Poetry Books

Book SynopsisThe Japanese poet-recluse Ryokan (1758–1831) is one of the most beloved figures of Asian literature, renowned for his beautiful verse, exquisite calligraphy, and eccentric character. Deceptively simple, Ryokan''s poems transcend artifice, presenting spontaneous expressions of pure Zen spirit. Like his contemporary Thoreau, Ryokan celebrates nature and the natural life, but his poems touch the whole range of human experience: joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, enlightenment and illusion, love and loneliness. This collection of translations reflects the full spectrum of Ryokan''s spiritual and poetic vision, including Japanese haiku, longer folk songs, and Chinese-style verse. Fifteen ink paintings by Koshi no Sengai (1895–1958) complement these translations and beautifully depict the spirit of this famous poet.

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Book Synopsis"My heart wandered through the world constantly seeking after my cure, but the sweet and delicious water of life had to break through the granite of my heart."  When the words of Rumi enter your heart, something softens, breaks, and is subtly reborn. That he wrote the words seven hundred years ago in a medieval Persian world that bears little resemblance to ours makes their uncanny resonance to us today just that much more remarkable. Here is a treasury of daily wisdom from this most beloved of all the Sufi masters—both his prose and his ecstatic poetry—that you can use to start every day for a year, or that you can dip into for inspiration any time you need to break through the granite of your heart.

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Book SynopsisA comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a “chantefable”, or “song-story”, and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a modern English translation on facing pages.An introduction outlines the text’s background, genre, literary relations, historical contexts, major themes, and relevance to a contemporary audience. Its alternating sections of verse and prose recount a story of love between the aristocratic but distinctly unheroic young lord Aucassin and his beloved Nicolette. Despite familial disapproval, class and ethnic differences, imprisonment, and geographical separation, Nicolette’s single-minded pursuit of Aucassin raises interesting questions about gender roles and their depiction in the Middle Ages.The issue of identity is also addressed, as the identity of Nicolette shifts in terms of class, religion, and ethnicity: born a Muslim princess, she becomes both a slave and a Christian convert, and is eventually recaptured by her Saracen family, much to her displeasure. With its daring escapes, its descriptions of travel to exotic lands, its separations, and its happy reunions, Aucassin and Nicolette is both a classic romantic comedy and an entertaining parody of the romance genre.

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Book SynopsisThis new volume of Rumi’s works, the first-ever English translation of his Arabic poems, will be exciting for the newcomer to Rumi’s verses as well as to readers already familiar with his mystical philosophy. The poems take the reader on a journey of spiritual exploration, ecstatic union, cruel rejection, and mystic reconciliation. Rumi reveals his soul and welcomes everyone to his spiritual feast.This dual-language volume opens a treasury of Rumi’s mystic thought and startling poetry. His verses pulsate with desire and longing, with sensuality, and with ecstatic celebration. Rumi found in his mystic poetry a vehicle for the expression of the endless spiritual bounties of love. He placed love at the center of his faith and doctrine, and he pronounced it to be the goal of his life and the only form of true worship. This collection is stunningly rendered in English by an award-winning poet and a distinguished translator of Arabic poetry.

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Book SynopsisRon Padgett is one of America's best-known and most acclaimed poets. Admired by John Ashbury, Jim Jarmusch, and Anne Waldman, his poems have moved and delighted generations of readers with their inventiveness, their gentle humor, and above all their ability to elicit wonder. These qualities are as evident as ever in Pink Dust, whose title refers to the residue from all the author's erasors, swept away or blown into the air. Like that dust, this is a book of memories rubbing up against the present. Its poignant reflections on old age shimmer with all the insouciance of youth.

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Book SynopsisTrust Fall is an exhalation of loss; a lean into frailty and bodily abandon. In the language of stomach and synapse, Gee maps a path towards accepting unwellness.These poems interrogate the role masculinity, capital and love can play when imposed upon by chronic illness. As each new movement writhes with pain, is abject with grief, it also sings of a deeper beauty to be found in being loved at one’s most vulnerable.William Gee is a poet from the West Country who lives with and writes about chronic illness. His debut pamphlet Rheuma (Bad Betty Press, 2020) was selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2020, and his work has appeared widely in publications including Poetry London and Tentacular and on BBC Radio 4.

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Book Synopsis"Why so few women on the street at night is another brilliant offering from the87press." –Bhanu KapilA searing and multi-form debut from Palestinian human rights activist and theorist Sarona Abuaker. Complete with images from performance pieces, essays, fragments of theory and notebooks, these are poems that engage the reader in thinking about liberation.For Fans of: Anna Mendelssohn, Ghassan Kanafani, Mira Mattar, Adania Shibli.

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

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Book SynopsisLike Shakespeare and Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas expanded our sense of what the English language can do. Rhythmically forceful yet subtly musical and full of memorable lines, his poems are anthology favourites; his 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood a modern classic. Much loved by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, he is a cultural icon and continues to inspire artists today.This new edition, released to commemorate the centenary of Thomas's birth, collects more of his poems together in a single volume than ever before. With recently discovered material and accessible critique from Dylan Thomas expert John Goodby, it looks at Thomas's body of work in a fresh light, taking us to the beating heart of his poetry.Trade ReviewFor that reader who is prepared to put in the necessary work, whatever the rewards in doing so, Goodby's Collected Poems will be all that is needed. * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisAn ideal introduction to the poetry of one of this country's finest ever poets and featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary.This collection features perhaps Dylan Thomas' best-known poem, 'Fern Hill' - a profoundly melancholic and wistful meditation on former times; set in the idyllic Carmarthenshire dairy farm owned by his aunt and uncle when he was a boy. Another beloved poem 'Do not go gentle into that good night' was written by the poet for his dying father, exploring the themes of grief, loss and death.

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Book SynopsisJ.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of his later work: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE~~~ARTESIAN (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions.Trade Review'Without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression' - Peter Ackroyd, The Times. 'The longer I have stayed with these pieces, the more they have moved and haunted me; the more I have felt altered by having experienced them - Prynne is hard-going, off-putting, and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel' - Robert Potts, Guardian (Books of the Year). 'This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century' - Adam Phillips, Observer.

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Book SynopsisPoems 2016-2024 is effectively volume two of Prynne's Poems (2015) but this supplementary edition is bigger than his previous life's work retrospective, bringing together the complete texts of 36 collections from the late and most productive period of Prynne's writing, all previously only available in limited editions.

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Book SynopsisClare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnsonâs all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poetâs own everyday life all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages.

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Book SynopsisThe Game is Afoot! A collection of art, poetry and writing from fans of the great detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Doctor Watson. From the deadly Moriarty to domestic life of Holmes and Watson, the Art of Deduction showcases some of the greatest talent from arguably the oldest fan base in the world. Raising awareness for the www.saveundershaw.com campaign and royalties to Help For Heroes.

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The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) writes in direct response to the Holocaust. She is uniquely a 'prophetic' poet, one of the greatest of that species in the twentieth century. Her first book appeared in the immediate wake of the Second World War, in 1946. Since that time, Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, 'she has been writing fundamentally a single book'. That book is represented in this volume which reveals her whole progression rendered into English. Unlike earlier translators, Andrew Shanks calls his versions 'translations/imitations', moving away from the doggedly literal to render more faithfully the sense and intention of the originals. Sachs escaped Berlin in May 1940. She found refuge in Sweden. Her major work is an evolving response to the trauma of the Holocaust. In 1966 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes. Her poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust. Other themes develop: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, personal bereavement, mental breakdown. And there are reflections on poetic vocation in the darkness of recent history.

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL________The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen MortLet me kneelbefore the sky and let me be humble, untidy,let me be decorated.Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLANTrade ReviewMort's language is visceral, holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved... Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *The Illustrated Woman celebrates the female body... Her deft poetry mesmerises as it troubles -- Daljit Nagra * New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022 *The title sequence is a complex, cohesive and at times dazzling analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThis is dub poetry: bold and musical, funny and furious. This collection brings together the work of nine inventive and brilliant poets who defined and drove the dub poetry genre. From the Caribbean, Canada and the UK, the poetry in this collection spans forty years, as dub became a powerful cultural and creative force. With roots in the reggae culture of 1970s Kingston, dub poetry uses the vivid expressions of everyday spoken language to describe and challenge the experience of life on the margins. Early dub poetry took on police violence, slums and poverty. Later, as Caribbean migrants arrived in countries like Britain and Canada, dub poets faced new issues: racism, discrimination and hostility. Over four difficult decades, dub gave marginalised people a voice for their anger, defiance and creativity. It was the soundtrack to post-Windrush culture. Serious and humorous, alive and urgent, here is the very best of dub poetry. The poets included in this collection are: Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, James Berry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, Lillian Allen and Afua Cooper.

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Book SynopsisDown the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives the general reader a sense of the view to be seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, the poems give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, that is internationally renowned for its distinction, demonstrating how Wales boast one of the oldest and yet continuing vibrant poetic traditions, the former in the Welsh language and the latter in English and bilingually.Trade Review"I can think of no more deft and authoritative introduction to the literatures of Wales than this gem of a book … tracing a path through the riches of the tradition with flair, clarity, and wit. This is a must-have guide for the curious and those new to the poetic panorama of Wales through the centuries." -- Gwyneth Lewis, National Poet of Wales 2005–6"With style, energy, and sureness of touch . . . we are guided through the complex story of Welsh identity from Maelgwn Gwynedd to Mark Drakeford, weaving political and cultural themes together in a vivid tapestry. There are very few pages that do not offer fresh insights, even for those who know their Welsh history well. The poems chosen are an excellent mix of the expected and the unexpected." -- Rowan Williams, Former Master, Magdalene College, CambridgeTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface Aneirin Y Gododdin (extract) Anon. Pais Dinogad Anon. Stafell Gynddylan (from Canu Heledd) Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch Marwnad Llywelyn ap Gruffudd Dafydd ap Gwilym Trafferth mewn tafarn Henry Vaughan The World Anon. Hen Benillion Ann Griffiths (Dolwar Fach) Wele'n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd Gwenallt Y Meirwon Dylan Thomas Fern Hill Gillian Clarke Blodeuwedd Menna Elfyn Siapau o Gymru

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Book SynopsisSince prehistory, horses have given us assistance, close companionship and artistic inspiration. Horses offer everything from practical help to brisk exercise to the sheer exhilaration of galloping together across open country. They provide entertaining antics when we're bored and quiet understanding when we need it most. To poets in particular, these beloved creatures are the most wonderful muses, as they neigh, whicker and nuzzle, reflecting back at us our heartfelt tenderness and high spirits. Horse Poems offers a selection of verses in praise of the horse by some of the most celebrated poets of all time. The perfect gift for literary horse fans.Trade ReviewAll of equine life is here. A pocket treasure * The Lady *

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Book SynopsisJalaloddin Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, or ‘Spiritual Couplets’, composed in the 13th Century, is a monumental work of poetry in the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. For centuries before his love poetry became a literary phenomenon in the West, Rumi’s Masnavi had been revered in the Islamic world as its greatest mystical text. Drawing upon a vast array of characters, stories and fables, and deeply versed in spiritual teaching, it takes us on a profound and playful journey of discovery along the path of divine love, toward its ultimate goal of union with the source of all Truth. In Book 1 of the Masnavi, the first of six volumes, Rumi opens the spiritual path towards higher spiritual understanding. Alan Williams's authoritative new translation is rendered in highly readable blank verse and includes the original Persian text for reference, and with explanatory notes along the way. True to the spirit of Rumi’s poem, this new translation establishes the Masnavi as one of the world’s great literary achievements for a global readership. Translated with an introduction, notes and analysis by Alan Williams and including the Persian text edited by Mohammad Este'lami.Trade Review‘This new verse translation of the Masnavi, the mystical masterpiece of the greatest and best-loved of Persian poets, Jalaloddin Rumi, is a literary event of the first importance. Alan Williams has made it his principal life’s work to present the profound spirituality of this towering poet of peerless spiritual and psychological insight – a poet for the ages and for all people – in a form that is accessible to readers of today.’ * Carole Hillenbrand, Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh, UK *In mid-thirteenth century, as the Mongol hordes were destroying the fabled city of Baghdad, in the small city of Konya to the northwest Rumi was erecting a world of mystical vision in words whose amazing architectonics and blinding beauty would prove hard to imagine and harder to grasp with any sense of immediacy. In Alan Williams' English translation of the Spiritual Couplets, we finally stand a chance not only to access that vision in all its inner glory and eternal grandeur, but ultimately to gain an immediate sense of its graceful relevance not just to our time but to all of humanity through the millennia. * Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, author of Recasting Persian Poetry *Alan Williams brings us an English version of that epic spiritual masterpiece which is both reliable and fluently readable. The Introduction provides an indispensable key to the Masnavi’s sudden, bewildering shifts between multiple dramatic voices and perspectives, the distinctive feature which makes this poem, for every reader, “the mirror of our innermost state.” * Professor James W. Morris, Boston College, USA *While maintaining the Persian flavour of Rumi’s epic and lyric virtuosities, this superior translation by Alan Williams brings Rumi fully to life in English. Professor Williams combines his erudition and sophistication as a scholar with his poetic flair, to do justice to Rumi’s sublime poetry for a modern readership. * Ali-Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, Associate Professor of Persian, Leiden University, The Netherlands *The Masnavi’s new English translation is the publishing event of the year. At the hands of Alan Williams, Rumi’s “cumulative polyphony” resembles a Shakespeare play where the poet speaks ‘in one character after another . . .’ This monumental poem’s opening couplet, among the most captivating ever written, fills my heart with sadness every time I read it: “Listen to this reed as it is grieving, / it tells the story of our separations”. Who could stop listening to this music after hearing these first notes? * Kaya Genc, author of The Lion and the Nightingale *Table of ContentsPreface Chronology Introduction Further Reading Note on the Translation English translation of the Masnavi Book 1 Notes to Rumi’s Preface Notes to the Masnavi Book 1 Appendix: Analytical Index of the Stories and Discourses of Masnavi Book One Index Persian Text of the Masnavi Book 1, Edited by Mohammad Este?lami

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