Poetry

A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems. Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction to the very best that poetry can off...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at po...

A Luxury: Omnibus Edition is simultaneously a time capsule and a time-machine. The first volume, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, bottled the lightning of poetry, prose and plays in 2015. The second, A Luxury We Must Afford, took a leap forward into the unknown future of Singapore. You will find something to please and pique every reader in this anthology. Hardback: 398 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 205 mmISBN: 9789811809002Signed Edition with Dust Jacket is limited to 30 copies Published by Math ...

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a 'common sense' approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examini...

A gorgeously illustrated introduction to poetry for children, featuring poems about everything from science, sports, and space, to friendship, family, and feelings. This thoughtfully crafted anthology is perfect for children new to verse and for young poetry fans seeking out new favorites. Explore poetry from a diverse selection of contemporary and historical poets, covering a broad range of topics--from personal subjects like emotions and family, to the wonders of the natural environment. Ca...

In a lasting marriage, one could still outlive the other. A poet gazes upon his older partner, pondering the inevitable. Panic, heartache, and a surprising sense of acceptance, interwoven with instances of joyful resilience, punctuate the ordinariness of their everyday lives and occupy these poems about same-sex love, death, and the fragile art of testimony. Hardback: 112 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 205 mmISBN: 9789811473722Signed Edition with Dust Jacket is limited to 50 copies Published ...

A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova--denounced by the Soviet regime for her "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference"--is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Before the revolution, Akhmatova was a wildly popular young poet who lived a bohemian life. She was one of the leaders of a movement of poets whose ideal was "beautiful clarity"--in her deeply personal work, themes of love and mournin...

An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming mosquitoes to William Cullen Bryant's solitary waterfowl and Rainer Maria Rilke's enchanted gazelle, from Auden on cats and dogs to E.E. Cummings's verse in the shape of a grasshopper to James Merri...

A bilingual anthology of poems from the sixth century to the present, Arabic Poems is a one-of-a-kind showcase of a fascinating literary tradition. The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. Themes of love, nature, religion, and politics recur in works drawn from the pre-Islamic oral tradition through poems anticipating the recent Arab Spring. Editor Marlé Hammond has selected more than fifty poems reflecting desi...

Ariel, first published in 1965, contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems, written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963. Including poems such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Edge', 'Daddy' and 'Paralytic', it was the first of four collections to be published by Faber & Faber. Ariel is the volume on which Sylvia Plath's reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the twentieth century rests. 'Since she died my mother has been dissected, an...

Art and Artists: Poems is a sumptuous collection of visions in verse--the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others. A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats's "...

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape -- populated by the addicted and the damned -- which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake.Hardback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679429104Published by Everyman's Li...

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational ve...

Blake contains a full selection of Blake's work, including Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, poems from Blake's Ms. book, poems from The Prophetic Books, and an index of first lines.Hardback: 283 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679436331Published by Everyman's Library

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to "Sweet Home Chicago," forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology-the first devoted exclusively to blues poems-a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes and "Fu...

In this remarkable collection—the first of its kind—poets from around the world give eloquent voice to the trials, hopes, rewards, and losses of the experience of migration. Each year, millions join the ranks of intrepid migrants who have reshaped societies throughout history. The movement of peoples across borders—whether forcible, as with the Middle Passage and the Trail of Tears, or voluntary, as with the great migrations from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the United States an...

Bronte contains poems that demonstrate a sensibility elemental in its force with an imaginative discipline and flexibility of the highest order. Also included are an Editor's Note and an index of first lines.Hardback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679447252Published by Everyman's Library

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are without parallel in the nineteenth century: celebrated poets, they became equally famous for their marriage. Still popular more than a century after their deaths, their poetry vividly reflects the unique nature of their relationship. This collection presents the Brownings' work in the context of their lives: the early years and their initial friendship, their courtship and marriage, the fifteen happy years they spent living in Italy until Eli...

The most essential of the immortal poems and songs of Scotland's beloved national bard are collected in this volume. With the publication of his first book of poems in 1786, Robert Burns--the twenty-seven-year-old son of a farmer--became a national celebrity, hailed as the "Ploughman Poet." When he died ten years later, ten thousand people came to pay their respects at his funeral, and in the two centuries since then he has inspired a cultlike following among Scots and poetry lovers around th...

To the nineteenth-century reader, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was the archetype of the Romantic literary hero, a figure admired and emulated as much for the revolutionary panache with which he lived his life as the brio and allure of his verse. Our century has seen him more clearly as a poet whose intellectual toughness, satiric gifts, and utter inability to be boring have made him one of the great comic spirits in our literature.Hardback: 288 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmI...

"Migrant. Citizen. Foreign Talent. Singaporean. Local. Expatriate. Immigrant. Permanent Resident. Migrant Worker.” What do these words mean, and how do they make you feel when you say them, or when you hear them said to you? When a border is crossed, when a passport is stamped, when you taste a familiar dish or hear a familiar accent – who truly belongs where, and to what or whom? This sequel anthology brings together more than seventy writers and poets with differing relationships to the wor...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-December 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of t...

edited by Daniel Mendelsohn The Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is a towering figure of twentieth-century literature. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the taboos of his time surrounding homoerotic desire. In this edition, award-winning translator and editor Daniel Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works, including such favorites as "Waiting fo...

The ancient Chinese tradition of erotic poetry has been largely ignored in the west. Now, a vast continent of sensual verse is opened to us with this glorious collection spanning nearly three thousand years and including many poems never before translated into English. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping have brought together poems about deep love and pure lust, enticement and seduction, ecstasy and disappointment. Here are poems that express need, hunger, grief, and longing--for husbands and wives ...

Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Margaret Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognisable and celebrated themes, but distilled -- from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and...

From Chaucer to Billy Collins and from basset hounds to brindle bull terriers, Doggerel presents a robust brood of the most charming verse tributes ever offered to our beloved canine companions. The rich and assorted cadences of some of the most distinguished poets across the centuries ring out from these pages-from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Pope to Merrill, Merwin, and Muldoon-celebrating pooches of every pedigree and persuasion. Here is Margaret Cavendish's barking chorus of beagles on the ...

Donne contains Songs and Sonnets, Letters to the Countess of Bedford, The First Anniversary, Holy Sonnets, Divine Poems, excerpts from Paradoxes and Problems, Ignatius His Conclave, The Sermons, Essays and Devotions, and an index of first lines.Hardback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679444671Published by Everyman's Library

Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people's lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations-in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore...

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets."No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects--the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his ke...

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece "The Waste Land, " he almost single-handedly ushered an entire poetic culture into the modern world. And with his enormously influential essays he set the canonical standards to which writers and critics...

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well. Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of ...

The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual...

These poems, selected from most of the cultures and histories of world literature, provide magnificent witness to the fact that love is as much an act of the imagination as it is of the body. From fourth-century Li Ch'ung's "Parody of a Lover" to John Betmeman's "Late-Flowering Lust, " they re-create, through the revelations of language, that experience of the erotic. Other poets include Theodore Roethke, Robert Graves, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Sylvia Plath, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Percy ...

translated by Charles Johnston Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature--the source of the human archetypes and the attitudes that define and govern the towering fictional creations of nineteenth-century Russia--and one of the most celebrated poems of the world. Before Alexander Push...

EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices is a landmark literary project, gathering the best works of local LGBTQ writers who emerged in the 2010s. These writings reveal the dreams, struggles and indomitable spirit of our queer community in a time of turbulence and transformation—a decade of highly visible protests and controversies, new labels for gender and sexuality, and a more fearless brand of cultural politics. This collection features texts written in English, Mandarin, Malay and ...

Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as a major event in this country's literature in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is ...

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this one-of-a-kind anthology features the richly varied voices of daughters and sons, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves. From eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o's witty "On the Birth of His Son" to Dylan Thomas's poignant "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," from Sylvia Plath's searing poem "Daddy" to Yeats's tender "A Prayer for My Daughter," from Homer to Seamus Heaney, from Shakespeare to Milosz, the poets and poems collected her...

Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life. The poems move between trad...

With both pen and camera lens, Orion Carloto captures the dreamlike beauty of memory. Film for Her is a story book of people, places, and memories captured on film. Through photographs, poetry, prose, and a short story, Orion Carloto invites readers to remember the forgotten and reach into the past, find comfort in the present, and make sense of the intangible future. Film photography isn't just eye candy; it's timeless and romantic-the ideal complement to Carloto's writing. In Film for Her, ...

Inspired by her encounter with Dr. Chevalier Jackson's collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, Kimiko Hahn's tenth collection investigates the grip that seemingly insignificant objects exert on our lives. Itself a cabinet of curiosities, the collection provokes the same surprise, wonder, and pangs of recognition Hahn felt upon opening drawer after drawer of these swallowed, and retrieved, objects-a radiator key, a child's perfect attendance pin, a mother-of-pearl b...

From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today's rising stars mingling with the great writers of past centuries: La Fontaine, François Villon, Christine de Pizan, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and many more. Here, too, are represent...

From one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems–all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost’s native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.Hardback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679455141Published by Everyman's Library

The splendid poems in this collection both represent and glorify the cultivating instinct, and each of them "succeeds in annihilating all that's made," as Andrew Marvell puts it in one of the most famous of all English poems, "to a green thought in a green shade." Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. ...

Hardy contains poems from Moments of Vision, Satires of Circumstance, Veteris Vestigia Flammae, Heredity, Short Stories, Afterwards, and an index of first lines.Hardback: 254 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679443681Published by Everyman's Library

George Herbert (1593-1633) has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. Though he is a profoundly religious poet, even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness, which are amply showcased in this selection. Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to pattern poems, the shapes of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language...

Hopkins contains a full selection of Hopkins's work, including selected verse, prose, and letters, and an index of first lines.Hardback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 114 x 165 mmISBN: 9780679444695Published by Everyman's Library

This wide-ranging selection showcases the work of one of ancient Rome's master poets--and originator of the phrase "carpe diem"--whose influence on poetry can be traced through the centuries into our own time. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who lived from 65 to 8 BCE, saw the death of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire and was personally acquainted with the emperor Augustus and the poet Virgil. He was famous during his lifetime and since for his odes and epodes, for his satir...

How Now Blown Crow is a sequence of poems which follows the relationship between two divorcees starting a new life together after their respective marriages have failed. Between ghosts of past loves, quotidian domestic and natural spaces, states of sleep and wakefulness, and the desire for rootedness and migration, the collection spans several decades from youth into old age. How Now Blown Crow is a poetry collection about sustaining a relationship in spite of the dubious nature of love. Hard...