Showing titles in Themes & Styles

Jackie Kay's first collection as Scottish Makar is an audiobook about the fighting spirit - one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus - Kay's own, her father's, and his own father's - to show us how the body holds its own story. Kay shows how old injuries can emerge years later; how we bear and absorb the loss of friends; how we celebrate and welcome new life; and how we embody our times, whether we want to or not.

The 98-stanza meter-and-rhyme translation of "Legenda Luceafarului" - an entrancing masterpiece by Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), the Romanian national poet - captures the essence of the original work's musicality and poetic nuance. It is the story of a young princess' longing and impossible love for the immortal star who, sharing her love, takes human form and tries to become mortal.

New Hampshire features Frost's meditations on rural life, love, and death, delivered in the voice of a soft-spoken New Englander. Critics have long marveled at the poet's gift for capturing the speech of the region's natives and his realistic evocations of the area's landscapes. This compilation, first published in 1923, earned Frost the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes and includes several of his best-known poems: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", and "Fire and Ice".

War poet Robin Horsfall became a soldier in 1972. He served from the age of 15 up to the age of 32 with the Parachute Regiment, the SAS, the Sultans of Oman’s Armed Forces, the Army of Sri Lanka and was a Major in "Frelimo" the Army of Mozambique. He studied Karate for most of his adult life achieving the rank of 6th Dan Black Belt until 2011 when a neck fracture changed his life.

Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead.

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is an audiobook-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive.

Odysseus has been away from Ithaca, the Greek city-state under his rule, for ten years while fighting in the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus begins the long journey home to his wife and son; however, his journey is plagued by misfortune as the gods feud over his fate, leaving the Ithacans to believe that he has died. In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Along the centuries numerous interpretations and definitions of Sufism have waxed and waned but the undeniable beauty of their verse in its myriad of forms including the musical Ghazal (love song), Masnavi (narrative) and Rubai (quatrain) always remains. Our chronological volume of the classic Sufi poets helps us understand the spiritual direction of Sufism, starting with Rabia in the 8th century through to Khwaja Ghulam Farid over a thousand years later.

Written when Vita became homesick for her beautiful home in Kent, it had six print runs within three years of its publication in 1926. Vita has always been popular for her gardening, her lifestyle, and bohemian companions like Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. Her nostalgia for farming and the beauty of the seasons is described with an artist’s eye for detail.

Of Love and Desire is a rich collection of love poems written over a lifetime, capturing its many forms: from rapture, infatuation and urgency to sorrow, heartache and disillusion. Poetry was de Bernières' first and greatest literary love, a passion evident in the musicality and emotion of his poems, which are full of stories and the truth of lived experience.

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Drawing inspiration from the art of Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, Carol beautifully weaves together the shattered fragments of her heart, transforming them into a life worth living. Divided into three sections, "Shattered", "In Pieces", and "Making Broken Beautiful", this book of poems chronicles the full spectrum of the grieving experience. With raw honesty, Carol illuminates the pain and loneliness that accompany loss, the disorienting struggle to adapt to a changed world, and the gentle steps towards self-discovery.

Jungle Nama is a beautiful verse adaptation of a legend from the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest. It tells the story of the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey and his mother; it is also the story of Dokkhin Rai, a mighty spirit who appears to humans as a tiger, of Bon Bibi, the benign goddess of the forest, and her warrior brother, Shah Jongoli.

Sleep. That most mysterious of times. The unconscious hours. Everyone needs it. Sleep offers a respite from the rigors and challenges of the day - a chance for the brain to process what has happened and bring rest and recuperation before the cycle of daytime activity begins again. Our poets, from Kipling and Swinburne through Hafiz, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe and a pillowful of others, explore the wish to rest, to close the eyes and reside in the land of nod.

Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Peter Thornton's accessible new translation brings Petrarch to the 21st century in direct, rhymed, English verse - for academics and poetry enthusiasts alike.

Beautifully and eloquently conceived, Awakening of the Heart will take you on a journey of self-discovery and personal transformation from the deepest of heartbreaks to blooming in love again: You will find yourself cocooned in a rebirth that will speak to the deepest parts of your soul: a powerful "awakening" in rediscovering what love truly means. Awakening of the Heart is the must-have book, not only for poetry lovers, but for anyone who wants to explore their own "awakening".

The Iliad - attributed to Homer - is the most famous ancient Greek epic poem. It recounts the struggle between King Agamemnon and the hero Achilles during the final months of the Trojan War, with frequent detours into earlier legends and myths. In its portrayal of battle scenes and the constant interventions of the gods, The Iliad explores themes of wrath, glory, and fate, and has provided the subject matter for many later Greek, Roman, and Renaissance writings.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

Poetry has over the centuries grouped poets or poems into many different themes and movements. Amongst its most unusual movements are the English wordsmiths, The Silver Poets. This select band lived during the sixteenth century reign of Queen Elizabeth 1st. Amongst their storied ranks were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Davies, Michael Drayton and Mary Sidney (Herbert), the Countess of Pembroke.

Christina Rossetti's long narrative poem about two innocent sisters, Lizzie and Laura, tempted by the delicious, magical fruit sold by goblin merchants as they walk through the glen....