A Poem For Every Day of the Year is a magnificent collection of 366 poems compiled by Allie Esiri, one to share on every day of the year. Reflecting the changing seasons and linking to events on key dates – funny for April Fool's Day, festive for Christmas – these poems are thoughtful, inspiring, humbling, informative, quiet, loud, small, epic,…
The classic collection of poetry from the author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS. ‘A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman’ BARACK OBAMA Maya Angelou’s poetry – lyrical and dramatic, exuberant and playful – speaks of love, longing, partings; of Saturday night partying, and the smells and sounds of Southern cities; of freedom and…
Book of Longing is Leonard Cohen's astonishing new collection of poems, the first since Book of Mercy was published nearly three decades ago. Leonard Cohen made his name as a poet before he came to worldwide attention as a singer and songwriter. Book of Longing, his new collection of poetry, was twenty years in the making and written in Montreal,…
Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York. This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) includes all the poems contained in the Definitive Edition of 1940. In his lifetime, Kipling was widely regarded as the unofficial Poet Laureate, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His poetry is striking…
Allen Ginsberg was the bard of the beat generation, and Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems is a collection of his finest work published in Penguin Modern Classics, including 'Howl', whose vindication at an obscenity trial was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' Beat movement icon and visionary poet,…
'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to…
A celebratory 20th anniversary edition of this landmark collection from black writers across the literary spectrum This ground-breaking anthology was first published twenty years ago, into a different literary landscape. Showcasing the work of more than 100 black British authors, this 20th anniversary edition celebrates their lasting contributions to literature and to our wider culture. Including poetry from Roger Robinson,…
The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka poems (the precursor of haiku) express deep emotion through visual images based on a penetrating observation of the natural world. Peter…
Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry…
With an Introduction and Bibliography by Stephen Matterson, Trinity College, Dublin. Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinctive national voice. It reflects the unique vitality of the new nation, the vastness of the land and the emergence of a sometimes troubled consciousness, communicated in language and idiom regarded by many at the time as shocking. Whitman's poems…
William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His writing attracted the astonished admiration of authors as diverse as Wordsworth, Ruskin, W.B.Yeats, and more recently beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the 'flower power' generation. He is one of England's most original artists whose works aim to liberate…
