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Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Mark StevenIn Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned;¢;‚¬;€?and aesthetically responsive;¢;‚¬;€?to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into Stalinism, opening up a hitherto underexplored domain in the political history of avant-garde literature. In doing so, Steven amplifies the resonance among the universal idea of communism, the revolutionary socialist state, and the American modernist poem.Focusing on three of the most significant figures in modernist poetry;¢;‚¬;€?Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky;¢;‚¬;€?Steven provides a theoretical and historical introduction to modernism;€™s unique sense of communism while revealing how communist ideals and references were deeply embedded in modernist poetry. Moving between these poets and the work of T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and many others, the book combines a detailed analysis of technical devices and poetic values with a rich political and economic context. Persuasively charting a history of the avant-garde modernist poem in relation to communism, beginning in the 1910s and reaching into the 1940s, Red Modernism is an audacious examination of the twinned history of politics and poetry.
Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies
by Jason R. RudyImagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada;¢;‚¬;€?often disparaged as derivative and uncouth;¢;‚¬;€?should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical;¢;‚¬;€?including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans;¢;‚¬;€?and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe.Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.
Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies
by Jason R. RudyImagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada;¢;‚¬;€?often disparaged as derivative and uncouth;¢;‚¬;€?should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical;¢;‚¬;€?including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans;¢;‚¬;€?and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe.Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.
Future Perfect (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by Charles MartinTo be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin;€™s darkly comic new collection, the poet explores our time and the times that come before and after, which we inhabit and cultivate in memory and imagination. Through poems that play with form and challenge expectation, Martin examines the continuities that persist from time immemorial to the future perfect.Sensitive to the traces left behind by the lives of his characters, Martin follows their tracks, reflections, echoes, and shadows. In "From Certain Footprints Found at Laetoli," an ancient impression preserved in volcanic ash conjures up a family scene three million years past. In "The Last Resort of Mr. Kees" and "Mr. Kees Goes to a Party," Martin adopts the persona of the vanished poet Weldon Kees to reimagine his disappearance. "Letter from Komarovo, 1962" retells the tense real-life meeting between Anna Akhmatova and Robert Frost a year before their nations almost destroyed one another. And in the titular sonnet sequence that ends the book, Martin conjures a childhood in the Bronx under the shadow of the mushroom cloud of nuclear war as the perfected future supplanting the present.Introducing Buck Rogers to Randall Jarrell and combining new translations or reinterpretations of works by Ovid, G. G. Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.
Future Perfect (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by Charles MartinTo be modern is to live not in a single era, but in a churn of new technologies, deep history, myth, literary traditions, and contemporary cultural memes. In Future Perfect, Charles Martin;€™s darkly comic new collection, the poet explores our time and the times that come before and after, which we inhabit and cultivate in memory and imagination. Through poems that play with form and challenge expectation, Martin examines the continuities that persist from time immemorial to the future perfect.Sensitive to the traces left behind by the lives of his characters, Martin follows their tracks, reflections, echoes, and shadows. In "From Certain Footprints Found at Laetoli," an ancient impression preserved in volcanic ash conjures up a family scene three million years past. In "The Last Resort of Mr. Kees" and "Mr. Kees Goes to a Party," Martin adopts the persona of the vanished poet Weldon Kees to reimagine his disappearance. "Letter from Komarovo, 1962" retells the tense real-life meeting between Anna Akhmatova and Robert Frost a year before their nations almost destroyed one another. And in the titular sonnet sequence that ends the book, Martin conjures a childhood in the Bronx under the shadow of the mushroom cloud of nuclear war as the perfected future supplanting the present.Introducing Buck Rogers to Randall Jarrell and combining new translations or reinterpretations of works by Ovid, G. G. Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.
Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Chad BennettCan the art of gossip help us to better understand modern and contemporary poetry? Gossip;€™s ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. But in Word of Mouth, Chad Bennett explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality in the twentieth century. Through nuanced readings of Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O;€™Hara, and James Merrill;¢;‚¬;€?poets who famously absorbed and adapted the loose talk that swirled about them and their work;¢;‚¬;€?Bennett demonstrates how gossip became a vehicle for alternative modes of poetic practice. By attending to gossip;€™s key role in modern and contemporary poetry, he recognizes the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities.Evincing an ear for good gossip, Bennett presents new and illuminating queer contexts for the influential poetry of these four culturally diverse poets. Word of Mouth establishes poetry as a neglected archive for our thinking about gossip and contributes a crucial queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the status and uses of the lyric genre.
Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Chad BennettCan the art of gossip help us to better understand modern and contemporary poetry? Gossip;€™s ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. But in Word of Mouth, Chad Bennett explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality in the twentieth century. Through nuanced readings of Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O;€™Hara, and James Merrill;¢;‚¬;€?poets who famously absorbed and adapted the loose talk that swirled about them and their work;¢;‚¬;€?Bennett demonstrates how gossip became a vehicle for alternative modes of poetic practice. By attending to gossip;€™s key role in modern and contemporary poetry, he recognizes the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities.Evincing an ear for good gossip, Bennett presents new and illuminating queer contexts for the influential poetry of these four culturally diverse poets. Word of Mouth establishes poetry as a neglected archive for our thinking about gossip and contributes a crucial queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the status and uses of the lyric genre.
T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination: The Dialectical Imagination (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Jewel Spears BrookerThe thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot;€™s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot;€™s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles;¢;‚¬;€?dialectic and relativism;¢;‚¬;€?constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot;€™s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot;€™s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet;€™s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive;¢;‚¬;€?moving from texts to theories;¢;‚¬;€?and comparative;¢;‚¬;€?juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot;€™s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry;¢;‚¬;€?Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot;€™s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot;€™s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.
T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Jewel Spears BrookerThe thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot;€™s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot;€™s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles;¢;‚¬;€?dialectic and relativism;¢;‚¬;€?constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot;€™s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot;€™s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet;€™s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive;¢;‚¬;€?moving from texts to theories;¢;‚¬;€?and comparative;¢;‚¬;€?juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot;€™s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry;¢;‚¬;€?Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot;€™s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot;€™s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.
Ballyhoo (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by Hastings HenselThough at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline. In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessity, as well as on the many forms that humor takes;¢;‚¬;€?comedy, laughter, farce, clowning, parody, and more;¢;‚¬;€?Hensel navigates fine lines between joy and sadness, jokes and cruelty, reality and illusion, and irony and sincerity. Universal in scope, the 47 poems in Ballyhoo are richly idiomatic and evocative. They are also frequently grounded in the southern Atlantic coast with its particular ecology, characters, history, and myth. The pleasure in reading these poems comes from the original connections Hensel makes between the literary and the gritty: an elegy set in a bait shop, Twelfth Night's Feste delivering a monologue in a bar, a villanelle about a murder on a cruise ship. These intelligent, insightful poems remind us of the frail but important relationships between comedy, memory, and identity. Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.
Ballyhoo (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by Hastings HenselThough at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline. In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessity, as well as on the many forms that humor takes;¢;‚¬;€?comedy, laughter, farce, clowning, parody, and more;¢;‚¬;€?Hensel navigates fine lines between joy and sadness, jokes and cruelty, reality and illusion, and irony and sincerity. Universal in scope, the 47 poems in Ballyhoo are richly idiomatic and evocative. They are also frequently grounded in the southern Atlantic coast with its particular ecology, characters, history, and myth. The pleasure in reading these poems comes from the original connections Hensel makes between the literary and the gritty: an elegy set in a bait shop, Twelfth Night's Feste delivering a monologue in a bar, a villanelle about a murder on a cruise ship. These intelligent, insightful poems remind us of the frail but important relationships between comedy, memory, and identity. Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.
Spaced Out: Space poems chosen by Brian Moses and James Carter
by James Carter Brian MosesBlast off into space and explore the galaxies with a constellation of illustrated poems about the sun, moon and stars, black holes and worm holes, asteroids and meteorites, and even weird alien life forms. From shape poems and free verse to rhymes, kennings and haikus, Spaced Out will take you on an intergalactic adventure. Join Brian Moses and James Carter and a wealth of new and established poets to discover your inner space cadet!This starry collection is the perfect way to get children interested in poetry.
The Tree House
by Kathleen JamieFor several years now, Kathleen Jamie's work has addressed two principal concerns: how we negotiate with the natural world, and how we should define our conduct within family and society. In The Tree House Jamie argues - as Burns did before her - for an engagement of the whole being through a kind of practical earthly spirituality. These often startling encounters with animals, birds, and other humans propose a way of living which recognises the earth as home to many different consciousnesses -- and a means of authentic engagement with ‘this, the only world’. Together they form one of the most powerful poetic statements of recent years.
Swithering
by Robin RobertsonWINNER OF THE 2006 FORWARD PRIZE In Scots, the verb 'swither' has two meanings: to be doubtful, to waver, to be in two minds; and to appear in shifting forms - indeterminate and volatile. From disarmingly direct poems about the end of childhood to erotically charged lyrics about the ends of desire, Robertson's powerful third collection is stalked and haunted by both senses. Hard-edged, pitch-perfect, effortlessly various, Swithering is a book of brave and black romance, locating its voice in that space where great change is an ever-present possibility. Swithering has just won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and is also shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize.
Hide Now
by Glyn MaxwellIn Hide Now, Glyn Maxwell shows how the times have begun to warp time itself: in the poet’s vision, the past rears up again with its angry ghosts, the present is racked by its martial and climatic nightmares, and the future has already come and gone. All the stories of the earth seem menaced by just one – to which nations cover their eyes and ears, and from which the grown-ups run and hide. Scheherazade, Robespierre, Dick Cheney and the Reverend Jim Jones all have their place here, though the book’s presiding genius is the lonely figure of Cassandra, cursed with knowing the fate of a world that finds her screamingly funny. Glyn Maxwell has established an international reputation as one of the most intelligent and stylishly original English poets since Auden, and he has never written with greater urgency or power. ‘[Maxwell’s] astonishing technical facility can make syllables, vowels and consonants do absolutely anything. His energetic voice riffs through evasively ordinary speech taking on love, politics, comedy and bizarre narratives in brilliantly elaborate syntax and forms’ Independent
Public Dream
by Frances LevistonPublic Dream, Frances Leviston’s first collection of poetry, is one of the most eagerly-awaited debuts in years. Although still in her early twenties, Leviston has already received considerable acclaim for her superbly-crafted and pitch-perfect verse. However, in the apparently effortless balancing of its lyric and metaphysical concerns, in the penetration, range and originality of its thought, Public Dream shows her to possess the maturity to match that skill. This book does more than merely display promise: it announces the arrival of a singular and essential new voice.
Afterlife
by Sean O'BrienThe seventies. Summer. Four students in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Two young American women, one hell-bent on destruction. Alcohol, LSD, sex, jealousy, infidelity and poetry. At the end of the summer, one of the four students will be dead, and another will be destroyed by his inability to let go of past memories, guilt and bitterness. ‘A cracker’ Evening Standard ‘Chills to the bone’ Independent on Sunday ‘Rich and powerful’ Daily Mail ‘Afterlife positively throbs with loss . . . It’s a deeply absorbing novel that lingers in the mind like the ghosts it so ardently evokes’ Claire Kilroy Irish Times ‘A richly rewarding portrait of friendships under siege, full of vibrant characters and atmospheres that linger in the mind and the heart’ Sunday Telegraph
Talk of the Town
by Jacob Polley1986, the last day of the summer holidays, and Christopher Hearsey is wondering why his best mate Arthur has suddenly disappeared, and whether lippy Gill Ross a few doors down might know anything about it. The border city of Carlisle is buzzing with rumours following an act of terrible violence, and in order to begin his search Chris must face down his own dread, not only of the consequences of his own actions, but of local big man Booby Grove, and his psychotic sidekick Carl ‘the black’ Hole. Populated by a menacing and hilarious cast of characters, and moving from the dark aggrieved streets of the city to the agricultural hinterland of the Solway Firth, this is the story of a boy desperate to get out of town, out of a bad situation, even out of his own skin . . . ‘A fierce cry of talent, raw as a confession and tender as a poem. Polley’s language is mercurial, his humour quick and surprising.’ Chris Cleave ‘A perfectly pitched quest for lost innocence’ John Burnside, Guardian ‘This is a disconcerting debut novel about how meaning is constructed from murmur, gossip and half-truth . . . Capturing the chaotic rhythms of these young lives in vivid yet unsentimental prose, Polley hits the perfect pitch.’ Anita Sethi, Independent
The Prophet: With Original 1923 Illustrations By The Author
by Kahlil GibranThe Prophet is known and loved by readers all over the world. It is a wise and warm testimony to life, whose wisdom speaks to us all. This beautiful edition of Kahlil Gibran's timeless classic is illustrated with the author's own mystical drawings.
Antigona and Me
by Kate Clanchy‘Antigona,’ I said. ‘How would you feel if I wrote your life down in a book?’ ‘Good,’ she said at once. ‘Good. And then a feature film, actually. Mini-series.’ One morning in London, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered, Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona, equally shrewdly, accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona’s extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with, the Kanun of Lek? At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common. ‘Clanchy’s portrait of Antigona is wonderfully vivid, as are her reflections on her own complex feelings. A powerfully written, refreshingly honest work.’ Observer
Tramp in Flames
by Paul FarleyFollowing the exceptional acclaim for his first two books, Farley might have been forgiven for resting on his laurels with his ‘difficult third’ – but Tramp in Flames instead finds him driving his formal ambition and remarkable imagination harder than ever. A book of considerable emotional daring and sometimes Wordsworthian sweep, Tramp in Flames is the work of a meticulous archivist of our cultural memory, and sets the palimpsest of the present hour on a light-box. It also shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the definitive English voices of the age. 'Resonant without being flashy . . . lines that will stick with you for a really, really long time' Mark Haddon 'Funny, observant, brilliantly musical . . . streetwise, erudite, elusive, but very accessible' Ruth Padel, Financial Times 'Farley is one of our most vital and engaging voices. Even a title can twist at the familiar, commanding our attention. He has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase' W. N. Herbvert, Scotland on Sunday Poetry Book Society Recommendation
The Speed of Dark
by Ian DuhigIan Duhig's The Speed of Dark is structured around his astonishing reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval text that railed against the corruption of the 12th-century French court and church. In Duhig's hands, however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and almost prophetic contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed ambitions and insatiable greeds. Elsewhere Duhig's many admirers will be delighted by his new ballads and elegies, his erudite high jinks and his low gags - with which he builds on the new imaginative territory he staked out in The Lammas Hireling to such universal acclaim. The Speed of Dark again shows Duhig as one the most capacious and brilliant minds in contemporary poetry. '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 'Duhig telescopes topical allusions, scholarly references and coarse humour into tightly-shaped, surreal poems which burst open with explosive moral force' Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems
by Glyn MaxwellThis book selects from twenty years of Glyn Maxwell’s poetry, and provides a concise introduction to one of the most imaginatively gifted poets of the age. Maxwell’s is perhaps the most immediately recognizable voice in British poetry: wry, wise, compellingly rhythmic, and everywhere carrying a sense of the dramatic line no other British poet has won for their verse since W. H. Auden. While wholly contemporary in their social and political concerns, these poems are haunted by forgotten histories, traditional fairytale and myth, parallel worlds which mirror or merge with our own. As Joseph Brodsky noted early in his career, the beating heart of this imaginative risk is the syntax itself: in Maxwell’s hands the poetic sentence becomes a fluid, new and protean thing, a means by which the very structure of time, voice and location may be questioned and made strange. Maxwell is a poet essential to understanding our own unstable times, and few other contemporary writers give us such pause before the world we thought we knew. ‘Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem’ Joseph Brodsky
John Clare: A Biography (Laurie Lee Memorial Lectures #No. 5)
by Jonathan Bate‘What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ Seamus Heaney John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley – and a life to match. The ‘poet’s poet’, he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, unveiled in 1989. Here at last is Clare’s full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer – cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons – and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare’s ringing voice – quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous – emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.
The Picador Book of Birth Poems
by Kate ClanchyWhere do we find the words to greet a new arrival? In this celebratory book, poet Kate Clanchy has made an inspired choice of poems that speak powerfully of the wonder, joy, bewilderment and mystery that new life brings, from conception through to the first years of parenthood. The Picador Book of Birth Poems is an essential source of inspiration for anyone looking to welcome the new child to the world, and the perfect gift for every new parent – as well as a wonderfully moving literary journey in its own right.