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Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho
by Sappho Aaron Poochigian Carol Ann DuffyMore or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.
T. S. Eliot: A Guide For The Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed #196)
by Steve EllisT. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Baudelaire, and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christianity that his work is steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation to and difference from the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematized by his work.
Tabby Mctat (PDF)
by Julia Donaldson Axel SchefflerTabby McTat is purr-fectly happy, singing along all day with Fred the busker. But when Fred gives chase to a thief, the two are separated. Will they ever find each other again? A heart-warming story of friendship, loyalty - and kittens! 'Our five\-year-old gave it the thumbs up, and that's about the best endorsement you can get. ' News of the World
Ted Hughes (Routledge Guides to Literature)
by Terry GiffordFor the first time, one volume surveys the life, works and critical reputation of one of the most significant British writers of the twentieth-century: Ted Hughes. This accessible guide to Hughes’ writing provides a rich exploration of the complete range of his works. In this volume, Terry Gifford: offers clear and detailed discussions of Hughes’ poetry, stories, plays, translations, essays and letters includes new biographical information, and previously unpublished archive material, especially on Hughes’ environmentalism provides a comprehensive account of Hughes’ critical reception, separated into the major themes that have interested readers and critics offers useful suggestions for further reading, and incorporates helpful cross-references between sections of the guide. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, Ted Hughes presents an accessible, fresh, and fascinating introduction to a major British writer whose work continues to be of crucial importance today.
Ted Hughes (Routledge Guides to Literature)
by Terry GiffordFor the first time, one volume surveys the life, works and critical reputation of one of the most significant British writers of the twentieth-century: Ted Hughes. This accessible guide to Hughes’ writing provides a rich exploration of the complete range of his works. In this volume, Terry Gifford: offers clear and detailed discussions of Hughes’ poetry, stories, plays, translations, essays and letters includes new biographical information, and previously unpublished archive material, especially on Hughes’ environmentalism provides a comprehensive account of Hughes’ critical reception, separated into the major themes that have interested readers and critics offers useful suggestions for further reading, and incorporates helpful cross-references between sections of the guide. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, Ted Hughes presents an accessible, fresh, and fascinating introduction to a major British writer whose work continues to be of crucial importance today.
The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables: Translated by Seamus Heaney
by Seamus HeaneyThe greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated; their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. Seven Fables and The Testament of Cresseid is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.
That Awkward Age
by Roger McGoughRoger McGough's eagerly-awaited new collection is a powerful testament to the miraculous in the everyday. Here he builds us his world: one of chance encounters and embarrassing moments, of big questions and small wonders. 'At that awkward age now between birth and death,' he addresses Alzheimers and wrestles with mortality. He resolves (and fails) to live every day as if it were his last, joins the Foreign Legion, jives in Macca's trousers, shares the pain of Mr Sappho and Lord Godiva and plans a prison break.With his inimitable warmth, wit and wordplay, Roger McGough affirms his position as the pre-eminent poet of the magic moment - the happy collision of life, language and the imagination.
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.'
Tomorrow's Living Room (Swenson Poetry Award #13)
by Jason WhitmarshVolume 13 in the Swenson Award Series, Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own (they may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement. Selected by, and with a foreword by, Billy Collins. The annual Swenson competition, named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. In John Hollander’s words, she was "one of our few unquestionably major poets."
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Transnational Poetics
by Jahan RamazaniPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.
A Treasury of Poems for Children
by Willy Pogány M. G. EdgarSet sail with "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" and "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," and gaze in wonder at the night sky with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Stroll the beach with "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and experience the magic of Christmas with "A Visit from St. Nicholas." This enchanting collection of childhood verse features these and nearly 100 other classic poems, illustrated by a master of the Art Nouveau style.With his fine eye for intricate detail and boundless enthusiasm for the fantastic, Willy Pogány perfectly captures the charm of these beloved verses in color and black-and-white images. Favorite poems include the works of William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and other great poets. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Owl and the Pussycat."
True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing
by Allen GrossmanTrue-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman’s long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry’s singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved’s continued life, knotted with the truth of life’s contingency—to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake’s vow of “mental fight,” Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno’s maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz,” to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman’s readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.
True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing
by Allen GrossmanTrue-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman’s long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry’s singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved’s continued life, knotted with the truth of life’s contingency—to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake’s vow of “mental fight,” Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno’s maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz,” to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman’s readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.
True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing
by Allen GrossmanTrue-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman’s long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry’s singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved’s continued life, knotted with the truth of life’s contingency—to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake’s vow of “mental fight,” Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno’s maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz,” to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman’s readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.
The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott
by M. ThurstonThe hero s descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets - British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins - stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.
The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists
by Helen CarrThe Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War. As T. S. Eliot was to say, appropriately re-invoking the Imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry's point de repère, the landmark venture that inaugurated Anglo-American literary modernism. A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the twenties began, these 'verse revolutionaries' received both abuse and acclaim, but their poetry, fragmented, pared-down, elliptical yet direct, exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, and contributed vitally to the transformation of American and British cultural life in those crucial years.Among those involved were the Americans Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, and the British T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence. On the edges of the story are figures such as W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. They came from very different class backgrounds, a heterogeneous mélange then only possible in a great metropolis like London. The Verse Revolutionaries traces the passionate interactions, love affairs and bitter quarrels of these aspiring poets from 1905 to 1917. Helen Carr unpicks the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what were the fissures that eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. Her compelling account challenges the conventional view of Imagism, and offers an acute analysis of the poetry, of the psychology of the individuals involved, and of the evolution and emergence of a transformative cultural movement.
War Bird (Phoenix Poets)
by David GewanterFrom Three at 4:43 And here comes my friend, limping on his heavy boot, the heel come off. A cobbler's shop appears, and I buy the black nails, the dwarf's hammer, glue and strapping. I work hard on it, bending there until he speaks and walks on. But as he is dead, his voice and step make no sound. In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies—all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. War Bird gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in “1861,” our “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”
War Bird (Phoenix Poets)
by David GewanterFrom Three at 4:43 And here comes my friend, limping on his heavy boot, the heel come off. A cobbler's shop appears, and I buy the black nails, the dwarf's hammer, glue and strapping. I work hard on it, bending there until he speaks and walks on. But as he is dead, his voice and step make no sound. In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies—all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. War Bird gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in “1861,” our “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”
Watch (Phoenix Poets)
by Greg MillerStrasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock, The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s share Of time—aspire I’d say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled, “My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze. In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real. Praise for Iron Wheel “Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, Poetry
Watch (Phoenix Poets)
by Greg MillerStrasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock, The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s share Of time—aspire I’d say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled, “My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze. In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real. Praise for Iron Wheel “Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, Poetry