Poetry

Poems, like anxiety, attempt to contain what spills over, and to overflow what fits too tightly. In Desiring Machines, Andrea Brady’s vital, candid eighth collection of poetry, the language of crisis gapes and sings. These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity. Midway through life’s journey, on the margins of a burning forest, we find ourselves in a clearing full of pulsing machines...When the time comes you are holding onto a facsimile of hope: that beneath your feetthere is a landing, vulnerable fruit caughtin a net; that the interval between struggle and arrivalis just space, empty space, no complexities.This is another way of talkingabout being born ... --Andrea Brady is the author of eight books of poetry and two critical monographs, including Wildfire (2010), Mutability (2012), Cut from the Rushes (2013), The Strong Room (2016), The Blue Split Compartments (2021) and Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint (2021). She has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the National Humanities Center, and performed throughout Europe and in Canada, the United States, Lebanon and Chile. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Slovene, Slovak, Finnish, Greek, Catalan, and Croatian, and has been the subject of a large number of critical essays. She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London where her research focuses on contemporary poetics and the early modern period. Andrea is the curator of the Archive of the Now and the co-editor (with Keston Sutherland) of Barque Press.

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'Bring us, Lord our God, at our last awakening, into the house and gate of heaven...' John Donne's prayer speaks of the hope and promise of a life with God that embraces us beyond death as well as during our time on earth. However, people of faith are not exempt from fears, fantasies and speculation, nor from the normal sequence of grief reactions that afflict bereaved human beings. Poetry, whether or not it is consciously religious, can help. In this selection of poems and thoughtful commentaries, Janet Morley offers an enriching approach to a subject we might prefer to avoid contemplating - our ordinary mortality. Here you will find the work of Dylan Thomas, Gillian Clarke, Philip Larkin, U. A. Fanthorpe, Seamus Heaney, Ann Griffiths, Jane Kenyon, Anne Stevenson, A. K. Ramanujan, Richard Baxter, George Herbert, Roger McGough and many more. Ranging in tone from joyful and ecstatic to gentle, ironic, despairing and even hilarious, these writers help us to look at death, accompany the dying, celebrate those who have died, and articulate our hope about what lies beyond. As a result, we have an opportunity to experience the whole range of human emotions about what it means to live, to love and to be loved.

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2023. Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 is two books in one: a representative selection from seven of Carl Phillips's innovative earlier collections and a complete new book of poems, providing a powerful introduction to European readers. A seemingly gentle but resolute attention to the things of this world evokes the joyful and painful elements in the contemporary human condition, characterised by loneliness and an unquenchable thirst for love. He is a poet who knows the rules and bends or breaks them, a master of syntax and prosody, avoiding convention and pursuing the lines of desire. In a starred review of this book, Publishers Weekly said, 'These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching [...] and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work.'

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***** 'So deeply gripping and inspiring...It will stay with me, always.' - Annie MacmanusIn 2008, 21-year-old Lady Unchained got involved in a fight in a club while trying to protect her sister.Serving 11 months of her prison sentence, her life changed completely. Inside, Lady Unchained began to write, while battling isolation, loneliness and the fear of being wrongly deported. These notes became powerful bars of poetry, capturing first-hand the broken justice system and the racism rooted within it.Wide-awake poetry, Behind Bars traces how Lady Unchained's identity was irrevocably changed during her sentencing, time in prison and release.Behind Bars proves there is life after prison.

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The classic poem, Goblin Market (1862) by Christina Rossetti, tells the story of Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted by the fruit sold by the goblin merchants. In this fully illustrated and beautiful volume, illustrator Georgie McAusland brings the words and story to life. SHORTLISTED in the V&A Illustration Awards and the World Illustration Awards. Breathing new life into the Victorian tradition of illustrated poems, this book reads like a picture story book. The stunning illustrations illuminate and drive the narrative forward as in all good story books. It tells the tale of the two sisters drifting apart as Laura succumbs to the forbidden fruit sold by the goblins, but the bonds of sisterhood prove strong. The poem has fascinated for generations and been the subject of various interpretations. This illustrated version brings the words and story alive for a new generation. Christina Rossetti is considered the foremost female poet of her time, and her poetry still resonates with women's lives today, as she entwines themes of sexuality, sisterhood, love and temptation in her work. All of these themes are encapsulated in Goblin Market. The book includes an introduction to the poem by novelist Kirsty Gunn, so all readers – for pleasure or study – can understand its riches.

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FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYWhen My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.Stolen cowboy boots, violins on fire; a mariachi band playing in the bathroom, a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades; the beauty of busted fruit, the sight of hellish visions - Diaz both revels and reveals through her distinctive use of language and imagery, bringing to life every intimate and communal encounter, blooming abundance from scarcity. The result is a wrenching portrayal of sacrifice, want, despair and fortitude that feels truly transformative.

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Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Ba n MacIntyre, rendering it into English.Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre's poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version.

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The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman'This is poetry rippling with communal recognition and empathy' Guardian'This is more than protest. It's a promise.'Including The Hill We Climb, the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, this luminous poetry collection by Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these seventy poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.'I think we all need more poetry - specifically her poetry - in our lives' i *A PRIMA 'BOOKS TO GIVE WITH LOVE' PICK*Praise for 'The Hill We Climb':'I was profoundly moved... The power of your words blew me away' Michelle Obama, TIME'I was thrilled' Hillary Clinton'She spoke truth to power and embodied clear-eyed hope to a weary nation. She revealed us to ourselves' Lin-Manuel Miranda, TIME

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This two-volume anthology celebrates four centuries of English poetry, from the Elizabethan era to the present day. This, the second of the two volumes, covers poets from Blake to Heaney, and provides an excellent portrayal of a wide variety of eighteenth to twentieth century poets. The richness and variety of this tradition are represented in this collection by all the great and familiar names, but also some of the less well-known poets who have often provided startling exceptions to the poetry of their age. The result is a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of the depth, diversity, and energy of poetry written in Britain and Ireland. Beginning with William Blake, this second volume, covers many of the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keates). It gives a generous survey of nineteenth century verse, including that of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, and Lewis Carroll, with poets from the twentieth-century being represented by poets such as Graves, Betjeman, Larking, Hughes, and Heaney.

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Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

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Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir od his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and the title essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems, many of them not collected elsewhere; and seven stories, including three from the early collection Furious Seasons.

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The theme of the Metamorphoses is change and transformation, as illustrated in Graeco-Roman myth and legend. On this ostensibly unifying thread Ovid strings together a vast and kaleidoscopic sequence of brilliant narratives, in which the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fates of his human and divine characters reflect the never-ending flux and reflux of the universe itself. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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This prose translation of the Odyssey is so successful that it has taken its place as one of the few really outstanding versions of Homer's famous epic poem. It is the story of the return of Odysseus from the siege of Troy to his home in Ithaca, and of the vengeance he takes on the suitors of his wife Penelope. Odysseus's account of his adventures since leaving Troy includes his encounter with the enchantress Circe, his visit to the Underworld, and the lure of the Sirens. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'The bitter tragedy of human life-- horrors of death, attack, retreat, advance, and the great game of Destiny and Chance. ' In The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581), Torquato Tasso set out to write an epic to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unlike his predecessors, he took his subject not from myth but from history: the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The siege of the city is played out alongside a magical romance of love and sacrifice, in which the Christian knight Rinaldo succumbs to the charms of the pagan sorceress Armida, and the warrior maiden Clorinda inspires a fatal passion in the Christian Tancred. Tasso's masterpiece left its mark on writers from Spenser and Milton to Goethe and Byron, and inspired countless painters and composers. This is the first English translation in modern times that faithfully reflects both the sense and the verse form of the original. Max Wickert's fine rendering is introduced by Mark Davie, who places Tasso's poem in the context of his life and times and points to the qualities that have ensured its lasting impact on Western culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A comprehensive bilingual collection of twentieth-century French poetry Not since the publication of Paul Auster’s The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1984) has there been a significant and widely read anthology of modern French poetry in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary verse of scourge Michel Houellebecq. Many of the English translations (on facing pages) are justly celebrated, composed by eminent figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery; many others are new and have been commissioned for this book. Distinguished scholar and editor Mary Ann Caws has chosen work by more than 100 poets. Her deliberately extensive, international selection includes work by Francophone poets, by writers better known for accomplishments in other genres (novelists, songwriters, performance artists), and by many more female poets than have typically been represented in past anthologies of modern French poetry. The editor has opted for a chronological organization that highlights six crucial “pressure points” in modern French poetry. Accompanying the selections are a general introduction, informative essays on each period, and short biographical notes—all prepared by the editor.

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Following the success and momentum of his anthology How to Love the World (93,000 copies in print), James Crews's new collection, The Path to Kindness, offers more than 100 deeply felt and relatable poems from a diverse range of voices including well-known writers Julia Alvarez, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alberto Ríos, Ross Gay, and Ada Limón, as well as new and emerging voices. Featured Black poets include January Gill O’Neil, Tracy K. Smith, and Cornelius Eady. Native American poets include Kimberly Blaeser, Joy Harjo (current U.S. Poet Laureate), and Linda Hogan. The collection also features international voices, including Canadian poets Lorna Crozier and Susan Musgrave. Presented in the same perfect-in-the-hand format as How to Love the World, the collection includes prompts for journaling and exploration of selected poems, a book group guide, bios of all the contributing poets, and stunning cover art by award-winning artist Dinara Mirtalipova. A foreword by Danusha Laméris, along with her popular poem "Small Kindnesses," is also included.

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In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps.In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.”With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.

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'we can speak of no greater contest than Olympia' The Greek poet Pindar (c. 518-428 BC) composed victory odes for winners in the ancient Games, including the Olympics. He celebrated the victories of athletes competing in foot races, horse races, boxing, wrestling, all-in fighting and the pentathlon, and his Odes are fascinating not only for their poetic qualities, but for what they tell us about the Games. Pindar praises the victor by comparing him to mythical heroes and the gods, but also reminds the athlete of his human limitations. The Odes contain versions of some of the best known Greek myths, such as Jason and the Argonauts, and Perseus and Medusa, and are a valuable source for Greek religion and ethics. Pindar's startling use of language - striking metaphors, bold syntax, enigmatic expressions - makes reading his poetry a uniquely rewarding experience. Anthony Verity's lucid translations are complemented by an introduction and notes that provide insight into competition, myth, and meaning. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The Eclogues, ten short pastoral poems, were composed between approximately 42 and 39 BC, during the time of the 'Second' Triumvirate of Lepidus, Anthony, and Octavian. In them Virgil subtly blended an idealized Arcadia with contemporary history. To his Greek model - the Idylls of Theocritus - he added a strong element of Italian realism: places and people, real or disguised, and contemporary events are introduced. The Eclogues display all Virgil's art and charm and are among his most delightful achievements. Between approximately 39 and 29 BC, years of civil strife between Antony, and Octavian, Virgil was engaged upon the Georgics. Part agricultural manual, full of observations of animals and nature, they deal with the farmer's life and give it powerful allegorical meaning. These four books contain some of Virgil's finest descriptive writing and are generally held to be his greatest and most entertaining work, and C. Day Lewis's lyrical translations are classics in their own right. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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This new translation in free verse conveys the full force of Lucan's writing and his grimly realistic view of the subject. The Introduction sets the scene for the reader unfamiliar with Lucan and explores his relationship with earlier writers of Latin epic, and his interest in the sensational. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wilde's poetry and prose short stories, plays, critical dialogues and his only novel - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Oscar Wilde's dramatic private life has sometimes threatened to overshadow his great literary achievements. His talent was prodigious: the author of brilliant social comedies, fairy stories, critical dialogues, poems, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In addition to Dorian Gray, this volume represents all these genres, including such works as Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, 'The Happy Prince', 'The Critic as Artist', and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Beowulf is the longest and finest literary work to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, and one of the world's greatest epic poems. Set in the half-legendary, half historical Scandinavian past, it tells the story of the hero Beowulf, who comes to the aid of the Danish king Hrothgar by killing first the terrifying, demonic monster Grendel, and then Grendel's infuriated and vengeful mother. A lifetime later, Beowulf's own kingdom, Geatland, is threatened by a fiery dragon; Beowulf heroically takes on this challenge, but himself dies killing the dragon. The poem celebrates the virtues of the heroic life, but Hrothgar and Beowulf are beacons of wisdom and courage in a dark world of feuds, violence and uncertainty, and Beowulf's selfless heroism is set against a background of ruthless power struggles, fratricide and tyranny. This acclaimed translation is complemented by a critical introduction and substantial editorial apparatus. `The poem has at last found its translator . . .supremely well done' Charles Causley ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.' In the 'rubáiyát' (short epigrammatic poems) of the medieval Persian poet, mathematician, and philosopher Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald saw an unflinching challenge to the illusions and consolations of mankind in every age. His version of Omar is neither a translation nor an independent poem; sceptical of divine providence and insistent on the pleasure of the passing moment, its 'Orientalism' offers FitzGerald a powerful and distinctive voice, in whose accents a whole Victorian generation comes to life. Although the poem's vision is bleak, it is conveyed in some of the most beautiful and haunting images in English poetry - and some of the sharpest- edged. The poem sold no copies at all on its first appearance in 1859, yet when it was 'discovered' two years later its first admirers included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Ruskin. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition does justice to the scope and complexity of FitzGerald's lyrical meditation on 'human death and fate'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with—and sometimes contradicting—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself “only to freedom.” Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.

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Larkin's final collection of poems shows, as does all his best work, his ability to adapt contemporary speech rhythms and everyday vocabulary to subtle metrical patterns and poetic forms. Many of the poems in the collection, which includes some of his best-known pieces ('The Old Fools', 'This Be the Verse', 'The Explosion', and the title poem) show the preoccupation with death and transience that is so typical of the poet.This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.

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'Ye Ice-Falls! Ye that from the mountain's browAdown enormous ravines slope amain -...'A selection of Coleridge's poems, including 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' and 'Frost at Midnight'Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Coleridge's Selected Poetry, The Complete Poems and (with William Wordsworth) Lyrical Ballads are available in Penguin Classics.

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Yehuda Amichai was first brought to attention in this country by his inclusion in Modern Poetry in Translation (1965). The magazine's editors, Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, here provide a selection of Amichai's poetry translated by various hands, placing his achievements alongside those other Eastern European poets with whom he was first introduced - Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz and Andrei Voznesensky - while demonstrating what makes his own talent so unique.In Ted Hughes's words, Amichai was 'the poet whose books I still open most often, most often take on a journey, most often return to when the whole business of writing anything natural, real and satisfying, seems impossible. And that after thirty years of feeling the same way about him. The effect his poetry has on me is to give me my own life - to open it up somehow, to make it available to me afresh, to uncover all kinds of riches in every moment of it, and to free me from my mental prisons'.

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WINNER of the 2020 FOUR QUARTETS PRIZE LONGLISTED for the 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST for the the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST for the KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

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An anthem for the modern woman, Unfollowing You will serve as a true companion for those who seek a voice that explores the complexities and hilarity of contemporary romance. Komal Kapoor uses her personal experience and astute social awareness as mechanisms to empower self-acceptance and promote cultural transparency. After prolific growth on social media, Komal Kapoor is utilizing her perceptive understanding of romance in the digital age to present her first interdisciplinary collection of poems. Unfollowing You tells a chronological tale of a modern love through a series of poems, prose, texts, screen grabs, and unsent letters. Exploring digital phenomena like swipe culture and technological realities, Kapoor’s words affirm experiences and sentiment echoed across many media platforms. Unfollowing You is separated into two parts: “Following You” details how the two protagonists fall in love and “Unfollowing You” deals with their heartbreak. The realism of this collection will encourage readers to normalize growth and indulge in their feelings, even finding strength in them.

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The multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects?I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt.What do you think would happen?People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.'When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

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Kendel Hippolyte’s poetry moves easily, boldly between the worlds of public engagement and the intimacies of domesticity. What unites this movement are the distinctive sounds and rhythms of his voice, and whilst some poems have a named recipient, and some are addressed to himself, all engage the reader in an implicit dialogue. His is an art of sound, of the rhythms of the long, supple line, of form that sometimes disguises itself as no form, of the beauty of the crooked basket. He wants the poem to draw us in rather than hold us outside in admiration at its skill – and skill and craft are what his poems display in spades. His is a vision that extends outwards in illimitable ways in space and time, but where the scale is always the human body, the human mind.The challenge comes in the way his poems address the dread reality of a Caribbean world of disappointed dreams, of sovereignty swamped by the new economic and cultural imperialism that masquerades under the mask of globalisation, of waking “one morning and the Caribbean was gone”, of continuing environmental degradation. The questioning comes from looking inwards to wonder why this has happened, what failures of vision, what empty sloganizing, what dishonesties, arrogance and failures of mutual respect led to the defeats so that “the rivers of Babylon clog into vomit…” The comfort comes from both the small loving kindnesses of the domestic – the rituals of coffee-brewing, of bed-making – but also the refusal to retreat, to look to the moment when flint and iron can “flare into the hot bright moment of a spark”.

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'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more.

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.

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Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse therefore contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.

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Revered in eleventh-century Persia as an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam is now known first and foremost for his Ruba'iyat. The short epigrammatic stanza form allowed poets of his day to express personal feelings, beliefs and doubts with wit and clarity, and Khayyam became one of its most accomplished masters with his touching meditations on the transience of human life and of the natural world. One of the supreme achievements of medieval literature, the reckless romanticism and the pragmatic fatalism in the face of death means these verses continue to hold the imagination of modern readers.

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This selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic Auld Lang Syne, the romantic A Red, Red Rose, and the patriotic Scots What Hae. As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range - from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.

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From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets.This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some his most famous poems, such as 'Piano', a nostalgic reflection on lost youth and love for his mother; 'Snake', exploring human fear of the natural world; the short, cutting comment on sexual politics of 'Can't Be Borne'; and the quiet philosophical resignation of 'Basta!'. Using the revised poems, but in the order in which they appeared in their original collections, this selection offers a fresh perspective that reveals an innovative poet who gave voice to his most intense emotions.

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'A revelation' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 2018The first Penguin anthology of Japanese haiku, in vivid new translations by Adam L. Kern. Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running over three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations, this anthology offers an illuminating introduction to this widely celebrated, if misunderstood, art form. Adam L. Kern's new translations are accompanied here by the original Japanese and short commentaries on the poems, as well as an introduction and illustrations from the period.

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