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Collected Poems (Poetry Ser.)
by Philip LarkinSince its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin's Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkin's own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years - some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended.
Small Hours
by Lachlan MackinnonLachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.
Letters of Louis MacNeice
by Louis MacNeiceLouis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon.The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time.During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson.His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.
Collected Poems
by Louis MacNeiceIn the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's reputation as a poet (and, indeed, amongst poets) has grown steadily, and there are now several generations of readers in Ireland, Britain, and beyond, for whom he is one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. His work has also received increasing attention from academic writers and students. For both readers and critics, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, and the second posthumous Collected Poems, entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, attempts, for the first time, to print MacNeice's poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the collections published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. This makes it easier to read the poet in the published forms in which he was read by his contemporaries. In choosing to re-create the environments of MacNeice's individual volumes of poetry, moreover, this new Collected reflects the opinion that MacNeice works best in and through those separate volumes, particularly so in the brilliant return to form - and unique kinds of return on lyric form itself - of the last three collections. The texts of the poems in the new edition are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections. The new Collected Poems also includes, as appendices, The Last Ditch - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and The Revenant, a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from Blind Fireworks, MacNeice's first published book of verse.
Autumn Journal: Poem (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Louis MacNeiceWritten between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.
Selected Poems (Poet To Poet Ser.)
by Louis MacNeice'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.'Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.
Crocodiles & Obelisks
by Jamie McKendrickCrocodiles and obelisks are ancient symbols of empire. The poems in Jamie McKendrick's astonishing new collection sift the debris of power and range from Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain to the Belgian Congo and to the Roman, the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. But 'crocodiles' and 'obelisks' are also terms used for newspaper obituaries - for tributes which either monumentalize the dead or shed false tears for them. Crocodiles & Obelisks is McKendrick's most individual work to date, and experiments with different ways of remembering, offering conclusions that are both cunning and drôle.
Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997 (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Jamie McKendrickSky Nails offers a selection from Jamie McKendrick's first three collections of poetry, including The Marble Fly, which was both a Poetry Book Society Choice and winner of the 1997 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Ink Stone
by Jamie McKendrickThe best ink stones are slates from Chinese riverbeds, but in the long history of their use these have all been found. As one expert writes, 'the better the stone, the smaller and more consistent the particles will be and the denser the ink.' These new poems by Jamie McKendrick have a remarkable density of ink. They explore the grain, or 'tooth', of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail at the same time as they chart the medium they work in - not only what the eye sees, but the eye itself: its structure and structurings. These poems open onto conflicting perspectives of home and abroad, the domestic and the wild, the natural and the uncanny, elegy and celebration.
Gethsemane Day
by Dorothy MolloyHare Soup, Dorothy Molloy's first collection of poems, was published by Faber in 2004, just weeks after the poet's untimely death. Gethsemane Day brings together her last and hitherto unpublished poems, which celebrate survival with all the anarchic zest, mordancy and lyric drive of Hare Soup, while confronting individual illness and death with moving lucidity.
The Cinder Path
by Sir Andrew MotionAndrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens. The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities. Here are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of the poet's father.
Love in a Life
by Sir Andrew MotionLove in a Life, Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry, marks a conspicuous development in the work of the founder of the modern Narrative School. Directness and a new colloquialism are wedded to Motion's distinctive obliquities in a volume where the idea of marriage governs the architecture of each poem and the book as a whole. The stories of two marriages gradually emerge, like chapters in a narrative, and are themselves bound to more public material, so that each lends profound resonances to the other.
The Price of Everything
by Sir Andrew MotionThis volume brings together two long poems. 'Lines of Desire' tells the story of an individual in crisis, under pressure from past and present events. 'Joe Soap' combines narrative and lyric forms to trace a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary apocalypse. Both are remarkable additions to an important body of work.
Selected Poems of Andrew Motion
by Sir Andrew MotionIn this book Andrew Motion has made his own choice from his outstandingly fine and varied body of work. Dramatic monologues, elegies, poems of social and political observation, love lyrics - all are part of this important poet's repertoire. Andrew Motion's concern for the extremes of human experience and the artistic integrity that insists on his addressing the reader with maximum clarity and impact are consistent features of a career otherwise remarkable for its imaginative range and technical versatility.
Public Property
by Sir Andrew MotionIn his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In the opening series of idylls he conjures the expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood, in scenes as precisely remembered as they are irretrievable. Elsewhere he reconsiders moments from the Victorian past from reticent and surprising angles, and elsewhere again he tackles distinctly contemporary themes and situations. The final section of the book contains a number of elegies and love poems, written in a variety of lyric forms, which provoke concerns that are among the most critical in poetry: What is public art? To whom do our most private sentiments belong?
Horse Latitudes: Poems
by Paul MuldoonPaul Muldoon's new collection opens with a sonnet sequence, 'Horse Latitudes', written as the U.S. embarked on its foray into Iraq. Poems on historical battles where horses played an important part present us with a commentary on the political agenda of America today.
Lord Byron
by Paul MuldoonIn this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.-- She Walks in Beauty
New Weather
by Paul MuldoonNew Weather was Paul Muldoon's first book of poems. When it appeared in 1973, Seamus Heaney described its author as 'unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accomplishment and an intellectual boldness that mark him as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years.' While the promise has been amply fulfilled, New Weather gives the poet's many, more recent admirers the opportunity to see what a versatile and substantial artist he was from the outset.
Mules
by Paul MuldoonMules, Paul Muldoon's second collection, was published in 1977.'Muldoon seems to me unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accomplishment and an intellectual boldness that mark him as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years.' Seamus Heaney
Why Brownlee Left
by Paul MuldoonWhy Brownlee Left, Paul Muldoon's third collection, was published in 1980.
Quoof
by Paul Muldoon'These poems delight in a wily, mischievous, nonchalant negotiation between the affections and attachments of Muldoon's own childhood, family and place, and the ironic discriminations of a cool literary sensibility and historical awareness.' Times Literary Supplement
Meeting the British
by Paul MuldoonMeeting the British is Paul Muldoon's fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ wafare, though a meditation on a bar of soap, to a sequence of monologues spoken by some of the famous, or infamous, inhabitants of '7, Middagh Street,', New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1940.
The Annals of Chile
by Paul MuldoonThe Annals of Chile is Paul Muldoon's seventh collection of poems and contains, amongst other things, celebrations of the birth of his daughter, a plangent and frankly personal lament fo the artist Mary Farl Powers, and a long fantasy invoking the world of boys' adventure stories, over which the poet's mother presides as a benign influence.
New Selected Poems: 1968-1994
by Paul MuldoonBetween New Weather (1973), which Seamus Heaney said marked its author as 'the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years', and The Annals of Chile, which was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for the best book of poems of 1994, Paul Muldoon amassed an incomparable body of work. New Selected Poems 1968-1994 offers the author's own choice from his first seven Faber collections, his pamphlets and his opera libretto Shining Brow, and serves as the ideal introduction for readers not yet familiar with his superabundant gifts.'The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.' Times Literary Supplement
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.