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The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben LernerNo art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: ‘I, too, dislike it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry,’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.’ In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato’s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In THE HATRED OF POETRY, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)
by Ian HickeyHaunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney’s work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney’s writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of ‘Route 110’ that incorporates the major instances of Heaney’s career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney’s prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland’s greatest writers.
Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)
by Ian HickeyHaunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney’s work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney’s writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of ‘Route 110’ that incorporates the major instances of Heaney’s career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney’s prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland’s greatest writers.
Have You Read George’s Podcast?
by George the Poet'There's something special about it: the storytelling is unique, so exciting, so kinetic. Even though it's in your ears, you feel like you're walking along with George.' -- Candice Carty-Williams'Have You Read George's Podcast? is a collection of the scripts of 28 of his podcasts. Even on the page, they are evidently brilliant, creating a shifting, shimmering world that remains anchored in the big questions of history, empire and identity that form the tec tonic plates of George's imagination.' -- Sunday Times '[George's podcast] blows through the medium's newly established boundaries, offering an experience as innovative as it is undefinable.' -- New Yorker'A genre-defying piece of audio that pushes the limits of what a podcast can be.' -- New York Times'There can't be many people out there who don't think George the Poet is a bit of a genius.' -- Charlie Phillips, Guardian***For fans of the critically-acclaimed, award-winning podcast Have You Heard George's Podcast?, a stunning collection of the scripts of the podcast, plus bonus material from George the Poet.There's nothing quite like Have You Heard George's Podcast?. Listeners and critics have struggled to fit it into just one neat category, jumping as it does between autobiography, fiction and social commentary, often in a single episode - and virtually all of it performed in spellbinding rhyming verse. And now the complete scripts of Chapters One, Two and Three are available to enjoy, along with new writing by George. This collection allows fans to read (and re-read) his words, and with new extra insights and commentary on each episode and Chapter. In the book, just as in the podcast, George The Poet delivers an incredibly powerful and unique perspective on politics, modern society, history and current affairs through the art of storytelling, speculative fiction and spoken word. The book also offers a deeply personal summation of George's observations, experiences and vision for the future. Whilst his narrative takes us all around the world, the ultimate ambition is to empower the next generation, starting with his community.
Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481)
by Sarah Messer Ikkyu Sojun Kidder SmithThe influence of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481) permeates the full field of medieval Japanese aesthetics. Though best known as a poet, he was central to the shaping and reshaping of practices in calligraphy, Noh theater, tea ceremony, and rock gardening, all of which now define Japan’s sense of its cultural tradition. Ikkyu is unique in Zen for letting his love of all appearance occupy him until it destroys any possibility for safety or seclusion. In his poetry, he turns the eye of enlightenment to all phenomena: politics, pine trees, hard meditation practice, sex, wine. A lifelong outsider to religious establishments, Ikkyu nonetheless accepted Imperial command to rebuild his home temple, Daitoku-ji, destroyed in the civil wars. He died before that project was complete. The poems in this collection express the unborn bliss of Ikkyu’s realization and equally his devastation at the horrors of this world. They are peopled with ancient Chinese poets, cantankerous Japanese Zen Masters, contemporary warlords, and his lover Mori, a blind musician who lived with Ikkyu the last eleven years of his life. All of this is his Buddhism. His awakening outshines the small idols of reason, emotion, self, desire, doctrine, even of Buddhism itself.
The Havocs
by Jacob PolleyLittle Gods established Jacob Polley as one of the leading talents of the younger generation; his third collection sees him extend that gift in often wholly unexpected directions. As before, Polley’s work is often unashamedly lyric, and displays a virtuosic range of form and address. However, the light has changed in The Havocs: these poems are often imbued with the weird, uncanny and otherworldly, drawing on the folkloric and mythic traditions of north Britain – as well as forms from older English traditions, including riddles and cautionary tales. However oblique his strategies, Polley’s work remains fixed on our most central concerns: our losses of faith, our working lives, our irrational fears and our loves. The Havocs charts a daring new turn in the work of one of our finest English poets.
The Haw Lantern (Noonday Ser.)
by Seamus HeaneyWidely and justly celebrated for his flawless handling of the lyric, Seamus Heaney is here shown venturing into new imaginative territory. Poems exploring the theme of loss, and in particular a sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother, are joined in The Haw Lantern by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein that will both surprise and delight the many admirers of his previous work.'More than other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.' John Carey, Sunday Times
The Hawk in the Rain: Poems
by Ted HughesPublished in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.
Hay: Poems (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Paul MuldoonPaul Muldoon's collection Hay refines, and re-defines, a lyrical strain in which an ostensible lightness of touch still has the strength to bear the weightiest subject matter. At once conventional and cutting edge, beautiful and bleak, Hay is a book that demonstrates fully the range of Muldoon's poetic intelligence and imagination.
Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew (Jewish Lives)
by Prof. Avner HoltzmanA moving inquiry into the dramatic life, epic success, and ultimate tragedy of the great Hebrew poet By the time he was twenty-eight, Hayim Nahman Bialik was already considered the National Hebrew Poet. He had only published a single collection, but his deeply personal poetry established a profound link between the secular and the traditional that would become paramount to a national Jewish identity in the twentieth century. When he died unexpectedly in 1934, the outpouring of grief was unprecedented, confirming him as a father figure for the Zionist movement in Palestine, and around the world. Using extensive research and elegant readings of Bialik’s poems, Avner Holtzman investigates the poet’s dramatic life, complex personality, beloved verse, and continued popularity. This clear-eyed and thorough biography explores how Bialik overcame intense personal struggles to become a charismatic literary leader at the core of modern Hebrew culture.
Hayley the Hairy Horse (Fables from the Stables)
by Gavin PuckettHayley the Horse is a beauty!Her sleek tail was glossy, her black mane perfection. Her coat shone so bright you could see your reflection. And when she gets a haircut . . . she is proud to see her locks used to make fine paintbrushes and bows for violins. But when the famous violinist La Rue comes to town and spots Hayley, he hatches a plan to steal her whole tail.So Hayley has to be strong - this horse couldn't fail. There was no way on earth he was taking her tail!She is going to put on a performance that the Queen will never forget!A laugh-out-loud horsey fable from our favourite Welsh policeman!
Haywire: Poems (Swenson Poetry Award)
by George BilgereTenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human condition in accessible lines and a magician's way with language. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy Haywire was chosen for the Swenson Award by poet Edward Field, winner of numerous awards and a personal friend of the late May Swenson. Field describes the book this way. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn’t fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy."
He, She, They, Us: An Anthology of Queer Poems
by Charlie CastellettiA poetry book like no other, He, She, They, Us pulls together poems from queer poets both old and new – from Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes to the likes of Jay Hulme, Dean Atta, Josie Giles, Nikita Gill, Theo Parish and Travis Alabanza. This anthology celebrates queerness in all its forms and takes us through the experiences that make us who we are today.Collected and introduced by editor, writer and anthologist Charlie Castelletti, He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems contains an inclusive array of voices, from modern and contemporary poets to those who came before.
He Spoke of Love: Selected Poems from the Satsai
by BiharilalThe seven hundred poems of the Hindi poet Biharilal’s Satsai weave amorous narratives of the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs that bridge divine and worldly love. He Spoke of Love brims with romantic rivalries, clandestine trysts, and the bittersweet sorrow of separated lovers. This new translation presents four hundred couplets from the enduring seventeenth-century classic, showcasing the poet’s ingenuity and virtuosity.
Hear, Germany!: Kleine Geschichte der Deutschlandgedichte
by Volker MeidLange bevor Deutschland als politische oder nationale Einheit überhaupt gedacht werden konnte, gab es ein dichterisches Sprechen über »unser lant« (Walther von der Vogelweide). Davon handelt dieses Buch – und wie sich diese Rede im Lauf der Jahrhunderte bis in die Gegenwart vollzogen und bis hin zur neueren kritischen Selbsterforschung und Identitätssuche angesichts der Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts verändert hat. Zahlreiche Textbeispiele tragen zur Anschaulichkeit dieses Geschichtsbuches der besonderen Art bei. Obwohl es ›nur‹ von Literatur handelt, wirft es indirekt auch ein kritisches Licht auf die aktuellen, eher geschichtsvergessenen Debatten über eine deutsche ›Leitkultur‹, über deutsche ›Identität(en)‹ bzw. deren angeblichen Verlust.
Heard-Hoard
by Atsuro RileyWinner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this new collection of verse from Atsuro Riley offers a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people. Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley deepens here his uncommon mastery and tang. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has “razor-exacted” and “raw-wired” an absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering an American place and its people. At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, and a soundscape; an “inscritched” dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring “time and time that yonder oak,” this collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.
Heard-Hoard
by Atsuro RileyWinner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this new collection of verse from Atsuro Riley offers a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people. Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley deepens here his uncommon mastery and tang. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has “razor-exacted” and “raw-wired” an absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering an American place and its people. At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, and a soundscape; an “inscritched” dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring “time and time that yonder oak,” this collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.
Heard-Hoard
by Atsuro RileyWinner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this collection of verse from Atsuro Riley offers a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people. Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley deepens here his uncommon mastery and tang. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has “razor-exacted” and “raw-wired” an absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering an American place and its people. At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, and a soundscape; an “inscritched” dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring “time and time that yonder oak,” this collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.
Heard it in the Playground (Puffin Bks.)
by Allan AhlbergThis illustrated collection of amusing poems and songs celebrating primary school life won the Signal Poetry Award in 1990.Meet Billy McBone and the Mad Professor’s Daughter, be amazed by the Longest Kiss Contest, shed a tear for the Boy Without a Name and – if you’re a stressed teacher – sing the Mrs Butler Blues.
Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature
by Angela LeightonHearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.
Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature
by Angela LeightonHearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.
Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem
by Catherine RobsonMany people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.
Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem
by Catherine RobsonMany people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.
The Heart of a Giant
by Hollie HughesGet ready for an epic journey of friendship and discovery from the bestselling author of The Girl and the Dinosaur.There's a shape up in the hills, where a giant's said to sleep,beneath a grassy blanket, on a bed of moss and peat . . .Then, one day, the sleeping giant wakes – and a small boy called Tom is plunged into an unforgettable adventure. Along the way, he'll discover what it means to be a true friend – and that even an ordinary boy can have the heart of a giant. With a beautiful rhyming text by bestselling Hollie Hughes, author of The Girl and the Dinosaur, and gorgeous illustrations from debut talent Anna Wilson, this beautiful book is an unmissable treat!