Poetry

Regarded by many as the finest poet of twentieth-century Spain, Antonio Machado y Ruiz (1875–1939) is not well known outside the Spanish-speaking world. This volume will introduce him to Anglo-American readers, enabling them to experience at first hand the subtle nuances of his verse. Some two hundred fifty poems in Spanish, drawn from Machado’s entire oeuvre, are accompanied on facing pages by sensitive and beautifully fluent translations which render the originals accessible to the mind and the ear.Alan S. Trueblood annotates the individual poems, placing them in context and illuminating their allusions and undertones. In addition, he provides a substantial biographical and critical Introduction. This gives an overview of Machado’s life, as a poet and teacher and wide-ranging commentator on cultural, political, and social affairs. (Forced into exile at the end of the Civil War, he crossed the Pyrenees on foot and died a month later.) The Introduction also discusses the qualities of Machado’s predominantly quiet and reflective verse, as well as the development of the thought of this major poet.

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Anne Bradstreet was one of our earliest feminists and the first true poet in the American colonies. This collection of her extant poetry and prose, scrupulously edited by Jeannine Hensley, has long been the standard edition of Bradstreet’s work. Hensley’s introduction sketches the poet’s life, and Adrienne Rich’s foreword offers a sensitive critique of Bradstreet as a person and as a writer. The John Harvard Library edition includes a chronology of Bradstreet’s life and an updated bibliography.

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Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1426–1503) was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy, the presiding spirit of the Accademia Pontaniana, and chief minister and tutor to the Aragonese Kings of Naples. He was also the most innovative and versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, given the subtitle Baiae by their first editor Pietro Summonte, experiment brilliantly with the metrical form associated principally with the ancient Latin poet Catullus. The poems are the elegant offspring of Pontano’s leisure, written to celebrate love, good wine, friendship, nature, and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples. They are translated here for the first time into English.

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George Chapman's translations of Homer are the most famous in the English language. Keats immortalized the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet in the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Swinburne praised the translations for their "romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur," their "freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire." The great critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) wrote: "For more than two centuries they were the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what Greek was. Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language." This volume presents the original (1611) text of Chapman's translation of the Iliad, making only a small number of modifications to punctuation and wording where they might confuse the modern reader. The editor, Allardyce Nicoll, provides an introduction and a glossary. Garry Wills contributes a preface, in which he explains how Chapman tapped into the poetic consonance between the semi-divine heroism of the Iliad's warriors and the cosmological symbols of Renaissance humanism.

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When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers. This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

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C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) is now considered by many to be the most original and influential Greek poet of this century. The qualities of his poetry that were unfashionable during his lifetime are the very ones that make his work endure: his sparing use of metaphor; his evocation of spoken rhythms and colloquialisms; his use of epigrammatic and dramatic modes; his aesthetic perfectionism; his frank treatment of homosexual themes; his brilliantly alive sense of history; and his commitment to Hellenism, coupled with an astute cynicism about politics. The translations in Selected Poems are completely new. Realizing that Cavafy's language is closer to the spoken idiom than that of other leading Greek poets of his time, and that earlier translations have failed to capture the immediate, colloquial qualities of Cavafy's voice, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard have rendered his most significant and characteristic poems in a style and rhythm as natural and apt in English as the poet's is in Greek. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary greatness had begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later Antonin Artaud pronounced, "Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the multiple riches of the subconscious into literature." Richard Howard's translation of this quietly radical work is the first to be published in nearly a century, and the first to accurately convey Maeterlinck's elusive visionary force. The poems, some of them in free verse (new to Belgium at the time), combine the decadent symbolism and the language of dislocation that Maeterlinck later perfected in his dramas. Hothouses reflects the influence not only of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. As for the title, the author said it was "a natural choice, Ghent ...abounding in greenhouses." The poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French originals, are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne that appeared in the original volume, and by an early prose text by Maeterlinck imaginatively describing a painting by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel. A feat of daring power extraordinarily immediate and inventive, Hothouses will appeal to all lovers of poetry, and in particular to those interested in Modernism. Maeterlinck's enormous fame may have faded, but twentieth-century writers such as Beckett are still our masters who testify to its undying influence.

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The authoritative new translation of the epic Ramayana, as retold by the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas and cherished by millions to this day.The Epic of Ram presents a new translation of the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas (1543–1623). Written in Avadhi, a literary dialect of classical Hindi, the poem has become the most beloved retelling of the ancient Ramayana story across northern India. A devotional work revered and recited by millions of Hindus today, it is also a magisterial compendium of philosophy and lore and a literary masterpiece.In the second volume, prompted by the tyranny of the demon king Ravan, Ram decides to be born on earth. Tulsidas lovingly details Ram’s infancy, childhood, and youthful adventures, the winning of Princess Sita as his bride, and the celebration of their marriage.This new translation into free verse conveys the passion and momentum of its inspired poet and storyteller. It is accompanied by the most widely accepted edition of the Avadhi text, presented in the Devanagari script.

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Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it: “There is one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self and not somebody else.”Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer—an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson’s poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson’s work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph W. Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever assembled. The poems, arranged chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Franklin gives Dickinson’s alternative readings for the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column, divisions in the source. Each entry identifies Franklin’s editorial emendations and records the publication history, including variants. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The poems are indexed by numbers from the Johnson edition, as well as by first lines.Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to this edition and surveys the history of the editing of Dickinson’s poems. His account of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.

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George Chapman's translations of Homer are among the most famous in the English language. Keats immortalized the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet in the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Swinburne praised the translations for their "romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur," their "freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire." The great critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) wrote: "For more than two centuries they were the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what Greek was. Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language." This volume presents the original text of Chapman's translation of the Odyssey (1614-15), making only a small number of modifications to punctuation and wording where they might confuse the modern reader. The editor, Allardyce Nicoll, provides an introduction, textual notes, a glossary, and a commentary. Garry Wills's preface to the Odyssey explores how Chapman's less strained meter lets him achieve more delicate poetic effects as compared to the Iliad. Wills also examines Chapman's "fine touch" in translating "the warm and human sense of comedy" in the Odyssey. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. --John Keats

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Gripping and poignant, this new collection of poetry from bestselling author Renaada Williams offers a raw view of the world from her unique perspective.Renaada Williams beckons readers into her deepest thoughts and most intimate experiences as a queer black woman living in America with her latest collection poetry. Much like her first book, Williams presents themes like sexuality and acceptance through her stunningly arranged words, but this time she dives much deeper. find her. keep her. delivers an amplitude of emotion and rawness; reading her poetry feels as if you’ve stumbled upon her secret journal and are reading words that were never meant to be found.

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'Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble.' Ted HughesPoet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

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Edward Mendelson has significantly expanded his authoritative, chronological ordered edition of Auden's Selected Poems (first published in 1979), adding twenty items to the hundred in the original edition, and broadening the focus to reflect the wealth of forms, the rhetorical and tonal range, and the variousness of content in Auden's poetry, in the confines of one volume. In particular, there are newly included examples of Auden's mastery of light verse: the self-descriptive sequence of haiku called 'Profiles', the barbed wartime quatrains of 'Leap Before You Look', or 'Funeral Blues' itself. Also included are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure, and a revised introduction drawing on recent additions to Auden scholarship.

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This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled "Squarings", shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "to credit marvels". The title poem, "Seeing Things", is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives. Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself. From the author of "The Haw Lantern", "Wintering Out", "Station Island" and "North".

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‘I can't think of a single person who wouldn't enjoy having this beautiful collection of poetry to dip into when they need a boost' – Good Housekeeping ‘This is supreme bedtime reading.’ – The Lady ‘Go to sleep with the lightest of hearts, with verses from Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope and more’ – Townswoman These days we're all in need of a little nugget of happiness to help soothe our weary souls at the end of the day. A Happy Poem to End Every Day provides just that: one sublimely happy poem for every day of the year, from cosy fireside idylls in winter to outdoor adventures in summer, encounters with the beauty of nature in spring and moments of quiet reflection in autumn. It features some of the greatest poets ever to put pen to paper, from William Wordsworth on the joy of skating and Emily Brontë enjoying life on the moors to Simon Armitage catching a cricket ball and Wendy Cope sharing an orange, with a good smattering of classic jolly verse such as Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat. Beautifully illustrated with contemplative scenes of pure happiness, this wonderful book is the perfect way to give yourself a little lift every evening. Keep it by your bedside and it's sure to bring restful sleep and sweet dreams.

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Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun. -- from 'Digging'With its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.

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This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin's poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkin's typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinized afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkin's typescripts and the early printings are recorded.For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poet's comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnett's commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

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Siegfried Sassoon is one of the First World War poets whose poetry has defined a generation. He published most of his war poetry in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Chronologically ordered, the poems in this collection act as a timeline for the war, bringing to life the extraordinary experiences of soldiers in that conflict.

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Winner of the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry'A writer we should treasure.' Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph'With every book [Harsent's] stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable.' Fiona Sampson, IndependentThe poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of 'Songs from the Same Earth', the troubling fractured narrative of 'A Dream Book', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled 'Fire', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of 'Sang the Rat' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.

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Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' (The Times). I Knew the Bride is Williams' eleventh collection of poems, and his first since West End Final was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for poetry in 2009. This new volume bears - and lays bare - those qualities that have become so characteristic of his work: his unflinching survey of his childhood and adult life alike, alighting on moments of vivacity from his upbringing in a theatrical family in the 1940s and 50s (the title poem a touching tribute to his late sister) through to the romantic peaks and pains of his adult years. Straight-talking, self-deprecating and funny, these recklessly accountable inspections are set against a Williams-esk miscellany of day-to-day backdrops that readers have come to treasure: of record collections, kitchen sinks, shopping bicycles, hotels, bedrooms. But I Knew the Bride is no mere rehearsal of old lives lived; instead it takes the author and his readers into startling new terrain in a series of brave, painful and profoundly moving poems 'From the Dialysis Ward', in which the author records his own ongoing hospital treatment with a fearless vulnerability that makes this collection of poems a courageous and inspiring read.

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'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occupies.' Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse

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Celebrating the art of the poet-translator, this pioneering anthology shows how the very heart of the English tradition has been sustained and enriched by translation over the centuries. The three editors have gathered together supreme examples of this art, poems that sing out on the most pressing of human concerns with all the conviction of two voices speaking as one.

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This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.

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The Animated Universe is the long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet who has traveled the world honing her craft and, in the process, settling into the assurance and confidence in her voice. These poems reflect her movement, but above all they speak to her core belief in the power of empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers. In “signs” she writes, “Everywhere I go/ I see the people I love in the faces of strangers,..” Her poems range across three modes of seeing: the ode that reveals her penchant for finding beauty in the unusual, in the ordinary and in the disquieting things of the world; her legends, which are the mythologizing of daily life that only great calypsonians and natural storytellers are able to achieve; and finally, her lyric disrobing of her heart, her soul and her body—a sacrifice she makes with heart because of her strong conviction that the sharing of self is a healing quality of poetry: “I am a figment/ of God’s imagination. / I am more than/ I say. I am./ I am who I am/ becoming.” If there are echoes of Ntosake Shange here, it is because, like Shange, Thornhill understands the deeply spiritual function of the poet, and she embraces the role of the poet as a a priestess in service of the community. And yet, in all of this, we find in Thornhill the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant’s imagination and language, rooted as she is in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home. There is a throw-back quality to her rhymes, invoking in the long-breathed journey to the satisfaction of rhyme, the “def” stage, the spoken-world space during its emergent height. But this is the beginning of the formal exploration. Thornhill, the poet, was made by the energy and immediacy of the stage, a poetry willing to improvise through elliptical leaps while being grounded in sound, rich sound, and the satisfaction of the rhyme’s reliability, and above all, while grounded in the story, the tall tale, the myth-making.

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Published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.

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The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the Observer

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This selection provides an excellent introduction to Ezra Pound's poetry for the general reader, and for the student of contemporary literature. It takes the place of the pioneer edition edited by T. S. Eliot which was published in 1928. A representative group of early poems is included; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius are printed complete; and there is a selection from the Cantos up to and including Drafts & Fragments (1969).

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Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, these poems were written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.

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Published to mark the poet's 80th birthday, this collection confirms R. S. Thomas as our pre-eminent poet.'This is the book I've been waiting for' Ted Hughes

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**WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2022** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR POETRY 2022** **LONGLISTED FOR THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE 2023** With Sonnets for Albert, Anthony Joseph returns to the autobiographical material explored in his earlier collection Bird Head Son. In this follow-up, he weighs the impact of being the son of an absent, or mostly absent, father, Though these poems threaten to break under the weight of their emotions, they are always masterfully poised as the stylish man they depict.

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With more than 100,000 copies sold, The New American Poetry has become one of the most influential anthologies published in the United States since World War II. As one of the first counter-cultural collections of American verse, this volume fits in Robert Lowell's famous definition of the raw in American poetry. Many of the contributors once derided in the mainstream press of the period are now part of the postmodern canon: Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Guest, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, O'Hara, Snyder, Schuyler, and others. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry delivered the first taste of these remarkable poets, and the book has since become an invaluable historical and cultural record, now available again for a new generation of readers.

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Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a form which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux and freedom of his age - and one of the founding texts of literary Modernism.

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“John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us—with subtle occasional rhyme—to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees.”—Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for PoetryAn award-winning translation of Hindi verses composed by one of India’s treasured poets.The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas’s popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known collectively as the Sūrsāgar.This award-winning translation reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas’s verse—the poems that were known to the singers of Surdas’s own time as his. Here Surdas stands out with a clarity never before achieved.

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'A tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our world' Ocean Vuong'Radical . . . invites the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery' Tracy K. Smith'Psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance' Ralf Webb'Deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence' Eileen Myles'Queer . . . gorgeous . . . just stunning' Joelle TaylorA captivating, original call for creative freedom from one of the most singular poets of our time'this mechanistic world . . . has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry'Since their inception in 2005, CAConrad's (soma)tic poems have acted as an urgent appeal for an embodied, unfettered creative practice. Rooted in the Sanskrit 'soma', meaning 'to press and be newly born', and the Greek-derived 'somatic', relating to the body, Conrad's (soma)tic poetry reaches out from electrifying, esoteric rituals. Their methods are elaborate, and the results are unexpected: one, for instance, might begin by seeing the poet flood their body with the field calls of extinct animals - and end not only in a consideration of survivor's guilt and the destruction of ecosystems, but also in an elated sense of the presence, close at hand, of the many friends and lovers they lost to AIDS.Conrad draws on these rituals to enter a political, physical and spiritual state of consciousness, meditating on ecology, queerness and grief in powerful, dreamlike poetry that invites us to engage with the essence of things. This new selection is a testimony to poetry's capacity to reconnect us with the present moment and put an end to the alienation we feel: from our bodies, our surroundings, our planet.

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*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE.* 'One of the greatest writers of our time' Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThe Perfect Nine is a glorious epic about the founding of Kenya's Gikuyu people and the ideals of beauty, courage and unity.Gikuyu and Mumbi settled on the peaceful and bounteous foot of Mount Kenya after fleeing war and hunger. When ninety-nine suitors arrive on their land, seeking to marry their famously beautiful daughters, called The Perfect Nine, the parents ask their daughters to choose for themselves, but to choose wisely.First the young women must embark on a treacherous quest with the suitors, to find a magical cure for their youngest sister, Warigia, who cannot walk. As they journey up the mountain, the number of suitors diminishes and the sisters put their sharp minds and bold hearts to the test, conquering fear, doubt, hunger and many menacing ogres, as they attempt to return home. But it is perhaps Warigia's unexpected adventure that will be most challenging of all.Blending folklore, mythology and allegory, Ngugi wa Thiong'o chronicles the adventures of Gikuyu and Mumbi, and how their brave daughters became the matriarchs of the Gikuyu clans, in stunning verse, with all the epic elements of danger, humour and suspense.'A tremendous writer... it's hard to doubt the power of the written word when you hear the story of Ngugi wa Thiong'o' Guardian

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'A profoundly valuable collection, full of fresh perspective, and opening doors into all kinds of material that has been routinely neglected or patronized' Rowan Williams, TLSThis rich and surprising anthology is a holistic, global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia. Beginning with the earliest attributable author in all of human literature, the twenty-third century BCE Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, and taking in a constellation of voices - from King David to Lao Tzu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Malian Epic of Sundiata - this selection presents a number of canonical figures like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized, diverse poets going up to the present day. Together they show the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the spiritual, across place and time.

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Caldebroc introduces a range of characters from the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders and beyond, including the Brontes at their naughtiest, and crazed millionaires who try to ban January and pimp their filing cabinets. The title is an old English word for a Manchester district and the book includes a sequence about a friend murdered there in 2013. “Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried histories, public and private… Channelling influences such as Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project uniquely his own to rework history in these ‘measures against outrages’. These are formidable sequences, scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.” Scott Thurston “It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives poetic language and, in doing so, uses the full artistic palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.” James Byrne

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There has always been an intense physicality to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for geographic groundedness and a biographical perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest writers of his generation. What is most striking about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of the relentless violence to which we have all become far too inured. There is hardly a Black British writer working today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable debt, whether they know it or not.

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From the artistic passion of the St Petersburg poets and bohemians, to the collective suffering of a nation, Anna Akhmatova spoke to, and for, the soul of her people. This magnificent edition includes: more than 800 poems, half of them available in no other translated edition: translator's preface: biographical introduction by Roberta Reeder: more than 125 photographs, including a 65 page photo biography, and 'The Artist's Muse' images of Akhmatova in art: memoir by Isaiah Berlin: comprehensive notes to the poems: index of first lines: bibliography.

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One of the English language’s best-loved living poets, in Nature Carol Ann Duffy presents us with her favourites among her poems on the natural world. Drawing on work written over four decades and arranged chronologically, Duffy also adds to her selection one wholly new poem.

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Rendered in an idiom drawn from present-day nature guides, gardening handbooks, how-to manuals, and scientific treatises--and in a style influenced by twentieth-century poetry--this bold new translation seeks to renew our appreciation of a work often relegated to the pigeonhole of didactic poetry about farming. In doing so, it reveals the Georgics as a remarkable window on Roman conceptions of the natural world and of the place of human life within it--and also conveys a sense of how daring were Virgil's poetics in their day. Footnotes offer a wealth of information on mythology, agriculture, wildlife, geography, and astronomy while highlighting the technical, scientific, ethnographic, and other registers of the poem.

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