Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book Synopsis“Old Poets is an indispensable jewel.” —Washington Post“An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.” —Boston Globe Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets’ existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”Hall’s essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost’s public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, “old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.”Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.Contents include: “Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,” “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide,” “Notes on T. S. Eliot,” “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,” “Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,” and “Fragments of Ezra Pound.”For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, “Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.”Trade Review“As a personalized introduction to the leading figures of modernism, no better book exists.”—New York Times “It’s impossible not to love Old Poets...an indispensable jewel...so rich, so packed with ideas and incident, any page reveals gold...”—Washington Post “An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.” —Boston Globe “If Old Poets only preserved Hall’s anecdotes and observations, it would be a fascinating document of literary history. But he is also a keen critic, drawing connections between the writer and his or her work.”—Adam Kirsch, Harvard Magazine“In Old Poets, the late poet Donald Hall opines on everything literary...and readers will vicariously experience outings with eminent poets.”—City Journal“ ‘Curiosity endures, surviving criticism or philosophy,’ affirms poet and critic Hall as he introduces a distinguished gallery of poets—Frost, Thomas, Eliot, Moore, MacLeish, Winters, Pound—with verisimilitude and freshness enough to satisfy readers. The most thorough portrait follows Hall’s relations with Eliot, disclosing a personality rather than a ‘monument’—an unusually humorous and surprisingly ‘American’ poet. And his reminiscences of the lonely, disconcerted Pound may be the book’s most insightful. Although Hall’s voice in these recollections and interviews is quiet, even self-effacing, he writes as a trustworthy and sympathetic witness, one who reveres his subjects: ‘Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.’ ”—Publishers Weekly“Reading it again after all these years in this sparkling new edition, I see that Donald Hall’s book of memoirs and opinions, Old Poets, is one of those quirky triumphs of literature that he so admired. It is a great pleasure to read—frank, funny, and entertaining, but also serious and insightful, filled with a sense of mission and vocation. I find it candid, unabashed, and inspiring.”—Edward Hirsch

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Book SynopsisAcclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world. “We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world,” writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root—Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and others—are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux. Drawn from “words that think,” these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that “a word is its own form of life.” In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where “the beginning and the end are in common.” A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.Trade ReviewPraise for the Seedbank Series“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books “Through its cultural-linguistic contribution to narrative diversity, Milkweed's Seedbank series is a vital tool in imagining the futures possible for humanity beyond the anthropocene. Bringing works from Greek, K'iche', German, Russian (and more!) whose authors are deeply rooted in their homelands, each voice encountered has resonated with me on a seemingly cellular level—shifting and changing both who I am and can be. I will continue to press these books into the hands of compassionate readers and cannot wait to share the forthcoming titles in the project!”—Erin Pineda, 27th Letter Books"Milkweed as a publishing house has long been championing literary works both fictitious and true to life centered around culture, nature, and environmentalism. The Seedbank series serves as both a marvelous introduction to the books Milkweed provides and as a collection of essential stories that ought to be on everyone's radar. The words behind these front covers highlight life-changing experiences, knowledge, and ways of life from communities that are seldom otherwise heard from in the publishing world through an authentic cultural lens. What I've read from the Seedbank line is phenomenal, and I look forward to spending time with future works in the series."—Andrew King, Secret Garden BooksPraise for Stone-Garland“As part of the publisher’s ‘Seedbank’ series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks.”—New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry”“Sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poets Alcman, Theognis, Simonides, Anacreon/Anacreonata, Archilochus, and Callimachus are beautifully translated by Beachy-Quick in this memorable and edifying collection, which presents excavated fragments meant to be sung or recited to music . . . This skillfully achieved collection is a necessary contribution to ancient translation.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“[A] thoughtfully collected anthology of poems of the ancients—poems that despite their age sing with a fresh vibrancy. Beachy-Quick is both translator and guide through the stone ruins and his insightful and beautiful introductions to each poet are a joy in and of themselves. Part of Milkweed’s Seedbank Series that aims to preserve and bring ancient, historical, and contemporary works from cultures around the world to readers, Stone-Garland is a collection to cherish.”—Book Riot, “Best Fall 2020 Books in Translation”“To me, every book by Beachy-Quick feels like a beacon amid the chaos of contemporary life . . . [offering] new coordinates to triangulate one’s uncertain position in deep time.”—Srikanth Reddy, BOMB Magazine“Beachy-Quick presents an inspired and intricately-constructed collection . . . [an] enchanting, death-defying project.”—Poetry Daily“Beautiful and understated . . . Beachy-Quick’s translations lean into the elegiac possibilities of these poems and poets. . . . We grow old, as do our voices; we die; the best we can hope for is that the songs we sing will be picked up by others, turned into new forms, given new life, and that, for a moment, something of us might live again.”—Words Without BordersPraise for Of Silence and Song “Responding to the silence from which poetry arises, Beachy-Quick is not afraid to follow the call of thought, wherever it may lead. This book situates itself beyond the noise of the times.”—Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Gardens: An Essay on the Human“You read here that, etymologically, ’consider’ means ‘to examine the stars. To draw the connections between the distant points.’ If that is so, then Of Silence and Song is a clear night sky full of constellations. From the beanfields that Pythagoras would not enter to the verses of her Bible that Dickinson cut out, from his daughter Iris’s fear of the dark to the ‘tenth Muse seldom mentioned,’ from here to heliopause, Beachy-Quick crosses great expanses in this book-length, acutely human consideration, flickering in the hunch that ’question and answer are the same thing—one. . . just the disappearance of the other.’”—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies “It’s an exciting thing when a writer of real originality and scope discovers a form that both focuses and liberates his gift. Beachy-Quick is such a writer, and Of Silence and Song is such a book. One doesn’t think to use the word ‘ennobling’ of many works of contemporary art, but this one is.”—Christian Wiman, author of My Bright AbyssPraise for Wonderful Investigations“Wonderful Investigations juxtaposes four essays with three ‘meditations’ and four fable-like ‘tales’ to trace the tension between mind and body, between our inner and our outer lives. A poet, Beachy-Quick is terrific with an image and relies on antecedents here from Plato to Thoreau to give his work a context and a depth.”—Los Angeles Times “Wonderful Investigations is a model of intense observation, of a mind reaching out as far as it can. Always Beachy-Quick seems to write in metaphor, returning to the process of wonder, and why it’s so necessary, and then to the failure of language and poetry to ever truly take us where we want to go. . . . His reader cannot help but feel the same desire for that hazy line—cannot help but want to reach for it as well.”—Ploughshares“This is a book about reading. It offers the kinds of insights into the act that most of us never stop to indulge in, and for that we are eternally grateful. . . . The idea that reading offers a dream world, a parallel one, is familiar. But Beachy-Quick takes this a step farther. Reading before sleep, reading books to children before they go to sleep, is a way to slide gently through a middle place and into forgetting.”—Los Angeles Review of BooksPraise for A Whaler’s Dictionary“Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant.”—Poetry Foundation“This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life.”—Los Angeles Times“Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler’s Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time.”—Daniel Tiffany, author of Infidel Poetics“This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America’s most significant young poets.”—Lyn Hejinian, author of My Life“A Whaler’s Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing.”—Virginia Quarterly ReviewTable of ContentsThales, Anaximander, Anaximenes Heraclitus Xenophanes Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles

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Book SynopsisExplores Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. She examines Plath’s early years growing up in a transcendentalist Unitarian church under a brilliant, if stern, Freemason father and a mother who wrote her master’s dissertation on the famous alchemist Paracelsus. She reveals Plath’s early knowledge of Hermeticism, how she devoured books on the occult throughout her life, and

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Book Synopsis1988: at four-years-old, he short-circuited his home with a silver spoon and a Betamax video player. 1989: stopped a 700-strong student assembly with a tantrum. 1995: was chased through jungle growth by a crazed, frustrated French teacher called Monsieur Batcock...Misfit? Apparently – until a little family research reveals a pattern of mischief reaching as far back as a great grandfather, and so the story begins: I'm from a long line of trouble makers, of ash skinned Africans, born with clenched fists and a natural thirst for battle only quenched by breast milk. They'd suckle as if the white silk sliding between gums were liquid peace treaties from mums. The 14th Tale is a beautiful mellifluous narrative that tells the hilarious exploits of a natural born mischief, growing from the clay streets of Nigeria to rooftops in Dublin and finally to London by award-winning writer and performer Inua Ellams.Trade ReviewA sharp reminder of the power of language and rhythm" The Scotsman; "original, experimental, beautiful * Culture Wars *Inua Ellams captures our attention as soon as he opens his mouth * The Times *

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Book SynopsisThis book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.Table of ContentsPreface List of Illustrations Introduction The Fox and Medieval Religion The Fox and Medieval Scholarship The Fox and Medieval Literature Postscript Appendix Endnotes Further Reading Select Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisMina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, Feminism, Fashion, and everything modern and modernist. This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy's exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.Trade Review'Reading Mary Ann Caws' book today reminds me of the excitement I felt when I first encountered Mina Loy's writing nearly fifty years ago. Mina Loy is not for everyone, I wrote at the time. She is an acquired habit. But if she gets into your system, you may become addicted. In fact you may not ever get over her, in which case this charismatic book will not help you. It will only make withdrawal more difficult.' - Roger Conover, writer, editor and Mina Loy's literary executor

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Book SynopsisNow available in paperback, Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works, including the little-known Japanese concretists, the Wiener Gruppe, Augusto de Campos, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, Cia Rinne, Susan Howe and many others. Perloff's anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that some have dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts.Trade Review"Beautifully produced. . . . Whether you leap in and buy it or consult a library copy I think it's well worth your time. A book for poets, readers, and art lovers. Your own formally composed verses, on the still white page, ought to be ruffled, alarmed, and if not fully converted, at least have the 'look' of them excitingly challenged."-- "High Window Review" "Instead of simply reprising 'Concrete Poetry's Greatest Hits, ' Perloff's anthology covers a wide range of formal approaches and aesthetics, and we are introduced to work from throughout Europe and North America, as well as important poetry from Japan, and especially, Brazil, where the poets associated the Noigandres group, among other innovations, made poetry by 'pursuing an analogy between musical instruments and components of language.'"-- "California Review of Books" "Perloff's lively style and tone in this book help to give new life to old forms, conveying something of the sense of adventure felt among those of us still young enough to remember being part of this postwar cultural movement. Written in a highly accessible way, with a fine choice of accompanying poems, it's a book to generate new interest as well as to inform existing initiates."--Hansjoerg Mayer, poet, typographer, and publisher "Perloff's new anthology presents a wide sampling of what is known as concrete poetry. Through the book's rich introduction to the nearly 200 color and black-and-white illustrations and the commentary below each, readers learn much about this postmodernist poetic genre. . . . Recommended."-- "Choice" "This is an exciting and engaging summary of an important and still misunderstood field, the value of which lies in the intelligence and sensitivity of Perloff's close readings."-- "Burlington Contemporary" "This new anthology is to be welcomed. It features a wide range of international poets who contributed to the movement, and displays prime examples of their poetic output in its original setting. Perloff offers personal commentaries on the individual poems, and provides a historical introduction which also conveys her belief in the enduring legacy of the movement."--Stephen Bann CBE, emeritus professor of history of art, University of Bristol, editor of "Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology" "This wonderfully rich anthology reveals the experimentation and internationalism of concrete poetry and its continuing significance. Perloff's fresh selection, including the work of poets from Austria and Japan, offers scholarly insight alongside helpful notes to each poem."--Andrew Nairne OBE, director, Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge "What is undoubtedly valuable about the book is the way that it carefully arranges, in a beautifully printed hardback, a selection of concrete poetry's keystones. The first half of Perloff's selection triangulates Brazil, Austria and Scotland through the work of three key figures: Augusto de Campos, Gerhard Ruhm, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. For the anglophone reader, she glosses the foreign words involved, prising apart the heavy punning that sparked the concrete imagination."--Jeremy Noel-Tod "Times Literary Supplement" "Most of the poems in Concrete Poetry fill a full page (and sometimes two). Under each is Perloff's critical gloss, never more than a few sentences long, and often brilliant . . . These glosses by Perloff set a new higher standard for the critical reading of avant-garde poetry, whether concrete or visual. The two pioneering critics of avant-garde poetry, Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman, would have loved them, as do I."-- "Rain Taxi Review of Books" "Perloff's Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology offers a present-day perspective on the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s through to the 1970s. The curator takes us back to that defining period, which most scholars identify as the heyday of concretism, with the aim of establishing a sort of 'canon' of the most interesting and enduring contributors to the movement. Here is a body of work . . . which deserves a wider audience and greater critical attention."-- "Fortnightly Review" "This groundbreaking book finally legitimizes one of the most important--yet most neglected--strains of contemporary poetic practice. By rigorously framing concrete poetry within a critical discourse, Perloff forcefully positions concrete poetry as essential to understanding our digital world. More than a mere history or a survey, Concrete Poetry's landmark achievement signifies an essential reshuffling of the historical deck."--Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Pennsylvania, founding editor of UbuWebTable of ContentsAUTHOR'S NOTE PREFACE INTRODUCTION AUGUSTO DE CAMPOS GERHARD RUEHM IAN HAMILTON FINLAY BRAZIL AUSTRIA JAPAN UNITED KINGDOM SWITZERLAND GERMANY AND FRANCE UNITED STATES AND CANADA POSTLUDE BIOGRAPHIES REFERENCES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Book SynopsisA biography of the poet Stevie Smith

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Book SynopsisWalking in the Luxembourg Garden, exchanging letters about tea with an irascible Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke's French translator Maurice Betz enjoyed a rare intimacy with the great poet. This account of their collaborative translation of Rilke's only novel brings the reader along on a tour of the glittering cultural scene of interwar Paris. An elegant, poignant look at the great writer's final years, Betz's memoir is a portrait of genius, an evocation of a lost world, and a testament to enduring friendship.

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Book SynopsisOne of America's best-loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay's refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.

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Book SynopsisW. B. Yeats believed that a poet's life should be an experiment in living. His poems fashion into memorable words the sometimes puzzling emotions that hover over important life events. Yeats's remarkable work can clarify our own thinking about similar situations. Joseph M. Hassett's Yeats Now: Echoing into Life extracts and distils the rich harvest of Yeats's experiment. As Yeats's biographer Roy Foster comments, Yeats Now is 'a personal, quizzical, imaginative testament that ranges through Yeats's thought and writings, showcasing and discussing a series of ringing statements, suggestions and aphorisms that evolve into a kind of vade-mecum or guide to life. The subjects cover love, anger, friendship, politics, violence and the competing claims of perfecting the life, or the work'. This book is a wonderful companion to the work of this significant poet. Hassett's writing provides an excellent frame of context through which to explore one of Ireland's greatest poets.Trade ReviewHassett seeks always to restore the full poetic and personal context to many famous lines. … The result is one of the most beautiful and enjoyable books on Yeats ever to call forth the skills of a gifted designer [a]nd of a true critic. -- Declan Kiberd * Dublin Review of Books *Subtle and often illuminating study of what we can learn from Yeats … and how we can let his words echo in our own lives. -- Michael O'Loughlin * Irish Times *Thought-provoking, a fresh, accessible look at the shimmering legacy of WB Yeats in all its wonder and poise. -- Paddy Kehoe * RTE *This is a handsome and stylish book, both in looks and, more importantly, in its capacity to appreciate the magic of William Butler Yeats’s poetry. -- Michael Langan * NBC-2 *I can’t think of a more inspiring way to fill the unforgiving minute than to read this book, to be renewed and invigorated by Yeats’ relevance today – Now – and to rediscover the nobility of his poetry, the endurance of his hope. -- Anne Cunningham * Anne Cunningham Blog *

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Book SynopsisYour battle wounds are scars upon my heart' wrote Vera Brittain in a poem to her beloved brother, four days before he died in June 1918. The rediscovery of TESTAMENT OF YOUTH has reminded a new generation of the bitter sufferings of women as well as men in the terrible madness of the First World War. This, the first anthology of women war poets for over sixty years, will come as a surprise to many. It shows, for example, that women were writing protest poetry before Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and that the view of 'the women at home', ignorant and idealistic, was quite false.Many of these poems come out of direct experiences of nursing the victims of trench warfare, or the pain of lovers, brothers, sons lost. Poets include: Nancy Cunard, Rose Macaulay, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, Edith Nesbit, Edith Sitwell, Marie Stopes, Katharine Tynan. Here, as elsewhere, 'the poetry is in the pity' - a moving record of women's experience of war.

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Book SynopsisDrawing on his extensive experience of poetry workshops and courses, Peter Sansom shows you not how to write but how to write better, how to write authentically, how to say genuinely what you genuinely mean to say. This practical guide is illustrated with many examples. Peter Sansom covers such areas as submitting to magazines; the small presses; analysing poems; writing techniques and procedures; and drafting. He includes brief resumes and discussions of literary history and literary fashions, the spirit of the age, and the creative process itself. Above all, his book helps you learn discrimination in your reading and writing - so that you can decide for yourself how you want your work to develop, whether that magazine was right in returning it or if they simply don't know their poetic arse from their elbow. Writing Poems includes sections on: Metre, rhyme, half-rhyme and free verse. Fixed forms and how to use them. Workshops and writing groups. Writing games and exercises. A detailed, annotated reading list. Where to go from here. Glossary of technical terms. Writing Poems has become an essential handbook for many poets and teachers: invaluable to writers just starting out, helpful to poets who need a nuts-and-bolts handbook, a godsend to anyone running poetry courses and workshops, and an inspiration to all readers and writers who want a book which re-examines the writing of poems.Trade Review'I would recommend this book to any student - It's funny, honest, thoughtful, realistic' - Gillian Allnutt, Northern Echo. 'Peter Sansom's handbook is The Haynes Manual for Poetry' - Cliff Yates. 'Peter Sansom is the best poetry teacher in the world' - Sian Hughes, Guardian. 'The classic Writing Poems - indispensable' - Naomi Jaffa, Poetry Trust.

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Book SynopsisThis wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren’t sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death. Grief isn’t denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin’s famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered – all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.

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Book SynopsisLucan's epic on the Civil War has dodged in and out of fashion. Widely admired in the 17th and 18th centuries, it came in the 19th and 20th to be criticised by comparison with Virgil's Aeneid. The latter was established as the standard by which all other epic poets fail. Lucan's besetting "fault" was seen as his reliance on rhetoric. This work sets out to consider the rules of ancient rhetoric as learned by Lucan and applied in his epic. Four themes commmon to poetry and to the declamatory schools (tyranny, storms, the occult and dreams) are closely analyzed in relation to the poem, and the poem is itself set in the context of the Neronian age.

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Book SynopsisDjuna Barnes (1892-1982) once described herself as the most famous unknown writer, and although her novel "Nightwood" is celebrated, her poetry has been a well-kept secret. This selection contains work written between 1914 and the 1970s. Many of the poems in "The Book of Repulsive Women" first appeared in pamphlets and literary journals in New York and Paris. Published together for the first time, they throw new light on Barnes' development as a writer. The book reveals her as a poet of unique power, at once compelling and disorientating. Marianne Moore observed, "reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand". "The Book of Repulsive Women" includes previously unpublished and uncollected poems, and five illustrations by Barnes herself. Rebecca Loncraine provides an introduction to Barnes' poetry.

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Book SynopsisI try to write something every day even though I am not writing poetry, just to get myself in touch with language.Edwin MorganEdwin Morgan (19202010) is one of the giants of modern literature. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the playful to the profound.Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language presents previously uncollected prose journalism, book and theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio scripts, forewords and afterwords all carefully moulded to the needs of differing audiences. Morgan's writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find surprises and delights in this new collection.

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Book SynopsisDr Johnson sums up the case against Milton: “the want of human interest is always felt.” It is the apparent distance of Paradise Lost from ordinary humanity that has thrilled or repelled critics throughout the ages. While many readers are carried away by Milton’s sublimity, others are daunted by his grandeur, scope and learning. Milton himself declared that he would not begin to write until he had “completed the full circle of my private studies”. The Greek word for a circle of learning is the root of “encyclopaedia”; and Milton’s erudition is encyclopaedic. Paradise Lost draws on both ancient learning and the scholarship of his day, displaying not only his deep knowledge of the Bible and Biblical scholarship, and his passionate assimilation of the classics, but also his absorption in astronomy, cosmology, geography, numerology and science. Yet many critics of Paradise Lost argue that all this circling lacks a human centre. Who, after all, is the hero? Adam and Eve in their unfallen state are too remote from us; Christ is not yet incarnate; God cannot be a character. Which leaves us with the magnificently problematic figure of Satan. In this fascinating study of Milton’s great poem, Caroline Moore suggests that, contrary to what these critics argue, the core of Paradise Lost is extraordinarily human. Milton himself believed that poetry excelled at describing “the wily subtleties and refluxes of man’s thought from within”. This is precisely what Paradise Lost does. If, to a generation raised on the novel, Milton’s methods of psychological exploration seem strange, this only intensifies the effect: Paradise Lost is a poem that explores the dark byways and infinite strangeness of the human heart.

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Book SynopsisA hundred years ago Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras (April 1917). The reputation of his poetry has never been higher. Edna Longley has already edited Thomas's poems and prose. She now marks his centenary, and adds to the growing field of Thomas studies, with this close reading of his poetry. Longley places the lyric poem at the centre of Thomas's poetry and of his thinking about poetry. Drawing on Thomas's own remarkable critical writings, she argues that his importance to emergent 'modern poetry' has yet to be fully appreciated. Thomas, as a leading reviewer of poetry in the early 1900s, was deeply engaged with the traditions of poetry in the English language, as well as with contemporary poetry. Under the Same Moon takes a fresh look at Thomas's relation to the Romantic poets, to Great War poetry, to Robert Frost, to W.B. Yeats. By making detailed comparisons between their poems, Longley shows how the aesthetics of Thomas and Frost complement one another across the Atlantic. She argues, perhaps controversially, that we should think about Great War poetry from the perspective of Thomas as 'war poet' and critic of war poetry. And she suggests that to focus on Thomas is to open up poetic relations in the 'Anglo-Celtic' archipelago. Under the Same Moon is also a study of lyric poetry: its sources, structures and forms; the kinds of meaning it creates. Longley asks what exactly happened when, in December 1914, Thomas morphed from a prose-writer into a poet; and she approaches the lyric from a psychological angle by comparing Thomas with Philip Larkin.

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Book SynopsisGeoffrey Chaucer might be considered the quintessential English writer, but he drew much of his inspiration and material from Italy. Without the tremendous influences of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, the author of The Canterbury Tales might never have assumed his place as the 'father' of English literature. Nevertheless, Richard Owen's Chaucer's Italy begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his roles as court diplomat and customs official, before his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III's son Lionel in Milan and diplomatic missions to Genoa and Florence. Scrutinising his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight John Hawkwood, Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy's people and towns on Chaucer's poems and stories. Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but, as Owen's enlightening short study of Chaucer's Italian years makes clear, the poet's life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.Trade Review'Very readable and well-paced - covers an amazing amount of ground.' Marion Turner, author of Chaucer: A European Life 'A fascinating insight into Chaucer's world.' Mary Hollingsworth, author of Princes of the Renaissance 'Richard Owen performs the remarkable feat of showing us Italy through Chaucer's eyes. It's a wonderful evocation of the vibrant intellectual, commercial, and cross-cultural exchanges at the height of the Middle Ages - and the perfect read for a getaway break to Florence, Genoa, or Milan.' Ross King, author of The Bookseller of Florence 'Inherently interesting, deftly written, impressively organised and presented.' Midwest Book Review

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Book SynopsisThis accessible textbook hinges on the central assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar, introducing students to the analytical tools they need to approach Stylistics, an essential area in language analysis. The author verifies the claim that alterations in style, triggered by different cognitive processes, reflect alterations in meaning, and shows how they are employed to achieve particular effects in context. The book links theory with practice, aiming both to acquaint students with the cognitive principles that account for stylistic expressions, and to provide them with the tools and techniques to conduct their own analyses. The textbook explores and explains how writers use the resources of language to create meaning, and how readers interpret texts. It will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses in English Linguistics, as well as those working on other languages and in related areas such as Composition and Creative Writing. Table of ContentsPrologue.- Chapter 1: Key Concepts.- Chapter 2: Historical Overview.- Chapter 3: The Cognitive Framework.- Chapter 4: The Idealization Theory.- Chapter 5: The Contextualization Theory.- Chapter 6: The Configuration Theory.- Chapter 7: The Experientialism Theory.- Chapter 8: The Conceptualization Theory.- Epilogue.

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Book SynopsisThe Poetics of Aristotle by Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, is a seminal work in the realm of literary theory and aesthetics. Written around 335 BCE, this treatise offers profound insights into the nature and principles of poetry and drama. Aristotle explores the concept of mimesis, asserting that art imitates life. He delves into the cathartic effect of tragedy, suggesting that it purges emotions like pity and fear from the audience. He dissects the essential elements of a compelling narrative, emphasizing plot structure with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Aristotle's discussion of character is central to The Poetics. He introduces the notion of a tragic flaw, or hamartia, which leads to a character's downfall. His analysis of language, diction, rhythm, and melody underscores their significance in poetic works. The Poetics is particularly renowned for its examination of tragedy. Aristotle outlines key elements, including peripeteia (a reversal of fortune) and anagnorisis (a moment of recognition), which are fundamental to tragic storytelling. This work's enduring impact on literature, theater, and aesthetics is undeniable. It has served as a foundational text for generations of writers, playwrights, and scholars, providing invaluable guidance in the craft of storytelling and dramatic performance.

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Book SynopsisOwing to the rich storehouse of information it contains, the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (c. 535--600) has long been mined as a historical source for Merovingian society, a focus that overshadows an appreciation of the poems' literary value. This volume, offering free-verse translations of Fortunatus' personal poetry, remains faithful to the historical sweep of the poet's lines while paying attention to the literary qualities that make these poems masterpieces of their kind. The volume includes an overview of late antique Gaul, Fortunatus' biography, interpretations of the poems, prosopographical introductions, maps, bibliography, and indices.Trade ReviewA fugitive handprint in a bowl of cream, a bird tangled in the grapevines of a mural, holy women who clap their voices into prayers--this is a world of unexpected beauty, and Pucci as a translator deserves our respect and praise for having clapped these poems into songs. --Joel C. Relihan, Wheaton College, Norton, MAOwing to the rich storehouse of information it contains, the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (c. 535-600) has long been mined as a historical source for Merovingian society, a focus that overshadows an appreciation of the poems' literary value. This volume, offering free-verse translations of Fortunatus' personal poetry, remains faithful to the historical sweep of the poet's lines while paying attention to the literary qualities that make these poems masterpieces of their kind. The volume includes an overview of late antique Gaul, Fortunatus' biography, interpretations of the poems, prosopographical introductions, maps, bibliography, and indices.

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Book Synopsis"At once erudite and colloquial" (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems.A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

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Book SynopsisCris Miller’s volume of Emily Dickinson's complete poems is the only edition to distinguish in easy visual form the poems Dickinson took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand—arguably to preserve them for posterity—from the poems she retained in rougher form or did not retain.Trade ReviewThis book brings us as close as we can get to how [Dickinson] presented her work… Sparing us the task of deciphering the poet’s sometimes challenging handwriting and presenting intriguing variants, this edition demonstrates why generations of writers have been galvanized by Dickinson… This edition brings us that much nearer to what this exceedingly decisive and willful writer wanted. It sweeps away distractions caused by posthumous fame, leaving us with the poems themselves… Closer than previous editions to Dickinson’s wishes, priorities and personality, Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them calls for no redundant plays, films, novels or warbling. What remains is lightning bolts of language akin to the trouvailles of Arthur Rimbaud and other powerful magicians of verse. -- Benjamin Ivry * Literary Review *[Dickinson’s] ‘fluid’ approach to poetic composition [is] clarified in Cristanne Miller’s painstaking new edition of Dickinson’s poems. -- Christopher Benfey * New York Review of Books *Miller chooses rightly not to number Dickinson’s poems, as previous editors have done, and allows them instead to name themselves in their first lines. More importantly, though, she does make a convincing case for Dickinson’s having wanted to preserve and organize her works as poems, to decide, for the most part, on their finished forms. -- Fiona Green * Times Literary Supplement *Miller’s approach works well, not only to give readers agency, but also to show Dickinson’s thought process… Miller crafts an edition that artfully accommodates Dickinson’s process of continuously reworking poems. -- Meg Schoerke * Hudson Review *Cristanne Miller’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is surely the best poetry book of all this past year. Who’d have expected such a surprising, new and fruitful way to read the great poet? -- Don Share * Irish Times *Reading the volume straight through, it’s a pleasure to discover and re-discover Dickinson’s odd metaphors and strange sounds in poems that oscillate between whimsical riddle and hard-nosed philosophical meditation… Emily Dickinson’s Poems delivers. -- Micah Mattix * Washington Free Beacon *This new edition of Dickinson’s poems attempts nothing less than to shift the center of gravity and value in present-day Dickinson studies back to the fascicles, the poet’s own ‘manuscript books.’ Miller has done the community of general readers as well as scholars a huge service in compiling this edition. -- Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern UniversityA remarkable new resource in a wonderfully accessible format. This edition offers readers a print version of the manuscript poems Dickinson retained and that, Miller argues, Dickinson preserved for posterity. -- Paul Crumbley, Utah State UniversityMiller’s edition gives us something like the Collected Poems Dickinson might have published in different circumstances. An invaluable book for Dickinson scholars and general readers alike. -- Bonnie Costello, Boston University

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year""This marvellous short book. . .is unsettling and relevant to our own times. Essential reading."---Mark Glanville, Jewish Chronicle"Hoffman’s short book ought to be . . . one of the most perceptive and sympathetic introductions to Miłosz’s life and work available. She manages not only to bring vividly alive one of the greatest Europeans of the century, but also to raise once again all the hauntingly insistent questions about art, politics, power and suffering that the century generated – and that we are constantly in danger of forgetting."---Rowan Williams, Literary Review

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A deeply informed, academic work, but highly readable."---Steven Carroll, Sydney Morning Herald"The Man of the Crowd is a thoroughly engaging book about the legendary writer and his complex relationship with the urban environment. Peeples is to be commended for deploying a unique lens for further examining the tortured genius of the great Edgar Allan Poe."---Leonora Cravotta, American Spectator"[A] superb new biograph[y] of Poe. . . . The Man of the Crowd . . . give[s] us a clearer view of Poe as a man and an artist, while at the same time showing how the myth mill about him was busy from the start, forming and deforming his choices, and creating the brand of Poe we know today."---Jonathan Elmer, Public Books"Engaging. . . . [The Man of the Crowd] succeeds admirably in bringing us closer to a man we can now better appreciate as part of the crowd rather than a remote and inexplicable monad."---Ian Finseth, Edgar Allan Poe Review"The Man of the Crowd, by Scott Peeples, has something for everyone. It should be equally attractive to Edgar Allan Poe scholars, aficionados, and those who simply want to read more of Poe’s stories, poems, and essays."---Henry T. Edmonson III, Law & Liberty"What sets Scott Peeples’s ‘compact biography’ apart from other recent work is that it also concerns cities, specifically Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, where Poe spent much of his life and which stirred his imagination. Peeples’s aim is to re-contextualize the image of Poe as a campy ‘nowhere man,’. . . . In detailing Poe’s moves from city to city, Peeples presents an ambitious young man seeking to support his family and to establish himself as a writer, critic, and editor."---Katherine J. Kim, The Metropole"A welcome, engaging introduction to Poe’s life. . . . This compact biography is an affable ramble, a genial journey, with Poe through the years. It knowledgeably and accessibly recounts Poe’s urban contexts and relates his relevant texts. . . . The whole is interestingly complemented by archival images of contemporary maps and periodicals and by archival photographs, blended photographs, and recent photographs by Michelle Van Parys of various Poe sites and locales. This volume is a useful vade mecum for our armchair Poe peregrinations."---Richard Kopley, Poe Studies"Peeples convincingly demonstrates that Poe remained “in transit” throughout his life, despite his literary successes, and was never in full control of his career. This accessible book will interest casual readers and Poe scholars alike." * Choice *"Well-researched . . . [and] deeply informed. . . . Scott Peeples's streamlined account of Poe's journeys . . . grounds itself determinedly in the arc of his life's movement through various urban social realities. . . . This biography achieves its freshness through framing Poe's life as a series of chapters related to the cities in which he took up primary residence."---Stephen Rachman, Poe Studies"A highly absorbing, important, and superbly crafted study that deserves a place on the top shelf of Poe biographies."---Jason Richards, American Literary History

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry] contains a wealth of concrete perception on the most varied aesthetic problems. It is impossible to do more than mention M. Maritain’s beautifully balanced chapter on abstract art, his discussion of the difference between classical and modern poetic imagery, and the gentle irony with which he chides the over-zealousness of modern critics who use Dante to denigrate modern poetry. . . . It is a rare pleasure to read a work characterized by this habit of mind and this sensibility . . . the best attempt yet made to write a poetics of modern art."---Joseph Frank, New Republic

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisBorn in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. His writings inspired the Humanist movement and, subsequently, the Renaissance, but few figures are as complex or as misunderstood. He was a devotee of the ancient pagan Roman world and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet at times an intensely private and almost misanthropic man. He believed life on earth was little more than a transitory pilgrimage, and took himself as his most important subject-matter. Christopher S. Celenza provides the first general account of Petrarch's life and work in English in over thirty years, and considers how his reputation and identity have changed over the centuries. He brings to light Petrarch's unrequited love for his poetic muse, Laura, the experiences of his university years, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking toward antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch's Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a paradoxical figure: a man of mystique, historical importance and endless fascination.Trade Review'Complexities of interpretation are food and drink to Petrarchan scholars, and Christopher Celenza tucks into them with quiet determination in his short life-and-works overview . . . Celenza's book introduces us to the breadth of Petrarch's intellectual world.' - Charles Nicholl, London Review of Books; 'Celenza's account, easily the best and most accessible life of Petrarch to appear in English in a century . . . ranges easily over the whole of the poet's life and times, following him in the "wanderings" Celenza describes as characterising Petrarch's somewhat peripatetic career in the service of the wealthy Visconti family and others. The book's main strength is its literary sensitivity; Celenza finds echoes of Petrarch's life in a far wider array of his writings than marquee sonnets - his various treatises, essays, and Latin verse all receive refreshingly intelligent integration into the broader narrative . . . the book's most memorable Petrarch is also its best achievement: the man himself, querulous, self-doubting, eager for fame but distrustful of it. That Petrarch very much does speak to our own age, and in these pages by Celenza, he finally gets a life of his own.' - The National; '[Petrarch] himself turned again and again in his writings to the flaws of humanity. Celenza exposes the Italian writer's flaws throughout his book, while simultaneously eliciting pity and respect. If he's a "misunderstood" man, then this book makes us want to understand him, contradictions and all.' - Times Higher Education; 'The entire book shines with Celenza's close attention to historical and philological detail, his superb textual and contextual analyses, and his deep understanding of how much Petrarch's legacy contributed to European cultural life. This brief review can barely suggest the subtlety with which the author interweaves such familiar texts as the poet's account of climbing Mount Ventoux with his evolving idea of Italy, and such ongoing endeavours as the poet's incursions into Italian verse with his efforts to secure a political future for Italy. Though designed for and accessible to a wide readership, the book will delight Petrarchan specialists with up-to-date nuggets of scholarly information, smart insights into cultural contexts, and powerful reinterpretations of landmark texts.' - Renaissance and Reformation; '[a] well-informed yet highly readable and elegant presentation . . . an impressive publication with which Celenza has set a standard for future research that will not be easy to surpass, when it comes to outlining Petrarch's intellectual profile both from the perspective of his life and work.' - Bernhard Huss, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift; 'The Epilogue connects several facets of Petrarch's posthumous reputation, reviewing his identities as a Latinist, classicist and Tuscan love-poet, and arguing that his complex personality "speaks to our age more than ever". For scholars hoping to join that Petrarchan dialogue, Celenza's biography will serve as a vital interlocutor.' - Forum for Modern Language Studies; 'No one who wants an up-to-date introduction to Petrarch will do better than Christopher Celenza's life and letters treatment, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer, beautifully printed by Reaktion Books. The prose is direct, demotic, and engaging, sometimes professorial, but pleasantly professorial.' - Brian Copenhaver, Journal of Modern History; 'The book on my table is beautiful, on the inside as well as the outside. And it is not only attractive to look at, it is also well written - a pleasure to read . . . This is a book that is meant to read from start to finish, rather than as a reference work; reading it is a little like walking through a labyrinth, or solving puzzles (which the present writer at least loves doing). It is stimulating and it gives you new ideas.' - Bryn Mawr Classical Review; 'not least among this book's virtues is the wealth of color illustrations, which include not only portraits of the poet and photographs of important Petrarchan sites, but also copies of manuscripts owned, annotated, or written by Petrarch, as well as later editions of his works. For the uninitiated, these images and their commentary grant special access into Petrarch's own reading and writing habits. Combined with the author's breadth of reference and limpid prose style, they make this book a pleasurable and accessible guide to Petrarch for the twenty-first-century neophyte.' - Speculum; 'The striking appeal of Christopher Celenza's study is how the scattered worlds of Petrarch are brought together in vigorous unity - the passionate classicist haunted by a yearning for modernity, the Tuscan love poet whose melodious sonnets for Laura would be imitated for centuries, the restless Augustinian pilgrim, and the self-conscious yet enigmatic spider in a network of powerful friends and acquaintances. In his elegant and poetic style, Celenza combines reader-friendliness with scholarly sophistication and depth. This is a timely intellectual biography written by one of today's leading Renaissance scholars.' - Professor Unn Falkeid, University of Oslo, author of The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena

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Book SynopsisHeroic epic of the eighth to the fifth century BCE includes poems about Hercules and Theseus, as well as the Theban Cycle and the Trojan Cycle. Genealogical epic of that archaic era includes poems that create prehistories for Corinth and Samos. These works are an important source of mythological record.Trade ReviewA magnificent achievement...As one would expect of a scholar of West's distinction these are accurate, keenly alive to each nuance of the Greek...Scholars owe a considerable debt of gratitude to West for [this] new Loeb. -- Richard Whitaker * Scholia Reviews *

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Book SynopsisSurveys the schemes, patterns and forms of English verse, and illustrates each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In this fourth edition, the authors offer a personal take on why the book has played such an important role in the education of young poets and student scholars.Trade ReviewThe first edition of Rhyme’s Reason was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Medal for an outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language and literature"How lucky the young poet who discovers this wisest and most lighthearted of manuals."—James Merrill"[Hollander] put everything he knew about the structures of poetry—those fabled magic tricks—into a sort of guidebook for those starting out on the trail up Mount Parnassus, as well as for those who may already know the path but would take unusual delight in Hollander’s marvelously ingenious blazes along the way. . . . There are astonishments on every page."—from the Foreword by J. D. McClatchy"This book's wit and inventive spirit, its self-describing embodiments of form, now offer the beginning poet a happy chance to discover the technician in himself."—from the Afterword by Richard Wilbur"This virtuoso work from a master, a book which is accurate and useful without ever ceasing to be funny."—Paul Fussell"What the E. B. White-William Strunk The Elements of Style is to the writing of prose, Rhyme’s Reason could very easily become to the writing of verse . . . . Marvelously comprehensive, clarifying and useful [and] a delight to read."—John Reardon, Los Angeles Times Review of Books

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Book SynopsisPalgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language is probably the most famous poetry anthology ever compiled.This sixth edition, faithful to the spirit of the original, includes poems from the last thirty years, along with all of the material from previous editions. Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Peter Porter, and Anne Stevenson are among the many names to figure in the book for the first time.Table of ContentsAVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

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Book SynopsisIn an updated edition of his hugely successful student introduction to English literature from 1100 to 1500, J. A. Burrow takes account of scholarly developments in the the field, most notably devoting a final chapter to the impact of historicism on medieval studies. Full of information and stimulating ideas, and a pleasure to read, Burrow''s book deals with circumstances of composition and reception, the main genres, ''modes of meaning'' (allegory etc.), and medieval literature''s afterlife in modern times. It shows that the literature of authors such as Chaucer, Gower, and Langland is more readily accessible than usually imagined, and well worth reading too. By placing medieval writers in their historical context - the four centuries between the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance - Professor Burrow explains not only how they wrote, but why.Trade ReviewThis book is the most effective introduction to Middle English literature that I know. It is everywhere alert to the ways that modern literary sensibilities need to be adjusted in order to appreciate the medieval norm, and Burrow combines astonishing learning with a pedagogical shrewdness that always picks out just the telling passage or focusing cultural fact. This second edition adds a great deal of new and equally important material to a work that had already become a classic in its own right. * Christopher Cannon, Girton College, Cambridge *Table of Contents1. The period and the literature ; 2. Writers, audiences, and readers ; 3. Major genres ; 4. Modes of meaning ; 5. The afterlife of Middle English literature ; Notes ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisA key resource for students and teachers of Arabic and world literature, as well as for readers interested in discovering an alternative narrative of modern Iraqi culture.

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Book SynopsisVery Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the ''best-loved'' poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the 90 or so published poems that are at the core of her remarkable canon of verse. Drawing on biographical and critical material, Jonathan Post also makes frequent use of Bishop''s letters and commentary by fellow poets, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and James Merrill to illuminate her writing and contemporary literary landscape. Throughout, Post places Bishop''s lyric poetry within the context of her life and aesthetic values, showing how these shaped her work. The book covers a wide range of core themes present in her poetry, including her powerful use of description, the environment, balance, and ideas of love and loss, as well as looking at Bishop''s interest in the visual arts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Trade ReviewA generous, sensitive overview of Bishops life and work. - Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University, George Herbert JournalI would recommend this book to any reader of Bishop because Professor Post's insights are fine-tuned with a good ear and extensive poetic foundation. * Angus Cleghorn, Seneca College, Toronto, The Elizabeth Bishop Centenary *Jonathan F. S. Post has written a fine guide. * Andrew Neilson, Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of Contents1: Less is more: a world in miniature 2: Formal matters 3: 'The Armadillo', the art of description, and 'Brazil, January 1, 1502' 4: Poetry and painting 5: Love known 6: Late travel poems Epilogue, with acknowledgements Timeline References Further reading Index

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Book Synopsis A Sunday Times Book of the Year'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail'A masterful portrait' The Times'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by aTrade Review‘A masterful portrait…Miranda Seymour is a marvellous storyteller…it is composed to a considerable extent of scandal, gossip and bad blood, Seymour’s book is hugely entertaining as well as formidably researched, and should not be missed’ -- John Carey * The Sunday Times *‘It was…her brilliance as a scientific and mathematical pioneer that defined Ada…Struggling against her mother’s domineering influence and the sexism of 19th Century England…she also found herself in competition for Annabella’s attention with Medora, Augusta’s daughter and rumoured Byronic bastard.’ -- Alexander Larman * The Times *‘Vastly enjoyable…it is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and human…Brilliant, ebullient, eccentric, vivacious, egocentric and oddly dressed, Ada had her mother’s discipline and her father’s volatility.’ -- Lucy Lethbridge * Literary Review *'As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography…the pretty 20-year-old Annabella Milbanke… [who] fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron…a serial womaniser who referred to sexual encounters as "hot luncheons"…"her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake".' -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Daily Mail, Book of the Week *'Miranda Seymour is…subtle, astute and experienced an historian…and her zestful prose keeps the reader engaged throughout…in this deeply absorbing and meticulously researched biography of Byron’s wife and daughter.' -- Rupert Christiansen * The Oldie *'It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace…credited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley. Miranda Seymour agrees that it is not Ada Lovelace’s skills as a mathematician that matter, but rather her visionary words, 100 years before the birth of electronic computers, about "a new, a vast and a powerful language". In her ambitious...dual biography of Ada and her mother Lady Byron, the power of Lovelace’s imagination and her belief in a "poetry of mathematics" is seen as a direct inheritance from Ada’s father Lord Byron.' -- Mark Bostridge * The Spectator *'There are difficult men, and then there is Lord Byron…the aim of Miranda Seymour’s new book is to put Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, and their increasingly famous daughter, Ada Lovelace, centre stage… Not only were his wife and child still dealing with the rumours of cruelty, incest and sodomy – a then illegal activity which, Seymour…a wonderful writer… speculates, his young wife may have enjoyed – long after his death in 1824; they remained, in emotionally complex ways, in his thrall all their lives.' -- Rachel Cooke * The Observer, Book of the Day *'On BBC4 she was celebrated as "Calculating Ada, the Countess of Computing"…writing about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, whose potential she was the only one to realise…in her extraordinarily prophetic "Notes"…As for Ada’s mother… Annabella Milbanke was married only a year before she left Byron, and he left the country…Miranda Seymour puts everything straight in this magnificent, highly readable double biography, which brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life…In Seymour’s hands, Annabella’s pioneering work…at last assumes the status it deserves. Her humanity shines through…Ada’s own short life was colourful, chaotic and bedevilled by illness…This is a very fine book. Written with warmth, panache and conviction, its formidable research is lightly worn.' -- Sue Gaisford * The Financial Times *‘The story of this unhappy trio has been told before, but seldom with as much brio as it is here. Miranda Seymour’s particular aim is to rescue Annabella from over a century’s worth of bad press… Only now, in Seymour’s careful hands, is she finally allowed to emerge as a figure who was neither saint nor sinner but somewhere in between.’ -- Kathryn Hughes * The Guardian *‘A seasoned biographer, [Miranda Seymour] brings her considerable powers to the lives of the human jetsam…left to sink or swim in Byron’s wake.' * Weekend Australian *‘A nuanced account, attuned to contemporary preoccupations...Goethe thought the spectacle of the Byrons’ marriage "so poetical that if Lord Byron had invented it, he would hardly have had a more fortunate subject for his genius." Seymour’s account...shows that it has lost none of its power to enthrall.’ * Daily Telegraph *‘Deft and compelling… The late Georgians invented the cult of celebrity and Byron was its first and finest creation. His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety. Annabella’s attempts to preserve her reputation and other people’s attempts to salvage Byron’s have left a pall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain. Seymour carries off a delicate balancing act, combining the historian’s proper caution with acute judgements and a dashing narrative pace.’ -- Rosemary Hill * London Review of Books *‘Seymour manages to offer a supremely even-handed and well-evidenced account of the relationship without losing any of the juicier details (Byron’s affair and possible daughter with his half-sister; his predilection for sodomy; his seeming derangement in the face of wedlock)…one of the many strengths of Seymour’s study is its illustration of these accomplished women’s lives apart from the man who deserted them. Seymour is a master of character, and here she gives us two ferociously intelligent women who were deeply ambivalent about motherhood and their place in the male-dominated fields they inhabited.’ -- Corin Throsby * TLS *‘Meticulously researched…A skilled and experienced biographer, Seymour weaves her way through cobwebby curtains of rumor and gossip…The combination of pure mathematics and agonized personal passions gives Seymour’s book an arresting power’ -- Jenny Uglow * New York Review of Books *‘Miranda Seymour joins the dots with a wonderful account of the life of Ada’s mother, Annabella Milbanke, a society heiress and education reformer who outlived both husband and daughter. This double biography…is a scholarly treatment of sensational material, and it’s often as gripping as a soap opera’ * Sunday Times Books of the Year *‘A skilful account of Lord Byron’s disastrous marriage to the heiress Annabella Milbanke…and then on their daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, computing pioneer, who descended into drugs and debt’ * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisRaman Mundair's second collection of poems sees her expanding her territory to create a new poetic geography. Her voice dances with her love for the language and life of the Shetland Islands through the anguish of war to the movement of people and the crossing of boundaries. She brings to all a combination of passion and compassion, sensitivity and sensuality.The collection encompasses poems written in the Shetland dialect, narratives of thwarted desire and a sequence of poems which explore the dynamics and historical by-ways of the waltz.Raman Mundair is a writer and artist. She was born in Ludhiana, India and came to live in the UK at the age of five. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Choreographer's Cartography and Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves.Trade Review"Mundair conveys a vivid and memorable sense of self, and a truly poetic intimation of a dimension beyond the sharply focused moment. This voice deserves to be widely heard." Michael Mitchell, University of Warwick"

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