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The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Tom PaulinThe Secret Life of Poems is a primer which offers a poem - or on occasion an excerpt - succeeding with commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase. This brief engagement with forty-seven poems is intended for students and readers of poetry, and seeks to explain how poetry works by bringing into view the hidden order of specific poems.
Seize the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus's 'Prometheus Bound'
by Tom PaulinAfter the success of The Riot Act, his version of Sophocles's Antigone, Tom Paulin turned his formidable powers of transformation on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Commissioned by the Open University, Paulin produced a reworking of the myth, deploying a fluent and sinewy diction laced with the vernacular. As drama it is a brilliant object lesson in what is inessential. Plot and character, even action, are secondary to a gripping, inventive and quasi-futuristic treatment of burning contemporary issues - feminism, the corruption of power and authoritarian politics.
Selected Poems 1972-1990
by Tom PaulinThis book offers Tom Paulin's own choice from his first four collections of poems, A State of Justice, The Strange Museum, Liberty Tree and Fivemiletown, and from Seize the Fire, his version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. It introduces the new reader to a body of work distinguished from the outset by its intelligence, toughness and lyrical grace.
Walking a Line
by Tom PaulinA collection of poems by Tom Paulin, who is also known as an essayist and from his appearances on television and radio. The title of the book is taken from a statement by the modernist painter Paul Klee.
The Wind Dog
by Tom PaulinThe 'wind dog' is a broken rainbow, but, in the title poem of Tom Paulin's sixth collection, it provides this most agile of poets with a perfect bridge into childhood and its 'lingo-jingo of beginnings'. The poem is a gloriously singing meditation on the life of the ear - 'the only true reader' - and the meaning and music of both words and pre-verbal sounds are a recurring theme in this rich, cogent and prosodically adventurous volume.
Fivemiletown
by Tom Paulin'To say that [Fivemiletown] was one of the best books of the Eighties isn't enough: it is one of the best books I know, or for that matter, am capable of imagining: a corrosive and uproarious litany of bad sex, bad politics and bad religion.' Michael Hofmann
The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions, Imitations
by Tom PaulinThe Road to Inver gathers the verse translations of Tom Paulin from four decades, and brings together distinguished versions of classical and European poets which have appeared in his previous collections, from Liberty Tree (1983) to The Wind Dog (1999). But The Road to Inver also includes dozens of new and recent translations from the European canon; it is at once a new volume of poetry by Tom Paulin and a personal anthology of European poetry, ranging from Horace to Heine and covering a surprising range of French, German, Russian and Italian poets. The Road to Inver is the richest collection of its kind since Robert Lowell's Imitations.
Collected Poems (PDF)
by Sylvia Plath Ted HughesThis comprehensive volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. The poems are drawn from the only collection Plath published while alive, The Colossus, as well as from posthumous collections Ariel, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. There is also an appendix containing fifty poems from Sylvia Plath's juvenilia. This collection was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 'For me, the most important literary event of 1981 has been the publication, eighteen years after her death, of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, confirming her as one of the most powerful and lavishly gifted poets of our time. ' A. Alvarez in the Observer
Collected Poems (Colophon Bks. #Vol. 900)
by Sylvia PlathThis comprehensive volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. The poems are drawn from the only collection Plath published while alive, The Colossus, as well as from posthumous collections Ariel, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees.The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. There is also an appendix containing fifty poems from Sylvia Plath's juvenilia.This collection was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.'For me, the most important literary event of 1981 has been the publication, eighteen years after her death, of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, confirming her as one of the most powerful and lavishly gifted poets of our time.' A. Alvarez in the Observer
Ariel: A Facsimile Of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection And Arrangement (P. S. Ser.)
by Sylvia PlathUpon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry Ariel in 1965, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim.This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems Sylvia Plath left at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath's manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem 'Ariel' in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems, including 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus'In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be reevaluated in the light of her original working draft.
The Colossus: And Other Poems (Vintage International Ser.)
by Sylvia PlathOriginally published in 1960, The Colossus was the only volume of Sylvia Plath's poetry published before her death in 1963. Showing a scholarly dedication to the craft, the poems in this collection are brimming with originality and the startling imagery that would later confirm her status as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. 'On every page, a poet is serving notice that she has earned her credentials and knows her trade.' Seamus Heaney 'She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. And she does so with a seriousness that demands only that she be judged equally seriously . . . There is an admirable no-nonsense air about this; the language is bare but vivid and precise, with a concentration that implies a good deal of disturbance with proportionately little fuss.' A. Alvarez in the Observer
The Holy Land
by Maurice RiordanAt the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet topping â?" and their close and intimate topography is recalled with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field, the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen)The tentative oral fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers on the borderline of prose, resolving complexities into an impression of timeless pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in time. Other poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of capture and recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish materials from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what happens'. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have lived in important places, times when great events were decided: who owned that half a rood of rock...'
Hart Crane (Poet To Poet Ser. #41)
by Maurice RiordanHarold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.
Floods
by Maurice RiordanThe poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended science of the quantum age. Riordan's vision is syncretist. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs his more personal poems: childhood memories of rural Ireland and poems of irretrievable loss nuanced with the restorative intimation that time's arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.
Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Jo ShapcottPoems 1988-1998 is a compendium from Jo Shapcott's award-winning books Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. It reveals her to be a writer of ingenious, politically acute and provocative imagination and justifies her reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.
Tender Taxes
by Jo ShapcottTowards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the two collections published as Les Fenêtres (The Windows) and Les Roses. The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather than the terminus for Jo Shapcott's new collection, Tender Taxes, which re-imagines Rilke's brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems. The occasion is Rilke, but these are more than versions: Shapcott's poems address this, arguing with the originals, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between translation and origination. Rilke and Shapcott are brought together in the shared incognito of a foreign language, 'speaking English through a French mouth'.
New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender
by Sir Stephen SpenderStephen Spender, along with his friends W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis, rose to prominence in the 1930s, writing powerfully of the fear and paranoia of a continent heading towards war. By the time of his death in 1995 he had established a distinguished reputation as a poet, critic, editor and translator. This New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, gathers seven decades of verse from Poems (1933) to Dolphins (1994) and the late uncollected work. Reordering the thematic principle of the 1985 Collected Poems, this edition returns to a book-by-book chronology and allows the reader to experience, for the first time, the full development and range of his career.
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender
by Sir Stephen SpenderStephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he met, among others, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1940s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism. His poetry has been praised for its exploratory candour, its personal approach to the stresses of modernity, and its exact portraiture of social and political upheaval. Grey Gowrie's new selection offers a timely and incisive revaluation of Spender's substantial poetic corpus.
Philip Larkin: Letters To Monica (Faber Poetry Ser.)
by Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985.This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones's death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship.
Midsummer
by Derek WalcottMost of the poems in this sequence of fifty where written in close succession during one summer in Trinidad. Their principle themes are the relationship of poetry to painting, the stasis of midsummer in the tropics, and the pull of the sea, family and friendship. Walcott records the experience of middle life - in reality and in memory or the imagination. On the publication of Derek Walcott's previous collection, The Fortunate Traveller, Blake Morrison wrote in the London Review of Books: 'The Forunate Traveller is an impressive collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between abstract notions of power and responsibility and visual notions of landscape, cityscape and sea.' Midsummer is equally impressive.
Collected Poems
by Hugo WilliamsIn gathering four decades of work, Hugo Williams's Collected Poems brings back into print a vast body of material long since unavailable - from his 1965 debut Symptoms of Loss to Self-Portrait with a Slide (1990) and including Writing Home (1985), described by Mick Imlah in the Independent on Sunday as 'a classic of creative autobiography'. The edition is brought up to date with his most recent work: Dock Leaves, a PBS Choice of 1994, and Billy's Rain, winner of the 1999 T. S. Eliot Award.'This year's best collection of works by a single poet. Intimate, charming and often funny, sometimes wistful, slightly sceptical, full of insight, the poems are a monument to 40 years of talent.' Times'In their seemingly artless way, these poems look with candour at feebleness, messy love affairs, squirming memories, and emerge triumphantly, often with a rueful grin.' Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph'Not since Thom Gunn's Collected Poems has there been a Collected as startling and poignant as Hugo Williams's Collected Poems. Williams shows us, like no other contemporary poet, what is so strangely undramatic about our personal dramas.' Adam Phillips, Observer Books of the Year 'William's is a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comical sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration.' Hermoine Lee, Guardian
Dear Room
by Hugo WilliamsDear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the many tenses and afterlives of desire are parsed - in sawn-off monologues, short stories in verse, thumbnail dramas, splintery photographs. In poem after poem Hugo Williams joins a sense of things missed and missing to a redemptive act of imaginative capture, and Dear Room uncovers an ethics of the present, reminding us in the words of Philip Larkin that 'days are where we live'.'Possibly the most original poet of his generation in England'. - Edna Longley'Williams is a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comical sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration' - Hermoine Lee, Guardian'His great subject is time, and time's power to consume both what is hated and what is loved'. - Helen Dunmore, Observer'Not since Thom Gunn's Collected Poems has there been a Collected as startling and poignant as Hugo Williams's Collected Poems. Williams shows us, like no other contemporary poet, what is so strangely undramatic about our personal dramas'. - Adam Phillips, Observer Books of the Year
West End Final
by Hugo WilliamsHugo Williams's new collection summons the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography, showing in poems as clear as rock pools that the plain truth is only as plain as the props and make-up needed to stage it. Childhood and school time offer up the amateur theatricals of themselves, in poems of vertiginous retrospect; other poems itemize the professional selves of the poet's actor-father Hugh Williams (by now as familiar and frequently depicted as Cezanne's mountain), while the narrator - 'waiting to step into my father's shoes as myself' - teases out the paradoxes of identity and inheritance After this searching portraiture of the poet's parents, the chronology opens onto the broad secular thoroughfares of adulthood, including a limpid arrangement of pillow poems which tell the same erotic bedtime story in twelve different ways. Other poems strike out decisively along roads not taken: meticulous misremembering, sinister and fecklessly unfinished narratives about the parallel lives of desire, re-enacting lost futures and accommodating the irrepressible past as it keeps bouncing back onstage. In these fastidious and sardonic investigations of the fault-line between voice and projection, we admire once more the droll fearlessness, the art of candour as practised by Hugo Williams in this, his tenth collection of poems.
Dock Leaves
by Hugo WilliamsIn these poems, Hugo Williams's subjects include the stings inflicted by school, family and love-life, and the exquisite (if qualified) solace afforded by their contemplation.
Billy's Rain
by Hugo WilliamsThe fifty poems in Billy's Rain chart the course of a love affair, now ended. Its complications, obsessions, evasions, secret joys and emotional pitfalls are explored with all the subtlety and irony of which Hugo Williams, among contemporary poets, is the acknowledged master. These are brilliant, wry and moving elegies for a love affair.