Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisFeatures 32 works â among them "The Convent Threshold," "Up-hill," "Cousin Kate," "Winter: My Secret," "Maude Clare," and celebrated title poem.

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Book SynopsisThe Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts the quests of knights including Sir Guyon, Knight of Constance, who resists temptation, and Artegall, Knight of Justice, whose story alludes to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene, with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.Table of ContentsThe Faerie QueeneA Note on the TextTable of DatesFurther ReadingA Letter of the AuthorsCommendatory VersesDedicatory SonnetsBook IBook IIBook IIIBook IVBook VBook VITwo Cantos of MutabilitieTextual AppendixNotesCommon Words

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Book SynopsisAlthough best remembered today for his novels, Thomas Hardy thought of himself as a poet forced by circumstance to write fiction for a living. This generous selection of nearly two hundred poems includes such familiar pieces as During Wind and Rain, Channel Firing, Afterwards, The Darkling Thrush, and The Oxen, but it will also acquaint readers with many less-celebrated works, among them To Lizbie Browne, After the Last Breath, My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound, The Haunter, Old Furniture, A Procession of Dead Days, The Harbour Bridge, At a Country Fair, Last Love-Word, Waiting Both, and Proud Songsters. With an introduction and annotations by Robert Mezey, this Penguin Classics edition will help readers to recognize Hardy as one of the greatest English poets of this century.Table of ContentsFrom "Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)"; from "Poems of the Past and Present (1901)"; from "Time's Laughingsocks and Other Verses (1914)"; from "Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914)"; poems of 1912-13; from "Moments of Vision and Miscillaneous Verses (1917)"; from "Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)"; from "Human Shows, for Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)"; from "Winter Worlds in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

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Book SynopsisThe final volume in this brilliant translation destined to take its place among the great English versions of The Divine Comedy. In his translation of Paradise, Mark Musa exhibits the same sensitivity to language and knowledge of translation that enabled his versions of Inferno and Purgatory to capture the vibrant power and full dramatic force of Dante's poetry. Dante relates his mystical interpretation of the heavens, and his moment of transcendent glory, as he journeys, first with Beatrice, then alone, toward the Trinity. Professor Musa's extraordinary translation and his interpretive commentary, informative glossary, and bibliography clarify the theological themes and make Dante accessible to the English-speaking public.Trade Review“The English Dante of choice.” –Hugh Kenner“Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths.” –Robert Fagles, Princeton University“A marvel of fidelity to the original, of sobriety, and truly, of inspired poetry.” –Henri Peyre, Yale University

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Book SynopsisBegun in 1262 AD, Masnavi-ye Ma navi, or spiritual couplets'', is thought to be the longest single-authored mystical' poem ever written. As the spiritual masterpiece of the Persian Sufi tradition, it teaches how to progress to the ultimate goal of the Sufi path - union with God. Jalaloddin Rumi was a poet and a mystic, but he was first a teacher; in these verses he draws the reader into the complexities of human love and separation and explains the path to divine love through the elimination of self-regard and worldly desires. Drawing on diverse sources from bawdy tales and fables to stories of the prophet Mohammed, these verses are brief in expression yet copious in meaning.

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Book SynopsisA treasure trove of inspiration and an invitation for personal renewal from the acclaimed author of bone and The TerribleWe still dream though, don''t we? We are gifted with a way into ourselves, night after night after night.Yrsa Daley-Ward''s words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers around the world: through her books of poetry and memoir bone and The Terrible, through her powerful writing for Beyoncé on Black Is King and through her always-illuminating Instagram posts.In The How, Yrsa gently takes readers by the hand, encouraging them to join her as she explores how we can remove our filters, and see and feel more of who we really are behind the preconceived notions of propriety and manners we''ve accumulated with age. With a mix of short, lyrical musings, immersive poetry and intriguing meditations, The How can be used to start conversations, to prompt writing, to delve deepeTrade ReviewFor us, here is a book that gives and gives, I loved every word of this phenomenally generous, nourishing and beautiful book -- Salena Godden * author of Mrs Death Misses Death *A brilliant reminder that the answers we seek are within ourselves ... Yrsa Daley-Ward's words are a guidepost, a reminder, and a welcome home -- Stephanie Long * Refinery29 *A heartfelt, artful manifesto focused on living fully and authentically ... By turns simplistic, elegaic, and illuminative * Kirkus *In this gratifying exploration of the self, Daley-Ward excels at describing the indescribable ... this work defies genre and features a beautiful blend of lyrical prose and bold poetry... This is a tender, hopeful meditation * Publishers Weekly *

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Book SynopsisA collection of poems.

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Book SynopsisRumi is the greatest mystic poet to have written in Persian, and the Masnavi, written in six books, is his masterpiece. It conveys a message of divine love in entertaining stories and homilies. The focus of Book Four is with the mystical knowledge of the spiritual guide.Table of ContentsIntroduction Note on the Translation Select Bibliography Chronology The Masnavi: Book 4 Explanatory Notes Glossary

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Book SynopsisThis volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students a comprehensive selection of the work of Thomas Hardythe first for nearly thirty years. The edition presents the poetry in a new way by using the text of Hardy''s individual volumes, as they appeared originally, instead of the revised text he later produced for his Collected Poems. This edition reveals the range and variety of his outputqualities he later tended to disguise. His most famous sequence, Poems of 1912-13, appears in a radically different form. Selections from his epic drama, The Dynasts, are given within the chronological sequence of his poetry, illustrating the power of this neglected work. Notebook and journal entries where Hardy puts forward his understanding of poetry and the role of the poet are also included. Uniquely generous in the number of poems it contains, this edition also provides extensive annotation, locating Hardy''s work in its cultural context and reading it in the light of the criticaTable of ContentsFROM WESSEX POEMS AND OTHER VERSES (1898) Preface [extract] The Temporary the All Hap A Confession to a Friend in Trouble Neutral Tones She Her Initials Her Dilemma She, to Him, I a ? , II a ? , III a ? , IV Ditty Valenciennes San Sebastian The Stranger s Song The Burghers Leipzig My Cicely Friends Beyond Thoughts of Ph a Middle-Age Enthusiasms In a Wood To an Orphan Child Nature s Questioning The Impercipient At an Inn In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury I Look into my Glass FROM POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT (1901) Preface [extract] War Poems Embarcation The Dead Drummer A Wife in London The Souls of the Slain The Sick God Poems of Pilgrimage Genoa and the Mediterranean Shelley s Skylark In the Old Theatre, Fiesole Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter Lausanne: In Gibbon s Old Garden Miscellaneous Poems The Mother Mourns A Commonplace Day At a Lunar Eclipse The Subalterns God-Forgotten The Bedridden Peasant to an Unknowing God Mute Opinion To an Unborn Pauper Child The Well-Beloved A Broken Appointment Between us now A Spot His Immortality The Superseded An August Midnight Winter in Durnover Field The Last Chrysanthemum The Darkling Thrush Mad Judy A Wasted Illness The Ruined Maid The Respectable Burgher on the Higher Criticism Her Late Husband The Self-Unseeing De Profundis I. De Profundis II. De Profundis III. The Lost Pyx: A Mediaeval Legend Tess s Lament The Supplanter : A Tale Imitations, etc. From Victor Hugo Retrospect I have Lived with Shades Memory and I a???????? ???? FROM THE DYNASTS (1904-08) Part 3, Act VI: scene viii: the road to Waterloo (extract) Part 3, Act VII, scene ix: The Wood of Bossu Part 3, After Scene (extract) From Select Poems of William Barnes. chosen and edited by Thomas Hardy (1908) Preface [extract] FROM TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS AND OTHER VERSES (1909) Preface [Extract] Time s Laughingstocks The Revisitation A Trampwoman s Tragedy A Sunday Morning Tragedy Bereft The Rejected Member s Wife The Farm-Woman s Winter Autumn in the Park Shut out that Moon The Dead Man Walking Love Lyrics The Division On the Departure Platform The Phantom The Night of the Dance The Voice of the Thorn The Minute before Meeting He abjures Love A Set of Country Songs Let me Enjoy At Casterbridge Fair I: The Ballad Singer II: Former Beauties III: After the Club-Dance VII: After the Fair The Dark-eyed Gentleman To Carrey Clavel The Spring Call Julie-Jane Pieces Occasional and Various A Church Romance The Christening A Dream Question By the Barrows A Wife and Another The Roman Road After the Last Breath In Childbed The Pine Planters One We Knew Before Life and After New Year s Eve His Education Panthera The Unborn The Man He Killed Geographical Knowledge One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes G. M., 1828-1909 FROM THE BOOK OF BABY BEASTS (1911) The Polar Bear The Rat The Calf FROM THE BOOK OF BABY BIRDS (1912) The Yellow-Hammer The Duckling The Tropic Bird FROM SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE, LYRICS AND REVERIES WITH MISCELLANEOUS PIECES (1914) Lyrics and Reveries In Front of the Landscape Channel Firing The Convergence of the Twain The Ghost of the Past When I set out for Lyonnesse A Thunderstorm in Town Beyond the Last Lamp Lost Love My spirit will not haunt the mound" Wessex Heights The Place on the Map Where the Picnic was Satires of Circumstance I: At Tea II: In Church VIII: In the Study X: In the Nuptial Chamber XI: In the Restaurant XIV: Over the Coffin XV: In the Moonlight Lyrics and Reveries (continued) The Year s Awakening Under the Waterfall The Spell of the Rose St Launce s revisited Poems of 1912-13 The Going Your Last Drive The Walk Rain on a Grave I found her out there Without Ceremony Lament The Haunter The Voice His Visitor A Circular A Dream or No After a Journey A Death-day recalled Beeny Cliff At Castle Boterel Places The Phantom Horsewoman Miscellaneous Pieces The Wistful Lady The Woman in the Rye The Re-enactment The Newcomer s Wife A King s Soliloquy A Week Had you wept Bereft, she thinks she dreams In the British Museum In the Servants Quarters Regret not me The Telegram The Moth-signal Seen by the Waits Exeunt Omnes Postscript Men who march away FROM THE BOOK OF BABY PETS (1915) About Lizards FROM MOMENTS OF VISION AND MISCELLANEOUS VERSES (1917) Moments of Vision The Voice of Things Why be at painsa We sat at the window Afternoon Service at Mellstock Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune At the Word Farewell The Day of First Sight Heredity You were the sort that men forget She, I, and They Near Lanivet, 1872 Copying Architecture in an Old Minster To Shakespeare Quid hic agisa Timing Her The Blinded Bird The wind blew words The Riddle To my Father s Violin The Change The Young Churchwarden Lines to a Movement in Mozart s E-flat Symphony In the seventies The Pedigree The Peace-offering Something Tapped The Wound A January Night The Announcement The Oxen An Anniversary Transformations The Last Signal Great Things The Figure in the Scene Love the Monopolist At Middle-field Gate in February The Head above the Fog Overlooking the River Stour The Musical Box On Sturminster Foot-bridge The Last Performance Logs on the Hearth The Caged Goldfinch The Five Students The Wind s Prophecy During Wind and Rain He prefers her Earthly Looking Across The Pedestrian Who s in the next rooma At a Country Fair Paying Calls Everything Comes Midnight on the Great Western The Clock-winder Old Excursions In a Whispering Gallery On the Doorstep The Clock of the Years The Shadow on the Stone An Upbraiding The Young Glass-Stainer While drawing in a Churchyard Poems of War and Patriotism His Country The Pity of It In Time of the Breaking of Nations Before Marching and After A Call to National Service I looked up from my writing Finale Afterwards FROM LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER WITH MANY OTHER VERSES (1922) Apology [Extract] Weathers The Maid of Keinton Mandeville Summer Schemes Faintheart in a Railway Train The Garden Seat The Curtains now are drawn According to the Mighty Working Going and Staying The Dissemblers The Old Gown A Duettist to Her Pianoforte Where Three Roads joined And There was a Great Calm The Woman I met On Stinsford Hill at Midnight The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House The Wanderer At Lulworth Cove a Century back At the Railway Station, Upway Side by Side The Beauty On the Tune called the Old-hundred-and-fourth The Opportunity The Rift Voices from Things growing By Henstridge Cross at the Year s End The Chapel-Organist Fetching her Could I but will After a Romantic Day He follows Himself Without, not within Her The Little Old Table Last Words to a Dumb Friend On One who lived and died where He was born Outside the Casement The Passer-by I was the midmost The Whitewashed Wall The Seven Times The Sun s Last Look on the Country Girl An Ancient to Ancients After reading Psalms XXXIX, XL. Surview FROM THE FAMOUS TRAGEDY OF THE QUEEN OF CORNWALL (1924) Could he but live for me FROM HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES, SONGS, AND TRIFLES (1925) Waiting both Any little Old Song The Turnip-hoer Circus-rider to Ringmaster The Later Autumn Let me An East-end Curate Coming up Oxford Street: Evening A Spellbound Palace When dead Sine Prole Ten Years since A Sheep Fair Snow in the Suburbs Ice on the Highway Queen Caroline to her Guests The Weary Walker Last Love-word Nobody comes In the Street So, Time Last Look round St. Martin s Fair A Leader of Fashion When Oats were reaped She opened the Door The Harbour Bridge Vagrant s Song The Shiver At the Aquatic Sports At the Mill Alike and Unlike The Thing unplanned Retty s Phases He inadvertently cures his Love-pains Known had I Shortening Days at the Homestead The Paphian Ball The Bird-catcher s Boy Song to an Old Burden Why do Ia FROM WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES (1928) Introductory Note [extract] The New Dawn s Business Proud Songsters Thoughts at Midnight I am the One A Wish for Unconsciousness To Louisa in the Lane The Love-letters Throwing a Tree Her Second Husband hears her Story Yuletide in a Younger World Lying awake Childhood among the Ferns A Countenance Silences To a Tree in London The Dead Bastard The Mongrel Concerning Agnes We Field-Women A Practical Woman He never expected much Standing by the Mantelpiece Christmas: 1924 Family Portraits We are getting to the End He resolves to say no more FROM FLORENCE HARDY, THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY, 1840-1891 (1928) Domicilium TH s remarks on poetry from journals and diaries FROM FLORENCE HARDY, THE LATER YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY, 1892-1928 (1930) TH s remarks on poetry from journals and diaries

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Book SynopsisA sensual, tender collection to be cherished by lovers new and oldPablo Neruda was probably the greatest and certainly the most prolific of twentieth-century Latin American poets. This, his third collection, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada, or, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was first published in 1924 and attracted international acclaim. Still adored the world over, the collection is ambitiously metaphorical and sensuous. Inspired by Neruda''s own personal relationships and injected with an expressive eroticism, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is evidence of a genius poet at work. A perfect present for your beloved on Valentine''s Day.Trade ReviewOne of the greatest love poets of all time * Observer *His love poems have fuelled romances around the world * Independent *The poems today remain as urgently gorgeous as freshly picked flowers * Daily Telegraph *The greatest poet of the 20th century -- Gabriel García MárquezHe was that rare thing - a public poet, and a great one, held in deep affection by every layer of Chilean society. For the skill that earned him such esteem was his ability to find beauty in ordinary things * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry PrizeStag''s Leap, Sharon Olds'' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love''s sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband''s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, ''When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it''s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver''.Olds'' propulsiveTrade ReviewSharon Olds, the winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap, is the first female American Poet to win the prize, and perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation. -- Tom Payn * Telegraph *Olds, who has always had a gift for describing intimacy, has, in a sense, had these poems thrown at her by life and allowed them to take root: they are stunning – the best of a formidable career. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *[A] brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol OatesA tremendous book of grace and gallantry which crowns the career of a world-class poet. -- Carol Ann Duffy * Huffington Post *Taut and beautiful poems. -- Edna O'Brien * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisIn a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called G', into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover Sad' (short for Sad But Great), a war veteran, and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the sombre house where G's mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful picaresque verse invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.Trade ReviewI have never read a poet where there was such a sense that the material was so unruly it might overwhelm its creator. It is this that makes Carson exciting... She writes with spendthrift ease. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *To engage so originally and compellingly with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing, the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else… Carson is, simply, one of the very best. -- Sarah Crown * Guardian *[Carson’s] work over the last three decades has the flux of tidal waters. Words deceptively simple become in context an exhilarating tsunami of images with a shift in typographical structure. -- Hayden Murphy * Herald *‘A true poet, in the sense that she makes the unfamiliar seem real, and the real seem fabulous.’ * Richard Eyre, Start the Week *The narrative poem plays delightfully with form, at times approaching stream of consciousness in the vivid interplay of memory and dialogue. * Financial Times *

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Book SynopsisA collectible new Penguin Classics series: beautiful clothbound editions of the most famous verse collections by ten favourite poets. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and attractively set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers. Songs of Innocence and Experience is one of the best-loved poetry collections of all time, an innovative and groundbreaking experiment in which Blake intertwined text and image to dazzling effect. The volume, published sometimes as two separate collections, juxtaposes the innocent world of childhood with the corrupt and repressed one of adults, and includes such favourites as ''The Lamb'', ''The Chimney Sweeper'' and ''The Tyger''.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review'Tim Allen's new translation of THE SONG OF KIEU is lively and absorbing. It reinvigorates a classic and wonderfully conveys the romance, adventure, tragedy, and wisdom of the poem that all Vietnamese know.' * Viet Thanh Nguyen *'Tim Allen has done what most literary translators can only aspire to do. He has secured a place for a major foreign work in the stock of his mother tongue.' -- David Constantine'Timothy Allen's supple and imaginative translation has re-energised Nguyên Du's lyricism in meticulous free verse that evokes the five senses' * The Poetry Review *'For elegance and sheer readability I doubt if it could be equalled. English readers already familiar with Kieu will be delighted by its musicality. And those who have not previously encountered Kieu will wonder how such a masterpiece could so long have eluded them.''Timothy Allen's translation of the Vietnamese epic The Song of Kieu is magnificent. [In language] capable of exquisitely beautiful love scenes, throat-catchingly eloquent nature passages and moments of humour, he renders an obscure masterpiece into a strikingly contemporary one.'

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewSeductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude -- Toni MorrisonClifton was one of America's great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative -- Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet LaureateFew poets have traversed such deserts, playgrounds and high castles of possibility in the briefest and seemingly effortless poetry. Her big-hearted work welcomes us and transports us with grace and mischief. It is poetry that goes down like fine wine and that sustains, in us, its good mood of inquiry ever after -- Professor Daljit Nagra, Brunel University LondonOpen up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words -- Danez Smith * The Week *Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual -- Reginald Dwayne Betts, * The New York Times *Clifton wrote physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds ... Her poems are committed to truth-telling in the face of silence. History in her work is embodied, alive, and autonomous, alert to its own contradictions -- Elizabeth Alexander * New Yorker *No-one writes like Lucille Clifton ... The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder - bearing witness to joy and to struggle * The Paris Review *Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak * Web Del Sol Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisConamara in the West of Ireland has a strange and beautiful landscape - a landscape of intense contrasts uniquely dependent on light and shade. In daylight, a subtle radiance of gentle colours envelops the place. Yet on the threshold of darkness, the fading light reveals an almost haunted vista of mysterious beauty.In this exquisitely crafted collection of poetry, John O''Donohue evokes the vital energy and rhythm of the Conamara landscape, engaging with earth, sky and sea, and the majestic mountains that silently preside over this glorious region. Here too, as he draws upon the ancient memory and history of this sacred place, he focuses upon the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, tenderly revealing the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship.Written with penetrating insight and a deftness of touch, Conamara Blues offers a unique, imaginative vision of a landscape steeped in mystery and legend - a landscape of hope and possibility that is at once both familiar and unknown.Trade Review'With this exquisitely crafted collection of poetry, John O'Donohue evokes the vital energy and pulse of the landscape of this glorious regoin, engaging with the elements and the majestic, rugged landscape. Focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need, O'Donohue ultimately reveals the tender vulnerability of love and friendship' Cara

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Book Synopsis''Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.'' Eavan Boland, Irish Times''Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.'' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThis collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the series of 12-line poems entitled Squarings, shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and to credit marvels. The title poem is typical in that it begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary.

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Book SynopsisElectric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet''s childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.Electric Light ranges from short takes (''glosses'') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to ''the must and drift of talk''; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming ''the real names'' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at

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Book Synopsis''I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949. It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed. His song is unique and his work an inspiration.'' Harold Pinter. From his first publications in the early 1940s, to his final works of the late 1970s, W. S. Graham has given us a poetry of intense power and inquisitive vision - a body of work regarded by many as among the best Romantic poetry of the twentieth century. This New Collected Poems, edited by poet and Graham-scholar Matthew Francis and with a foreword by Douglas Dunn, offers the broadest picture yet of Graham''s work.

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Book SynopsisThe Golden Gate is a brilliantly achieved novel written in verse. Set in the 1980s in the affluence and sunshine of California''s Silicon Valley, it is an exuberant and witty story of twenty-somethings looking for love, pleasure and the meaning of life. It was awarded the 1986 British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

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Book SynopsisIn this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past

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Book SynopsisIt was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to ''what is the word'' (1988), describes a lifetime''s arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to ''bore one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through.'' Also included are several of Beckett''s translations from contemporaries - Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale - in versions which count among his own poetic achievements. Edited by David Wheatley

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Book SynopsisSir John Betjeman (1906-84) was born in Highgate, the son of a manufacturer of Dutch descent. His poetry enjoyed immense popularity, as did his personality, and his knighthood in 1969 and appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972 were universally welcomed.Other volumes in this series: Auden, Eliot, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

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Book SynopsisMarianne Moore scholar Heather Cass White has prepared an edition of poems that, for the first time, presents the full range of Moore's work in its published order, while honouring the complex textual lives of the poems.

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Book SynopsisFor more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation's most popular and respected poets. Christmas Poems collects together her best festive poems, including anthology favourites such as 'The Christmas Life', together with new and previously unpublished work.

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Book SynopsisDescribed as a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city' (LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music. With his magical style in English, Kaminsky's poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. His imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.' The American Academy of Arts and LettersDancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be.' The N

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Book SynopsisFor those turning sixty, this new edition of Christopher Matthew''s tribute to A. A. Milne''s classic poems contains fresh material as well as the old favourites.''A wonderful present to sixty-year-olds'' Auberon Waugh, Daily TelegraphWhen Christopher was six, the poems of Milne were always on hand to reassure him that other children were just as puzzled and naughty and silly as he was, and that grown-ups could be even sillier. When he turned sixty, he decided it was high time there was an equally reassuring volume for those of his generation who were not only more confused than ever, but were losing their teeth, their hair and, all too often, their car keys. What he did twenty years ago was to take some of Milne''s best-loved poems from Now We Are Six for an older audience, with results that are often hilarious, sometimes rueful and always thought-provoking. Some verses are about realising one is not as young as one once Trade ReviewA wonderful present to sixty-year-olds -- Auberon Waugh * Daily Telegraph *Very funny and very clever -- Simon Hoggart * Guardian *I absolutely love it -- Sheridan Morley * Daily Express *Hilarious -- Valerie Grove * Oldie *A charming book * Herald *

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Book SynopsisThe collected poems of the Pulitzer Prize winning author of THE COLOR PURPLE.''I am the womanoffering two flowerswhose roots are twin.Justice and HopeHope and JusticeLet us begin''Alice Walker has been writing poetry since the summer of 1965, when she travelled to East Africa and began the collection ONCE while sitting beneath a tree facing Mount Kenya.Encompassing the collections ONCE, REVOLUTIONARY PETUNIAS & OTHER POEMS, GOOD NIGHT WILLIE LEE I''LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING, and HORSES MAKE A LANDSCAPE LOOK MORE BEAUTIFUL as well as other poems, this is a wonderful, surprising, entertaining collection that offers a historical perspective on the evolution of both the poetry itself and the political and spiritual inspiration behind it.

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Book SynopsisA fearless collection by a trailblazing writer whose poems represent the people, culture, and topography of the Caribbean in multidimensional, complex ways (Tanya Shirley)Trade Review"One of the most brilliant and witty of our poets." -- Kamau Brathwaite"What to say of Pamela’s poetry? Juicy. The salt juice of living blood. The sweet, liquid whispers of desire dripping from full lips. The acid venom of righteousness spat in the eye of the wicked." -- Nalo Hopkinson"Mordecai illuminates the challenges of life at the crossroads of race, class and gender. Her subjects are diverse, her storytelling immediate—especially in her use of a vibrant, dynamic language that superbly articulates an irrepressible Jamaican spirit." -- The Star"Mordecai has created motion from epiphanic moments which reject dominant discourses and frameworks…She writes violence, sex, love, mothering, God, landscape, colonialism, racism—no subject is off-limits." -- Alina Stefanescu - BOMB

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Book SynopsisThis is the first English translation of works attributed to Abu Madyan, a seminal figure of Sufism in Muslim Spain and North Africa. The Arabic text accompanying the English translation also represents the first scholarly edition of these works in the original language. The variety of Abu Madyan''s oeuvre, which includes doctrinal treatises, aphorisms, and poetical works in the ode, qasida, style, provides a unique opportunity for students of Arabic and Sufism, as well as the interested layman, to experience several of the most important genres of religious writing in the Islamic Middle Period.The Arabic texts have been extensively vocalised in order to aid the student. The work as a whole is well-suited for use as a reader for advanced level classes in the Arabic language. In addition, notes have been provided in the English translation. The Arabic parallel text, set by DecoType, Amsterdam, marks the debut of a new form of calligraphic typesetting in the classical Nashk style, combining state-of-the-art computer technology with unique faithfulness to the great calligraphic tradition of the Islamic world.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisThrough the porosity of the US/Mexico border, Freudian slippages, and toxic relationships, poet Juana Adcock interrogates what it means to cross from one country into another the gradient spaces that inhabit the nexus between life and death, and the people and languages that sit either side of it. Ghostly glitches, the role of rivers, and the character of Lisa Simpson as voiced for the Latin American market all empower I Sugar the Bones to stand as a polyvocal display; one where revelatory restlessness is underpinned by predicaments and realities which work to complicate the vistas of the interpersonal.

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Book SynopsisThe definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.

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Book SynopsisMore of a story than a collection of poetry, Love by Night will whisk you away from your world and into the dreamy romantic night.Love by Night begins with anxious hesitation and nervous attraction, grows into tender affection, blossoms into passionate love, delves deep into whimsical dreams, and finally builds an image of an idyllic future together, as the reader develops along with the two characters of this poetic story.Written as a conversation between two points of view in constant change and flux with each other, this book invites the reader into the conversation about the love that connects one person to another, but also all of us to each other.Through this written testament to the emotional journeys books can take us on, S. K. Williams breaks down stereotypes, sexism, relationship roles, and brings awareness to mental health, grief, anxiety, depression, how to move forward, how to love in a healthy way, and, most of all, how to love yourself when it feels impossible.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2020 Music for the Dead and Resurrected captures the complexity of living in the shadows of imperial force, of the vulnerability of bodies, of seeing with more than the eyes. Valzhyna Mort's work is characterised by a memorial sensibility that honours those lost to the violences of nation states. In Music for the Dead and Resurrected the poet offers us a body of work which balances political import with serious play. There are few poets writing with such an intuitive sense of the balance between arcane and contemporary currents in poetry. Mort's lines are timeless, finely honed to last beyond a single lifetime.Trade Review[A] striking study of what Belarus can teach the world about state violence, collective memory, and the role of poetry in fighting tyranny . . . [Mort] captures, through language, the contours of dissent. Soviet monuments remain upright in Minsk, like concrete odes to terror, repression, and silence. And yet Music for the Dead and the Resurrected feels like its own monument, not only to Belarusians but also to victims of state violence around the world * New Yorker *

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Book Synopsis“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.Trade ReviewPraise for Late Wonders “Not all poets are storytellers, not even close, but all of them wish they were, wish they had a better understanding of how words and images bind spells. Wesley McNair is the author of nine collections of stories in the shape of poems.” —Foreword Reviews “At 81, Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment. Wonders never cease.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “McNair’s poems are just sharp enough to open our eyes anew—and just smooth enough for us to think such wisdom arrived by grace alone. His work is melodic...both sanguine and realistic.” —Nick Ripatrazone, The National Review “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” —Philip Levine, former U.S. Poet Laureate

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam is one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work. Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full of the sights and sounds of the steppes, blue sky and black earth, the roads, winter breath, spring with its birds and flowers and bees, the notebooks are a continual improvisation and an unapologetic affirmation of poetry as life.

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Book SynopsisA vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet—with a wealth of materials for understanding her work—by a prize-winning poet and translator   Sappho’s thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years—certainly a record for poetry of any kind—and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English. In the past, translators have taken two basic approaches to Sappho: either very literally translating only the words in the fragments, or taking the liberty of reconstructing the missing parts. Willis Barnstone has taken a middle course, in which he remains faithful to the words of the fragments, only very judiciously filling in a word or phrase in cases where the meaning is obvious. This edition includes extensive notes and a special section of “Testimonia”: appreciations of Sappho in the words of ancient writers from Plato to Plutarch. Also included are a glossary of all the figures mentioned in the poems, and suggestions for further reading.

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