, 1812 and office afternoons. Here too are Stendhal in a Paris heat-wave, Muybridge murdering his wife''s lover and other portrait sketches that, for all their clarity and cunning, often refuse to distinguish between real and invented lives.

The stories in The Manet Girl explore situations in which desire, cutting through the demands of daily life, blurs all rational distinctions between what is important and what is distraction.

In Paleface, the free and subversive intelligence which has been heard to speak with growing confidence in each of Charles Boyle''s four previous collections attains full authority. With exhilarating inventiveness, the poet finds new ways, in poem after poem, of expressing both his own predicament as he confronts the confusions and enigmas of middle age, and that of the politically distressed culture in which he finds himself living. Intimations of mortality at a Sunday market, unicorns at the zoo, a miracle in west London, the customs of a not-so-faraway tribe, redundancy and love - these poems distil a sense of sometimes painful, sometimes comic displacement that rings true to the facts.

In this action-packed, character-building story,an injured bird,Sandy,is rescued by young twins,Kate&Kurt,who live at the seashore. He learns the twins are unhappy because they''re slow as runners on their school''s cross-country team due to having no hills for training. The healed bird, in appreciation, invents a running game and coaches them to be faster. Better yet, he opens their minds to the idea of doing your "Personal Best" in everything you do.