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 offer. Familiar favourites are nestled alongside marvellous new discoveries-all woven together with Carey's expert commentary. Particular attention is given to the works of female poets, like Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew.

This is a personal guide to the poetry that shines brightest through the ages. Within its pages, readers will find treasured poems that remain with you for life.

The sonnet has fascinated and challenged poets ever since it was imported from Italy in the sixteenth century. This anthology has been collected together by Don Paterson, and contains some of his personal favourites along with some of the most shining examples of the form.

The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Includes sexually explicit passages.

Alexander Pope was an essayist, critic, satirist, poet and translator. Here, contemporary poet John Fuller selects some of his poems, and offers insights into his own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to one of the greatest poets of our literature.

Alfred Lord Tennyson is one of Britain's greatest and most popular poets. Even during his lifetime, he was considered a national institution: Queen Victoria appointed him Poet Laureate in 1850, a position he held for 42 years, and in 1884 he became the first writer to be granted a baronetcy. In a long and fruitful career, he penned numerous classic works, and this BBC Radio collection showcases some of the very best.

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), one of the most popular of poets, was celebrated in 2009. Works such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar and Tears, idle tears have made him an internationally famous figure, and the second most quoted writer of all time (after Shakespeare). Tennyson’s poetic works encompass a great range of styles, settings and personae, and are known for their emotional resonance and powerful imagery. ‘The Great Poets’ series marks the anniversary bringing together all the key works, read by veteran reader Michael Pennington.

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021

Raymond Antrobus's astonishing debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet's much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory.

Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.

A collection of poetry from a well loved poet which will appeal to the child in us all.

In this collection of poems, Wendy Cope celebrates 'the half-forgotten stories of our lives' with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time.

In 2008, 21-year-old Lady Unchained got involved in a fight in a club while trying to protect her sister.

Serving 11 months of her prison sentence, her life changed completely. Inside, Lady Unchained began to write, while battling isolation, loneliness and the fear of being wrongly deported. These notes became powerful bars of poetry, capturing first-hand the broken justice system and the racism rooted within it.

Wide-awake poetry, Behind Bars traces how Lady Unchained's identity was irrevocably changed during her sentencing, time in prison and release.

Behind Bars proves there is life after prison.

This audio edition of the book includes original music to accompany the poems.

Sir John Betjeman was one of the best-known and loved Poet Laureates. Even after his death, his popularity continues to garner acclaim and new admirers. Fortunately, he left behind a legacy of poetry readings and performances in the BBC archives that can be enjoyed in this comprehensive collection.

Selected from over thirty years of radio and television programmes, this compilation includes the very best of his performances and the most popular of his poems, among them 'Metro-land'; 'A Subaltern's Lovesong'; 'Diary of a Church Mouse'; 'In a Bath Teashop'; 'Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden'; 'Youth and Age on Beaulieu River'; 'Trebetherick'; 'Myfanwy at Oxford'; 'Back from Australia' and 'Death at Leamington'.

The Bhagavad Gita has been called India's greatest contribution to the world. For more than five thousand years, this great scripture has shown millions in the East how to fill their lives with serenity and love. Here these ancient secrets are revealed to Western seekers in beautiful prose that make the story of the Gita clear and exciting, and its truths understandable and easy to apply to our busy lives.

Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyonce's Lemonade and Black Is King.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl.

The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Every reader will come away changed.

The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi

Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.

With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances -- of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go -- and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

Butterfly Mind is a beautiful and diverse first collection of poems, haiku and insightful observations brought to us by poet, Lisa Taylor. Finding inspiration and wonder in the everyday, Lisa takes us on a journey into her world; flitting from childhood memories of her Blue Raleigh, to her thought provoking interpretation of an archaeological dig in An Audience With The King.

Immerse yourself in the creativity and magic of Butterfly Mind. Who knows where Lisa’s imagination will take us next?

Moving and impassioned chronicles of a love affair. A classic work of poetic prose.

WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2021. The female body is a political space. C+nto enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the '90s to reclaim their bodies as their own - their difficult balance between survival and self-expression. History, magic, rebellion, party and sermon vibrate through Joelle Taylor's cantos to uncover these underground communities forged by women. Part-memoir and part-conjecture, Taylor explores sexuality and gender in poetry that is lyrical, expansive, imagistic, epic and intimate. C+nto is a love poem, a riot, a late night, and an honouring.

Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these seventy poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future. Includes The Hill We Climb.

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.

A beautiful collection of poems from bestselling author Louis de Bernières. There are moving poems to, and about, his family: his great grandmother, his mother and father and his children. There are poems about places near and far, about the passing of time, music and about love in its various forms.

This narrative poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands

In this moving sequence of poems Nicola Davies's text combines with the superbly evocative illustrations of Petr Horácek to provide insight into the real-life experiences of refugees forced to leave their homes and previous lives behind to face an unknown future.

For a decade, while she was Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy gifted her thousands of readers an illustrated poem every Christmas, transporting them in one year to a seventeenth-century festival on the frozen Thames, in another to Western Front to witness the famous 1914 truce, then to a sweet winter’s night in the South of France with Pablo Picasso and his small dog. These ten much-loved poems are gathered together for the first time in this compendium.

For more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation's most popular and respected poets. In this anthology she celebrates the joyful aspects of the season but doesn't overlook the problems and sadness it can bring.

Christmas brings out the best and worst in us, as can be seen in this evocative anthology. Here, Christmas is expounded by divines, sung by rustics, deplored by philosophers and made mystical in stories.

Over the ages many poets have put pen to paper in celebration of that most raw and yet most beautiful of human instincts – erotic love. All aspects of erotic love are to be found in these poems, from the witty and bawdy to the sensuous and tender.

This delightful anthology is a timeless collection of poems chosen by Classic FM listeners. Whether you're reading them for the first time or revisiting a classic, this is a selection to enchant, move and delight.

A collection of Yeat's published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics by which he is still best remembered, to the later work which, some argue, put beyond question his status as one of the foremost poets of his age.

The poems of Emily Jane Brontë are passionate and powerful works that convey the vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Only twenty-one of her poems were published during her lifetime - this volume contains those and all others attributed to her. Many poems describe the mythic country of Gondal and its citizens that she imagined with Anne, and remain the only surviving record of their joint creation. Other visionary works, including 'Remembrance' and 'No coward soul is mine', boldly confront mortality and anticipate life after death. And poems such as 'Redbreast early in the morning' and 'The blue bell is the sweetest flower' evoke the wild beauties of nature she observed on the Yorkshire moors, while also examining the state of her psyche.

The poems in Country Music are observant and curious, finding everywhere they look detail worthy of notice. From the intimately personal, the choices that lead us towards, or away from, old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, to the collective humanity's 'bad choices piling up like debts' Burns is everywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. In its evocations of doubt and responsibility, music and memory, Country Music is a debut of immense power from one of British poetry's most accomplished new voices.

One of the most important collections of the second half of the twentieth century, 'Crow' is read by the author, with narrative links not included in the published text.

One night Mark Cocker followed the flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls 'our landscape made audible'. The result is a prose poem describing a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly.

A Calibre selection of poetry by D H Lawrence.

A collection of the unique writings of Christy Nolan, who has never been able to speak or control his movements. His remarkable talent was only released when he was introduced to a muscular relaxant drug which has given him sufficient control to compose with a processor, manipulated by a 'unicorn' stick attached to his head.

For every moment in your life there is a poem. In Dancing by the Light of the Moon we have a remarkable collection of over 250 best-loved poems in the English-speaking world. Allow Gyles Brandreth to be your guide to not only the wonders of poetry - and there are many - but also its practical uses in everyday life. Whether seeking some words to reflect your mood, wanting to celebrate or mark an occasion or simply looking for lines of comfort and joy in difficult times, this collection has everything for readers of poetry both young and old, novices and old hands alike, will love and return to again and again.