Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 21 - 40 of 11432 items
By Walt Whitman. 2015
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself.(I am large, I contain multitudes.)Abundant, ecstatic, generous, courageous - this is…
the first American epic poem, a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenth-century American life of all ages and races. Revolutionary in style and controversial in content when it was first published in 1855, Whitman's masterwork has since inspired generations with its intoxicating rhythms and images, and its inclusive, praiseful joy.THE ORIGINAL 1855 TEXTBy Nguyen Du. 2019
Ever since it exploded into Vietnam's cultural life two centuries ago, The Song of Kieu has been one of that…
nation's most beloved and defining central myths. It recounts the tragic fate of the beautiful singer and poet Kieu, who agrees to marry to save her family from debt but is tricked into working in a brothel. Over the course of a swift-moving story involving kidnap, war, jealous wives and rebel heroes, she will become a queen, wife, nun, slave, victim and avenger, surviving through the strength of her words and her wits alone.Translated with an introduction by Timothy AllenBy Jane Campion, John Keats. 2009
Published to coincide with the release of the film Bright Star, written and directed by Oscar Winner Jane Campion (The…
Piano, In the Cut), starring Abbie Cornish (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited, Perfume)John Keats died aged just twenty-five. He left behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and love letters ever written, inspired by his great love for Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time apart - separated by Keats' worsening illness, which forced a move abroad - Keats wrote again and again about and to his love, right until his very last poem, called simply 'To Fanny'. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death. So Bright and Delicate is the passionate, heartrending story of this tragic affair, told through the private notes and public art of a great poet.By Paul Durcan. 1976
Since the publication of his first book in 1967, Paul Durcan has made satirical, celebratory and extraordinarily moving poetry out…
of his country's fortunes and misfortunes. His readings are legendary and each new collection, from his collaboration with Brain Lynch, Endsville (1967) to Daddy, Daddy (winner of the 1990 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crazy about Women (1991) and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) has borne out the truth of Ezra Pound's dictum that "literature is news that stays news". This book contains Durcan's own selection from his work. It is a literary milestone that has set the seal on his reputation as a poet of international standing.By Mark Pajak. 2022
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE****SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE**'Fresh, urgent, alive... genius' PATIENCE AGBABIThis assured…
and arresting first collection moves deftly and with purpose into private, hidden places - a locked shed, the dark of a battery farm, a murky riverbed, a late-night bar - to show, unflinchingly and in cinematic detail, what we might otherwise choose not to see. Sight is both a gift and curse, of course: given or taken away in poems of windows and curtains, torches and blindfolds, and yet here - following in the tradition of Oswald and Heaney - each image is freshly minted through a cool, objective eye.Every poem seeks to inhabit those seemingly small but pivotal moments which have monumental, sometimes mortal, consequences. For Pajak, time is fluid: a blink can be 'slow as an eclipse', our lifetimes are fleeting, our deaths often lingering and seldom peaceful or painless.Vivid and visceral, steadily examining violence, sexual encounters, childhood and ageing (a dying grandmother's 'slow pink eyelids, those quick teaspoon breaths'), cars and cities, and Nature - full of wonder and threat - Slide is always asking pertinent questions: illuminating brutality, frailty and tenderness, the responsibility of those who witness - whether voyeur, bystander or reader. This is a charged, beautifully observed and thrilling debut.By Jean Sprackland. 2013
In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a…
life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’.This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.By Roger McGough. 2008
If Philosophy is the Why?And Science is the How?Then Poetry is the Wow!In this stunning, brand-new volume, you'll discover poems…
about poems, poems about life, poems about kangaroos and chameleons and caterpillars (though not in the same verse) and many more. This touching and thought-provoking collection will make you laugh, cry, or simply say 'Wow!'By Roger McGough. 1983
Waiter, there's a sky in my pie!Roger McGough has cooked up a delicious feast of poems. This spicy collection contains…
only the finest ingredients - wit, sparkle and thought-provoking insight from a very superior source. Get ready to have your tastebuds tickled!Warning: some poems will make you choke with laughter, some need to be chewed very carefully.By Petra Borner. 2006
'Tomorrow I must set off to receive that blow, to seek out that creature in green, God help me!'J.R.R. Tolkien…
spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He was hugely influential for his advocacy of Beowulf as a great work of literature and, even if he had never written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, would be recognised today as a significant figure in the rediscovery of these extraordinary tales.Legends from the Ancient North brings together from Penguin Classics five of the key works behind Tolkien's fiction.They are startling, brutal, strange pieces of writing, with an elemental power brilliantly preserved in these translations.They plunge the reader into a world of treachery, quests, chivalry, trials of strength.They are the most ancient narratives that exist from northern Europe and bring us as near as we will ever get to the origins of the magical landscape of Middle-earth (Midgard) which Tolkien remade in the 20th century.By A. E. Housman. 2010
A. E. Housman was one of the best-loved poets of his day, whose poems conjure up a potent and idyllic…
rural world imbued with a poignant sense of loss. They are expressed in simple rhythms, yet show a fine ear for the subtleties of metre and alliteration. His scope is wide - ranging from religious doubt to intense nostalgia for the countryside. This volume brings together 'A Shropshire Lad' (1896) and 'Last Poems' (1922), along with the posthumous selections 'More Poems' and 'Additional Poems', and three translations of extracts from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides that display his mastery of Classical literature.By A. E. Housman. 2017
A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at A. E. Housman's own expense. The collection of lyrical poems became…
hugely successful following the Second Boer War and World War I, with themes such as nostalgia for one's home and the patriotic celebration of the life of the solider striking a chord with English readers. This collection contains Housman's greatest works, demonstrating the lyrical precision and emotional depth of his writing. It includes 'To an Athlete Dying Young', a lyrical elegy to a life lost at its prime and 'When I was One-and-Twenty', a love poem on the ignorance of youth.By Edmund Spenser, Richard Mccabe. 1999
Although he is most famous for The Faerie Queene, this volume demonstrates that for these poems alone Spenser should still…
be ranked as one of England's foremost poets.Spenser's shorter poems reveal his generic and stylistic versatility, his remarkable linguistic skill and his mastery of complex metrical forms.The range of this volume allows him to emerge fully in the varied and conflicting personae he adopted, as satirist and eulogist, elegist and lover, polemicist and prophet.The volume includes The Shepeardes Calender, Complaints, and A Theatre for Wordlings.By Will Alexander. 2021
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry Three kinetically distilled long poems by the…
singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia) “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.By Ovid. 1955
In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems.When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the…
ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection.Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...By David Parlett. 1986
This is a selection from the 13the century collection of secular latin poems. Some are serious (eg Crusade poems) but…
the majority are light, including many love poems. A number of items from the Carmina are well known as text for Carl Orff's 'Scenic Cantata'.By Earl Of Rochester. 2004
The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), lived a life of…
reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three - described by Samuel Johnson as having 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness'. Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires and highly explicit erotica - from the bawdy self-portrait in 'The Maimed Debauchee' and the tender passion of 'Absent from thee I languish still' to the comic world-weariness of 'Upon Nothing' and 'A Satyr against Mankind', which mocks human follies. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humour and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.By Alexander Pushkin. 2020
WINNER OF THE READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020Alexander Pushkin established what we know as Russian literature. This collection includes his strongly…
personal lyric verse, which springs spontaneously from his everyday life - his numerous loves, his exile, his hectic life in St Petersburg - while the narrative poems here, from exotic Southern tales to comic parodies and fairy tales of enchanted tsars, display his endless ability to surprise. His landmark work The Bronze Horseman, with its ghostly central figure of Peter the Great, holds the meaning of all Russian history. Antony Wood's translations reveal the variety, inventiveness and perfection of Pushkin's verse.By Samuel Coleridge. 1994
Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes…
of the human condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics. This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own individual development in craft and theme.By Isabel Quigly, Percy Shelley. 1956
SHELLEY'S WORK HAS BEEN CRITICIZED FOR ITS DIDACTICISM AND UNDISCIPLINED EMOTIONALISM. BUT ESSENTIALLY HE WAS A POET OF IDEAS AND…
IN HIS SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND ORIGINAL HUMAN PERFECTION, SHELLEY WAS INSPIRED AS MUCH BY THE GREEK POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS, PARTICULARLY PLATO, AS BY THE RADICALISM OF HIS OWN AGE. ABOVE ALL, HIS GREAT GIFT WAS HIS LYRICISM AND HIS VERSE COMES AS NEAR TO MUSIC AS POETRY CAN.By Goethe. 1999
'Shall I embrace you, must I let you go? Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!'Goethe viewed the…
writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical and the works selected in this volume represent over sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as 'Prometheus' he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervour, while 'To the Moon' is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The Roman Elegies show Goethe's use of Classical metres in homage to abcient Rome and its poets, and 'The Diary' , supressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is unusually combined with its morality. Arranged chronologically, David Luke's verse translations are set alonjgside the German orginals to give a picture of Goethe's poetic development. This edition also includes an introduction and notes placing the poems in the context of the poet's life and times.