Search results for ""author jenny joseph""

Selected Poems draws on Jenny Joseph's first four collections of poetry, The Unlooked-for Season (1960), Rose in the Afternoon (1974), The Thinking Heart (1978) and Beyond Descartes (1983). The poems explore the duality of existence, a track that runs through all her work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. Jenny Joseph's Selected Poems includes 'Warning', her much celebrated monologue in which a young woman talks of her fantasies of old age, voted Britain's favourite modern poem in a BBC poll in 2006.

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As in her poetry, so now in Extended Similes Jenny Joseph shows the influence on human lives of the mechanical workings of the world, illuminating many human states, especially love. Writing of Jenny Joseph's poetry, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner described the ‘mosaic mode’ she uses to draw ‘emotional, philosophical, reflective, lyrical, meditative, dialogic, descriptive and provocative tones into a rich impressionistic tableau’. This could also describe the prose of Extended Similes.

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"Extreme of Things" is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present "how things work" at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, "Ghosts and Other Company" (1995) and "All the Things I See" (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The "'Season Songs' from Persephone" (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts.

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"Nothing Like Love" is a collection of love poems by one of Britain's most popular and highly acclaimed poets. Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of "Warning", her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny Joseph was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of forms - new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories - she has always written what she things of as 'songs'. For this new book she has brought back some of the best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph's ability to convey the experiences of a 'thinking heart' is in no way diminished.

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'Utterly charming and uplifting' The Good Book Guide Voted Britain's favourite poem, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over for its message of old age as a time for indulgence and fun. In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she imagines herself in old age as a cheeky rebel with outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, poet Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends and remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike around the world. Here, 'Warning' appears as a beautiful updated edition with new illustrations; the perfect gift for a friend or relative who wants to grow older free from expectations, with a joyful and rebellious spirit.

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Jenny Joseph was no ordinary poet - and Led by the Nose is no ordinary memoir. Shaped around the smells of the English countryside, it is full of the wilful personality and the sly humour that characterised the purple-clad old woman in her iconic poem 'Warning'. Joseph's eccentricities permeate each chapter as she flows through the gardening year with its chores and blossoms, frequently leading the reader off the garden path to stop, smell the roses, and ignore the world for a while. Full of the sensual awareness of Jenny Joseph's poetry, Led by the Nose is a singular memoir: a work of delicious diversion and literary flair, horticultural anxieties and countercultural tendencies, providing a glimpse - or sniff - of the landscape of this treasured poet's life.

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