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.

Germaine Greer's selection, covering a range of female preoccupations, begins in the sixteenth century and ends at the present day.

WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA POETRY AWARD 40 Sonnets is the new collection by Don Paterson, a rich and accomplished work from one of the foremost poets writing in English today. This new collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward prize-winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty sonnets. Some take a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has been visible in his work since his first book of poems, Nil Nil, in 2009. Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the seance, the coalshed, the war, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the 'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .' In 40 Sonnets Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date.

When it was first published in 1947 'The Age of Anxiety', W H Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious poem, immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. This annotated, critical edition of the poem, introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Using a mix of versed and unversed passages, this is a war-poem both historic and frighteningly topical. It begins in the 1950s during a period of vigilance and dread in the middle of the Cold War: We hear the thoughts of those involved who are trying to understand and justify their roles, and examine the lives of civilians who are not aware of the impending danger, as well as those who are.

A short collection of poems written and read by one of our popular readers, Bob Rollett.

Written between August and December 1938, this is a moving testament of living through the thirties. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside.

The sequel to Autumn Journal which McNeice described as a long occasional poem written in the final months of that year. Coming fifteen years later in 1953, Autumn Sequel (subtitled A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI cantos) is written in a similar style.

This is a startlingly original poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive. It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and scrutiny of life and death in nature.

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.

A masterful new translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem. It is the tale of a hero, his triumphs and his death as a defender of his people. Whitbread Book of the Year Winner.

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.

A collection of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast. Poems that recognise we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why they fail to love us.

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.

A collection of poetry powerfully influenced by jazz and painting, and the landscapes of North America and England. There are poems on Chet Baker and Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper and Thelonious Monk, exploring the ambivalences of family relationships and love lost and found.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.