There has always been love, & we have been writing poetry about it for over 4, 000 years. A complex & truly timeless emotion, love
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Poems from the Second World War is a moving & powerful collection of poems written by soldiers, nurses, mothers, sweethearts & family & friends who experienced WWII from different standpoints. The Imperial War Museum was founded in 1917 to collect & display material relating to the ` Great War`, which was still being fought. Today IWM is unique in its coverage of conflicts, especially those involving Britain & the Commonwealth, from the First World War to the present. They seek to provide for, & to encourage, the study & understanding of the history of modern war & wartime experience. ...

The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied & historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, & sometimes infuriating contradictions. Poems of the American South

Includes:: poems both by Southerners & by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, & Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, & Donald Justice, & include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, & many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.

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Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind`s nautical fears, dreams, & longings. The colorful legends of the sea-pirates & mermaids, phantom ships & the sunken city of Atlantis-have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses & shipwrecks, of icebergs & frothing foam & seaweed. This marvelous collection

Includes:: classics old & new, from Homer & Milton to Plath & Merwin. Here are Tennyson`s seductive sea-fairies next to Poe`s beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge`s darkly brooding ” The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare`s ” Full Fathom Five.” & here is Masefield`s ”I must go down to the seas again” alongside Cavafy`s ” Ithaka” & Stevens`s ” The Idea of Order at Key West.” In the wide variety of lyrics collected here
- sonnets & sea chanteys, ballads & hymns & prayers
- we feel the encompassing power of our planet`s restless.



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This beautiful new edition of ” Poems on the Underground” is published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Underground in 2013. Here 230 poems old & new, romantic, comic & sublime explore such diverse topics as love, London, exile, families, dreams, war, music & the seasons, & feature poets from Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy & Wendy Cope, including Chaucer & Shakespeare, Milton, Blake & Shelley, Whitman & Dickinson, Yeats & Auden, Seamus Heaney & Derek Walcott & a host of younger poets. It

Includes:: a new foreword & over two dozen poems not included in previous anthologies.

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Following the success of their anthology Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, father-&-son team Anthony & Ben Holden, working with Amnesty International, have asked the same revealing question of 100 remarkable women. What poem has moved you to tears? The poems chosen range from the eighth century to today, from Rumi & Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, W. H. Auden to Carol Ann Duffy, Pablo Neruda & Derek Walcott to Imtiaz Dharker & Warsan Shire. Their themes range from love & loss, through mortality & mystery, war & peace, to the beauty & variety of nature. From Yoko Ono to Judi Dench, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Elena Ferrante, Carol Ann Duffy to Meera Syal, & Joan Baez to Olivia Colman, this unique collection delivers private insights into the minds of women whose writing, acting & thinking are admired around the world. ...

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain`s most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense & tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, & often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight & their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zeal&, she has explored questions of identity & rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native & adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death & bereavement, & has tackled political issues with honest indignation & caustic wit. This first Collected edition of her poetry replaces her Selected Poems, with the addition of work from her later Oxford collections The Incident Book, Time-Zones & Looking Back. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining ` Against Coupling`, ` Smokers For Celibacy` & ` The Prize-Winning Poem` to modern classics such as ` The Ex-Queen Amongst the Astronomers` & ` Things`
- as well as the notorious one about kissing John Prescott ` Adcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach` Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian ` Most of Fleur Adcock`s best poems have something to do with bed: she writes well about sex, very well about illness, & very well indeed about dreaming Her imagination thrives on what threatens her peace of mind, & only when she is unguarded can these threats have their full creative effect. Hence the importance of bed: it is the place where the elegant artful barriers that she builds from day to day are most easily over-thrown Throughout her writing life, she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of orderliness & good clear sense; but she has made an even finer one from loosening her grip on them` Andrew Motion, TLS ` Adcock`s reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucentthose who see in such poems only flatness are missing the power of a voice which teases both reader & subject` Jo Shapcott, TLS
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National Poetry Day is a chance for everyone everywhere to read, share & enjoy poetry. This special anthology features poems by the National Poetry Day Ambassadors, a top team of fantastic poets who bring poetry alive all year round.
Includes: new poems by Deborah Alma, Joseph Coelho, Sally Crabtree, Jan Dean, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Chrissie Gittins, Matt Goodfellow, Sophie Herxheimer, Michaela Morgan, Brian Moses, Abigail Parry, Rachel Piercey, Rachel Rooney, Joshua Siegal & Kate Wakeling (winner of the CLi PPA, 2017). And each poet has chosen a favourite poem to share, so look out for classics by Chistina Rossetti, WB Yeats, Shakespeare & Keats among others. Take a look, & be part of the celebration!
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The Taliban are synonymous with the war in Afghanistan. Doughty, uncompromising fighters, they plant IEDs, deploy suicide bombers & wage guerrilla warfare. While much has been written about their military tactics, media strategy & harsh treatment of women, the cultural & sometimes less overtly political representation of their identity, the Taliban's other face, is often overlooked. Most Taliban fighters are Pashtuns, a people who cherish their vibrant poetic tradition, closely associated with that of song. The poems in this collection are meant to be recited & sung; & this is the manner in which they are enjoyed by the wider Pashtun public today. From audiotapes traded in secret in the bazaars of Kandahar, to mp 3s exchanged via bluetooth in Kabul, to video files downloaded in Dubai & London, Taliban poetry has an appeal that transcends the insurgency. For the Taliban today, these poems, or ghazals, have a resonance back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, when similar rhetorical styles, poetic formulae & tricks with metre inspired mujahideen combatants & non-combatants alike. The poetry presented here

Includes:: 'classics' of the genre from the 1980s & 1990s as well as a selection from the odes & ghazals of today's conflict. Veering from nationalist paeans to dirges replete with religious symbolism, the poems are organised under four headings -- War, Pastoral, Religious & Love -- & cover many themes & styles. The political is intertwined with the aesthetic, the celebratory cry is never far from the funeral dirge & praise of martyrs lost. Two prefatory essays introduce the cultural & historical context of the poetry. The editors discuss its importance to the Pashtuns & highlight how poetic themes correspond to the past thirty years of war in Afghanistan. Faisal Devji comments on what the poetry reveals of the Taliban's emotional & ethical hinterl&.

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This new anthology of poems, favourites from the nation`s longest-running & best-loved request programme for verse, moves with the seasons, following the turning year from John Clare`s `pale splendour of the winter sun` to John Keats` ` Season of mists & mellow fruitfulness`, by way of Larkin`s `young-leafed June` & Gerard Manley Hopkins` `glassy peartree leaves & blooms` when ` Nothing is so beautiful as Spring`. As the year changes, so we change with it. Our daily lives have been shaped & directed by the seasons, & it is here that we find poems about harvest & hardship, growth & new life, the warmth of the life-giving sun, Christmas & the closing of the year. Poetry Please: Seasonal Poems is a vital & generous gathering to treasure. ...