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Showing 8521 - 8540 of 8717 items
By Quentin Blake. 2017
The Winning Entries of the most REVOLTING Poetry Competition!To celebrate the BBC's new two-part animation of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes,…
the Roald Dahl Literary Estate launched a poetry competition with a twist, asking chiddlers far and wide to submit their most revolting - and humorous rhymes. We were inundated with thousands of disgusterous entries! To discover our winners, we waded through burps, farts and rotten eggs; bogies, vile stew and goo to find the funniest and most revolting specimens. This eBook contains the crème de la phlegm-hand picked by children's author, songwriter and McFly frontman, Tom Fletcher, and Wales's Children's Poet Laureate, Anni Llyn. A huge thank you to our revolting partners Puffin Books, the National Literacy Trust, Literature Wales, Magic Light, and the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre for all their help and support!By Ruth Padel. 1998
Ruth Padel's passionate new collection is a woman's eye view of a love affair, with darker undercurrents of mortality and…
loss. Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, innocence and doubt, tenderness and frustration, teasing reproach and the exaltation of deep love and sexual happiness, Padel's extraordinarily bold and intimate book explores the complexity of emotions that go with falling in love. Wonderfully versatile in tone, it blends the lyrical and the colloquial, formality and wit, myth and the Spice Girls. It includes the poem that won the 1996 National Poetry Competition 'Icicles round a tree in Dumfriesshire'.By Dante. 2007
In Purgatorio Dante, having described his journey into Hell, narrates his ascent of Mount Purgatory with Virgil, as he encounters…
penitents who toil through physical agonies, starvation and flames to assuage their earthly vices. Only by learning from them can he achieve his final enlightened transition to the lost Earthly Paradise at the mountain’s summit, where he meets his dead love, Beatrice, and prepares to ascend to Heaven. Depicting a realm of intense sensation and physical experience, Dante’s poem transformed the traditional Christian idea of Purgatory by showing how the free will of the aspiring soul could change wordly perversions into perfection. It is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human possibility, hope and redemption.By Quentin Blake. 1994
Ever eaten Poodle Strudel? Slain a Jabberwock? Bathed in Irish Stew? Quentin Blake is one of the best loved of…
children’s illustrators. In this brilliant book he has selected and illustrated his favourite comic verse, making it pure entertainment for nonsense-lovers of all ages. His unique style of drawing brings a new perspective to every poem. Classic writers such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are combined with more contemporary talents such as Roger McGough, Margaret Mahy and Russell Hoban. With fifteen wonderfully absurd sections, including Distracting Creatures, Sticky Ends, I Wish I Were a Jelly Fish, A Recipe for Indigestion and Chortling and Galumphing, here is a delightful collection of the topsy-turvy, the fantastical, the anarchic, the illogical and the utterly wonderful.By Kahlil Gibran. 1923
A hugely influential philosophical work of prose poetry, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is an inspirational, allegorical guide to living, and…
this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Robin Waterfield.First published in the 1920's, The Prophet is perhaps the most famous work of religious fiction of the twentieth century, and has sold millions of copies in more than twenty languages. Gibran's Prophet speaks of many things central to daily life: love, marriage, death, beauty, passion, eating, work and play. The spiritual message he imparts, of finding divinity through love, blends eastern mysticism, religious faith and philosophy with simple advice. The Prophet became the bible of 1960s culture and was credited with founding the New Age movement, yet it still continues to inspire people around the world today. This edition is illustrated with Gibran's famous visionary paintings.Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a poet, philosopher and artist, who stands among the most important Arabic language authors of the early twentieth century. Born in Lebanon, he spent the last twenty years of his life in the United States, where for many years he was the leader of a Lebansese writing circle in New York. He is the author of numerous volumes, including The Garden of the Prophet, The Storm, The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart, The Vision, Reflections on the Way of the Soul, and Spirit Brides. If you enjoyed The Prophet, you might like Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'His work goes on from generation to generation'Daily Mail'To read it was to transcend ordinary levels of perception, to become aware ... of a more intense level of being'IndependentBy William Wordsworth. 2004
First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative…
work. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the reader back to Wordsworth's formative moments of childhood and youth, and detailing his experiences as a radical undergraduate in France at the time of the Revolution. Initially inspired by Coleridge's exhortation that Wordsworth write a work upon the French Revolution, The Prelude has ultimately become one of the finest examples of poetic autobiography ever written; a fascinating examination of the self that also presents a comprehensive view of the poet's own creative vision.By Dinah Roe. 2010
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known…
Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.By Paul Durcan. 2012
Paul Durcan's twenty-second collection finds Monsieur le Poète on the road in Paris, New York City, Chicago, Brisbane, and Achill…
Island, meditating upon the sanctuary of home and what it means to feel truly at home. Regarded by many as the great poet of contemporary Ireland, Durcan is on top form here as he contemplates the fall of the Celtic Tiger, while railing against bankers and 'bonus boys'. There are poems of love lost and won, and poems in memory of friends and relatives who have passed on, but there is also joy to be found in the birth of a grandson, and there is praise, too, for the modest heroism of truckers, air traffic controllers and nurses, those 'slim, sturdy, buxom nourishers' of fallen mankind. If for Sartre 'hell is other people', for Durcan 'heaven is other people, especially women'.By Owen Sheers. 2009
Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology that ties…
in with the BBC series of the same name.Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, our land. He has chosen six powerful poems, all personal favourites, and all poems that have become part of the way we see our landscape. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series itself, while also offering paper chains of poems about the landscape and nature of Britain, transcripts of contemporary poet interviews, and a short introduction to each lead poem.By Sophie Hannah. 1990
The Poetry of Sex - a raucous, highly enjoyable anthology by acclaimed poet Sophie Hannah 'We've been at it all…
summer, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico . . .'It's hard to imagine a more fruitful subject for poets than sex, in all its glorious manifestations: from desire and hope, through disappointment and confusion, to conclusion and consequence. And little has changed over the centuries, as Sophie Hannah's anthology vividly demonstrates, from Catullus pleading with Lesbos to Walt Whitman singing the body electric. Moods and attitudes may vary but the drive persists as does the desire to write about it.Sophie Hannah's selection ranges from ancient Rome to modern New York, from gay to straight, but her principle has been to go low on the sugar and high on the excitement. It is essential reading for poetry lovers and romantics everywhere. Sophie Hannah has published five collections of poetry. Her fifth Pessimism for Beginners was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award in 2007. Her Selected Poems is published by Penguin (revised edition, 2013). She is also the writer of bestselling psychological crime fiction, most recently The Carrier. Her novels have been translated into 24 languages. Born in Manchester, she now lives in Cambridge with her husband and children, and is a Fellow Commoner of Lucy Cavendish College.By Desmond Graham. 1981
Poetry of the Second World War brings to light a neglected chapter in world literature. In its chorus of haunting…
poetic voices, over a hundred of the most articulate minds of their generation record the true experience of the 1939-45 conflict, and its unending consequences. In keeping with its subject, it has an international scope, with poems from over twenty countries, including Japan, Australia, Europe, America and Russia; poems in which human responses echo each other across boundaries of culture and state. Auden, Brecht, Stevie Smith, Primo Levi, Zbigniew Herbert and Anna Akhmatova are set alongside the eloquence of unknown poets. The anthology has been arranged to bring out the chronological and cumulative human experience of the war: pre-war fears, air raids, the boredom, fear and camaraderie of military life; battle, occupation and resistance; surviving and the aftermath. Here at last, are the poems of the Holocaust, the Blitz, Hiroshima; of soldiers, refugees and disrupted lives. What emerges is a poetry capable of conveying the vast and terrible sweep of war.By Andrew Motion. 1969
Poetry by Heart - based on the hugely successful nationwide schools competition, 200 magical poems to learn by heart'The poems…
we learn stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become personal and invaluable, and what's more they are free gifts - there for the taking' Simon ArmitageTwo years ago former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had the idea of setting up Poetry by Heart - a nationwide annual competition for secondary schools which asked contestants to learn two or three poems and be judged on their recitations, first at school level, then regional, then in a national final held at London's National Portrait Gallery. It's proved a huge success, with hundreds of schools participating in the first year, and numbers up by 20% in the second. Coinciding with the start of the third year of competition, and published on National Poetry Day whose theme coincidentally in 2014 is Recitation, this Poetry by Heart anthology brings together the pool of poems - 200 altogether - from which contestants make their choices. Specially picked by Motion and his three co-editors, these poems make up a treasure house - of almost-unknown poems and familiar poems from the mainstream; love poems and war poems; funny poems and heartbroken poems; poems that recreate the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. And all chosen with a view to their being recited out loud.From William Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen, Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bishop this wonderfully enjoyable anthology will be enjoyed by all ages and includes the best poets from the past to the present day. In a groundbreaking feature, the book includes QR codes which allow readers to use their mobile phones to listen to recordings of the poems - many of them specially recorded by the poets themselves. Sir Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 till 2009, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Jean Sprackland'sTilt won the Costa Poetry award in 2008. She is a Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie Blake is co-Founder and Director of The Full English, an organization based in Bristol which provides support to teachers of English Literature. Mike Dixon is an educational consultant specializing in English in the classroom.By Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert. 2012
This wonderful new edition of Poems on the Underground is published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Underground in…
2013. Here 230 poems old and new, romantic, comic and sublime explore such diverse topics as love, London, exile, families, dreams, war, music and the seasons, and feature poets from Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley, Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott and a host of younger poets. It includes a new foreword and over two dozen poems not included in previous anthologies.By Thomas Hardy. 2006
Thomas Hardy wrote some of the most moving and personal poems in his era and this collection brings together the…
best of his verse on life and love.Hardy's poems are by turn haunting, intense, songlike humerous and tender. From snatched lovers' meetings to the wreck of the Titanic from the death of a Dorest drummer boy in the Boer War to memories of his dead wife Emma, from ghosts, loss and longing to pleasure in landscape and weather, they tell the story of one of our best-loved writers, and the people and places that inspired him.By Robert Burns. 2008
The farmer’s boy from Ayrshire who went on to be the most acclaimed of all Scottish poets, celebrated around the…
world, Robert Burns is a greater and more varied artist than those that know him only through annual Burns’ Suppers and choruses of his ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at New Year could imagine. This new selection by Ian Rankin of verses and lyrics from Scotland’s national poet, the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’, reveals a writer capable of evoking tremendous sympathetic power from his readers and with an easy, astonishing command of the sounds and rhythms of both standard English and the evocative Scots tongue. It also reveals an artist of incredible range. His ‘Tam O’ Shanter’, with its midnight pursuit of witches from a grisly graveyard dance, is gripping, fantastical and funny in equal measure, ‘Is there for honest poverty’ beautifully expresses the egalitarian spirit by which Burns became a political hero for so many, and sentiments both romantic (‘Ae Fond Kiss’) and bawdy (‘The Fornicator’) co-exist in this canny selection of the best of the Scottish Bard.By John Milton. 2008
John Milton was a master of almost every type of verse, from the classical to the religious and from the…
lyrical to the epic. This is a new selection of his poems, edited and introduced by Claire Tomalin.By John Keats. 2009
Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By…
the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should 'be among the English poets after my death'. This new, wide-ranging selection of Keats's poetry has been selected by Claire Tomalin.By Gerard Hopkins. 1995
Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley…
Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus at the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wishes of my superiors'. The poems, letters and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life, and published posthumously in 1918. His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice.By Michelangelo. 2007
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is universally celebrated as one of the greatest artists of all time, yet iconic Renaissance creator was…
also a prolific and gifted poet. The verses collected here are primarily devoted to love and religion. Intense and passionate, the love poems focus on two figures: Tommaso de Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna; with the sonnets and madrigals dedicated to de Cavalieri revealing a highly charged, homoerotic fervour - previously obscured in the original versions. Michelangelo's later religious poetry moves away from his earlier wordly concerns, while his letters provide a fasicnating insight into his fanily relations and day-to-day life as a working artist. The result is a revealing picture of one of the towering figures of the Renaissance.By Algernon Charles Swinburne. 2000
This volume brings together Swinburne's major poetic works, ATALANTA IN CALYDON (1865) and POEMS AND BALLADS (1866). ATALANTA IN CALYDON…
is a drama in classical Greek form, which revealed Swinburne's metrical skills and brought him celebrity. POEMS AND BALLADS brought him notoriety and demonstrates his preoccupation with de Sade, masochism, and femmes fatales. Also reproduced here is 'Notes on Poems and Reviews', a pamphlet Swinburne published in 1866 in response to hostile reviews of POEMS AND BALLADS.