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100 More Great Indian Poems
by Abhay K.100 More Great Indian Poems serves as a perfect companion volume to 100 Great Indian Poems. Together they open a new window to the world of Indian poetry and delight our senses invoking a distinct taste, smell, colour and mood of this ancient and unique civilization.
I am a Jigsaw: Puzzling poems to baffle your brain
by Roger StevensFrom acrostics and riddles to kennings and paradiddles, this is a fun anthology of puzzling poems which also encourages children to have a go at writing poetry themselves. I am a Jigsaw is an excellent tool for teachers who want to introduce different forms of poems to their pupils and features different types of puzzle poems that are commonly used as models for children's writing in schools.Including puzzle poems ranging from easy to difficult, different poem styles and lots of humour, join Roger Stevens as he helps young readers crack the codes and learn to write their own puzzling poems that will baffle even the greatest mind.
Perfectly Peculiar Pets
by Elli WoollardFrom armadillos, flamingos and umbrella birds to quokkas and iguanas, Elli Woollard presents a lovely collection of poems for younger children about pets which are just a little bit peculiar... Filled with fun rhymes, quirky black-and-white illustrations and exotic animals, this book is perfect for reading aloud. Some poems are hilarious, some are gruesome and some will make you want to wash your hair, but there's sure to be a pet poem here for every child and adult alike.
The Poets of Alexandria (Understanding Classics Ser.)
by Susan A. StephensAlexandria was the greatest of the new cities founded by Alexander the Great as his armies swept eastward. It was ruled by his successors, the Ptolemies, who presided over one of the richest and most productive periods in the whole of Greek literature. Susan A Stephens here reveals a cultural world in transition: reverential of the compositions of the past (especially after construction of the great library, repository for all previous Greek oeuvres), but at the same time forward-looking and experimental, willing to make use of previous forms of writing in exciting new ways. The author examines Alexandria's poets in turn. She discusses the strikingly avant-garde Aetia of Callimachus; the idealized pastoral forms of Theocritus (which anticipated the invention of fiction); and the neo-Homerian epic of Apollonius, the Argonautica, with its impressive combination of narrative grandeur and psychological acuity. She shows that all three poets were innovators, even while they looked to the past for inspiration: drawing upon Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the lyric poets, they emphasized stories and material that were entirely relevant to their own progressive cosmopolitan environment.
Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past
by Carol Ann DuffyCarol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired – Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti – the result is a collection of voices that speak to one another across the centuries. Teasing, subverting, arguing, echoing and – ultimately – illuminating, Answering Back is a vibrant, fascinating and timeless anthology, compiled by one of the nation’s favourite poets. ‘Intriguing . . . Entertaining and stimulating’ Good Book Guide ‘A starry game of call and answer across poetic generations’ FT Magazine
Rapture: Poems
by Carol Ann Duffy'Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose TremainThe effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity. Yet in showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives, Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all.
Reliable Essays: Reliable Essays:The Best of Clive James
by Clive JamesIncluding Clive James's most memorable pieces – his ‘Postcard from Rome’, his observations on Margaret Thatcher, his insights into Heaney, Larkin and Orwell – this book also contains brilliantly funny examinations of characters like Barry Humphries, as well as showcasing James’s more thoughtful, analytical side. From Germaine Greer to Marilyn Monroe, from the nature of celebrity to German culpability for the Holocaust, Reliable Essays is an unmissable collection from one of the best writers of our time.
To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems
by Carol Ann DuffyCarol Ann Duffy's beautiful anthology features an eclectic mix of poems that chart human fascination with the moon across the centuries and around the world.Carol Ann Duffy on To the Moon:'Editing Answering Back, in which living poets replied to poems from the past, I was astonished to see how many of the poems, old and new, referred to the moon. I then started to keep a record of such references, and from my notebook, I see that in one morning alone I came across no fewer than nine poems, from the likes of Coleridge, Graves, Rosetti and Rowe - and it was this selection that initially inspired To the Moon. There's something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 BC, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the Moon itself: I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed, I saw him coming on the southern road. My heart lays down its load. In collecting together poems such as these - poems that span continents and centuries - To the Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are - like space itself - infinite.'
Love Poems: An Anthology Of Love Poems
by Carol Ann DuffyWhether writing of longing or seduction, of passion, adultery, or simple, everyday acts of love, Carol Ann Duffy perfectly captures the truth of each experience. Love Poems contains some of her most popular poems and, always imaginative, heartfelt and direct, displays all the eloquence and skill that have made her one of the foremost poets of her time.
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto BolañoWith an afterword by Natasha Wimmer.Winner of the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. New Year’s Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe – our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.
Even As We Speak: Criticism
by Clive JamesEffervescent, energetic and eclectic, this is one of the late Twentieth Century's finest minds (and bellies) on show. Even As We Speak is a compelling collection of essays in which Clive James focusses on Australian poetry; on television today; on the rise and fall of various icons; on the question of the culpability of the ordinary German in the holocaust; and there is a compellingly provocative and much-talked about piece on the death of Diana.
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008
by Clive JamesOpal Sunset gathers together fifty years of Clive James’s poetry, and will undoubtedly enhance his reputation as one of the most versatile and accomplished of contemporary writers. Indeed – as with Other Passports, The Book of My Enemy and Angels Over Elsinore before it – Opal Sunset proves Clive James to be as well suited to the intense demands of the poetic form as he is to prose. Readers new to his verse will not be surprised to find him a master of the comic set-piece and surreal excursion, while those who are familiar with his previous collections will already be aware of his fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope. Ultimately, however, the highest recommendation one can give is that Clive James is, in these poems, unmistakably himself – an assured and dazzling wordsmith.
At the Pillars of Hercules
by Clive JamesFirst published to great acclaim in 1979, At the Pillars of Hercules (a title taken from a certain Soho pub) confirmed Clive James’s place as a writer of immense talent, and as entertaining and elegant as ever. His main topics are contemporary poetry, aesthetics and the theory and practice of criticism, the popular novel, and the literature of modern history and politics. His discussions range from the legacy of Auden and Larkin to Gore Vidal and Lord Longford. His inimitable wit and candour are ever present in this collection of criticism, featuring a previously unpublished introduction.
Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful
by John KinsellaAustralian John Kinsella is one of the most highly regarded poets currently writing in English. Taking Edmund Burke’s 250-year old masterpiece A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as his template, Kinsella has produced his most accomplished and broadly representative work to date. Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful is a warm, human, anecdotally rich book, concentrating many of the themes that have obsessed its author over the last twenty years: language, love, the invocation of place, the mysteries of the Australian wilderness, and our mediations between the human and natural realms. Together, these lyric meditations build towards a profound thesis on the ecology of the imagination, and are always conducted in concrete, vivid and exuberant language that is unmistakably Kinsella’s own. ‘Kinsella’s poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight – of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light – becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming of a true poet’ George Steiner ‘John Kinsella is an Orphic fountain, a prodigy of the imagination . . . he frequently makes me think of John Ashbery: improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience’ Harold Bloom
Grain
by John GlendayThough John Glenday has long been admired for his lyrically delicate and emotionally powerful poetry, he has remained something of a well-kept secret. His third collection, Grain, makes his singular talent available to a wider audience. Sometimes Glenday’s poems are forcefully direct; sometimes they are so quiet they feel as if they were composed within a capacious listening, as a form of secular prayer. Glenday’s seamless lyric can also disguise some wild and surreal tales: the Beauty and the Beast told in reverse, a bizarre list of new saints, or a can of peaches waiting for the invention of the tin-opener. However, the lasting impression is of a genuinely spiritual poet, one with the ability to turn every earthly detail towards the same clear light. Grain announces Glenday as an essential voice in contemporary poetry.
The Bees: Poems
by Carol Ann Duffy‘Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world’ Jeanette Winterson, Guardian ‘Wonderful . . . a poet alert to every sound and shape of language’ Sunday Telegraph The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy’s subject, sometimes it strays into the poem, or hovers at its edge. In the end, Duffy’s point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees, at once intimate and public, is a work of great power from one of our most cherished poets. ‘Swooningly glorious’ The Times ‘Indisputably her best volume’ Sunday Times ‘Duffy is magnificent, grounded, heartfelt, dedicated to the notion that poetry can give us the music of life itself’ Scotsman
The Picador Book of Funeral Poems
by Don PatersonIn our deepest grief we still turn instinctively to poetry for solace. These poems, drawn from many different ages and cultures, remind us that the experience of parting is a timelessly human one: however alone the loss of a loved one leaves us, our mourning is also something that deeply unites us; these poems of parting and passing, of sorrow and healing, will find a deep echo within those who find themselves dealing with grief or bereavement. Whatever our loss, it is assuaged in finding a voice – and whether that voice is one of private remembrance or public memorial, The Picador Book of Funeral Poems will help you towards it.
Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems
by Clive JamesClive James’ power as a poet has increased year by year, and there has been no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower. Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is merely to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters and sharks – as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. But despite the dizzying variety, James’ poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this collection out is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in ‘Numismatics’) to striking new coin; and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure-chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, ‘whose play of light pays tribute to the dark’.
The Other Country
by Carol Ann DuffyThe Other Country was Carol Ann Duffy’s third collection, and as with her later books, takes its readers on journeys that seem initially similar – but soon prove anything but. This book leads our imagination to places our minds could not have suspected were there, or would not have dared to go alone. Some of its voices are disarmingly direct, while others blur the lines between fantasy and reality, confession and self-delusion, forcing us to re-examine everything we thought we knew about some of our most basic human drives and emotions. Deeply intelligent, unflinchingly honest, with a deftness of touch and tone, and openness all the more moving for its lack of sentimentality, The Other Country is as remarkable a collection today as it was on its first publication.
Green Glass Beads: A Collection of Poems for Girls
by Jacqueline Wilson'The joy for me is that this is my anthology, and I love every single poem in this book.' Jacqueline Wilson This is a gorgeous, stunningly produced collection of classic and modern poems that girls will turn to again and again throughout their lives. Jacqueline has taken great delight in selecting and arranging her favourite poems for this book, and you can hear her voice in the beautiful poems she has chosen, making it a truly personal collection. There are poems that will make you smile, laugh, frown and cry, and poems that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
by Billy Collins‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ Carol Ann Duffy Readers will only have to open this book at random to realize the privation a life without Billy Collins has been. A writer of immense grace and humanity, Billy Collins shows how the great forces of history and nature converge on the tiniest details of our lives - and in doing so presents them in a new radiance. He is also unbelievably funny. ‘The most popular poet in America’ New York Times ‘Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides’ John Updike ‘Billy Collins’ medium is a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I’d follow this man’s mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised’ Michael Donaghy ‘Smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm voiced, easy to love’ E. Annie Proulx
The Wrecking Light
by Robin RobertsonRobin Robertson’s fourth collection is, if anything, an even more intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book than Swithering, winner of the Forward Prize. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary: the poet’s gaze – whether on the natural world or the details of his own life – is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry and disarming humour. Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic (and at times horrific) retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems in The Wrecking Light pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human. Ghosts sift through these poems – certainties become volatile, the simplest situations thicken with strangeness and threat – all of them haunted by the pressure and presence of the primitive world against our own, and the kind of dream-like intensity of description that has become Robertson’s trademark. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep which confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today. ‘Robin Robertson continues to explore the bleak, beautiful territory that he has made his own. His stripped-bare lyricism, haunted by echoes of folksong, is as unforgiving as the weather and poems such as 'At Roane Head' show him writing at the height of his considerable powers’ The Times
Pandorama
by Ian DuhigIan Duhig’s erudite, compassionate and often wonderfully droll poetry sits at the intersection of the literary and folk traditions, and moves in an easy and masterly fashion between them. While this has lent his verse an enviable musicality and force, it has also written him a visa to places poets rarely venture. In Pandorama, Duhig has mined poems and songs from the work-camps of England’s itinerant navvies, jihadist training-grounds on the Yorkshire moors, football terraces, and meetings of the National Fancy Rat Society – and has painted a far truer picture of Britain’s cultural diversity than most documentary accounts are able to give us. It is also one we would rather not confront. Duhig was always an elegist of great power, but never more so than in the quiet and focused anger with which he memorializes the tragic figure of David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant whose appalling racial harassment led to his death. With Pandorama, poetry’s finest social historian has delivered a riveting book, its vision as broad and unsettling as its title suggests. ‘The most original poet of his generation’ Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian ‘His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish), art, history, politics and children’s word-games’ Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday
The Floating Man
by Katharine TowersAppropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.
Collected Poems: U A Fanthorpe
by Carol Ann DuffyCarol Ann Duffy has been a bold and original voice in British poetry since the publication of Standing Female Nude in 1985. Since then she has won every major poetry prize in the United Kingdom and sold over one million copies of her books around the world. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009.Her first Collected Poems includes all of the poems from her nine acclaimed volumes of adult poetry - from Standing Female Nude to Ritual Lighting - as well as her much-loved Christmas poems, which celebrate aspects of Christmas: from the charity of King Wenceslas to the famous truce between the Allies and the Germans in the trenches in 1914. Endlessly varied, wonderfully inventive, and emotionally powerful, the poems in this book showcase Duffy's full poetic range: there are poems written in celebration and in protest; public poems and deeply personal ones; poems that are funny, sexy, heartbroken, wise. Taken together they affirm her belief that 'poetry is the music of being human'. Collected Poems is both the perfect single-volume introduction for new readers and a glorious opportunity for old friends to celebrate thirty years' work by one of the country's greatest literary talents. It confirms indisputably that 'Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time' (Rose Tremain, Guardian).