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Love Visions
By Geoffrey Chaucer. 1983
Spanning Chaucer's working life, these four poems build on the medieval convention of 'love visions' - poems inspired by dreams,…
woven into rich allegories about the rituals and emotions of courtly love. In The Book of the Duchess, the most traditional of the four, the dreamer meets a widower who has loved and lost the perfect lady, and The House of Fame describes a dream journey in which the poet meets with classical divinities. Witty, lively and playful, The Parliament of Birds details an encounter with the birds of the world in the Garden of Nature as they seek to meet their mates, while The Legend of Good Women sees Chaucer being censured by the God of Love, and seeking to make amends, for writing poems that depict unfaithful women. Together, the four create a marvellously witty, lively and humane self-portrait of the poet.Love That Moves the Sun and Other Stars (Penguin Little Black Classics)
By Dante Alighieri. 2007
'Happiness beyond all words! A life of peace and love, entire and whole!'A collection of cantos from Paradiso, the most…
original and experimental part of the Divina Commedia.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People
By Elias Lönnrot. 1988
'One of the great mythic poems of Europe' The New York TimesSharing its title with the poetic name for Finland…
- 'the land of heroes' - Kalevala is the soaring epic poem of its people, a work rich in magic and myth which tells the story of a nation through the ages from the dawn of creation. Sung by rural Finns since prehistoric times, and formally compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century, it is a landmark of Finnish culture and played a vital role in galvanizing its national identity in the decades leading to independence. Its themes, however, reach beyond borders and search the heart of human existence.Translated with an Introduction by Eino FribergThe Life of St Teresa of Avila by Herself
By Teresa Of Avila. 1957
Born in the Castilian town of Ávila in 1515, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation when she was…
twenty-one. Tormented by illness, doubts and self-recrimination, she gradually came to recognize the power of prayer and contemplation - her spiritual enlightenment was intensified by many visions and mystical experiences, including the piercing of her heart by a spear of divine love. She went on to found seventeen Carmelite monasteries throughout Spain. Teresa always denied her own saintliness, however, saying in a letter: 'There is no suggestion of that nonsense about my supposed sanctity.' This frank account is one of the great stories of a religious life and a literary masterpiece - after Don Quixote, it is Spain's most widely read prose classic.Life of St Columba
By Adomnan Of Iona. 1991
Founding father of the famous monastery on the island of Iona, a site of pilgrimage ever since his death in…
597, St Columba was born into one of the ruling families in Ireland at a time of immense expansion for the Irish Church. This account of his life, written by Adomnán - the ninth abbot of Iona, and a distant relative of St Columba - describes his travels from Ireland to Scotland and his mission in the cause of Celtic Christianity there. Written 100 years after St Columba's death, it draws on written and oral traditions to depict a wise abbot among his monks, who like Christ was capable of turning water into wine, controlling sea-storms and raising the dead. An engaging account of one of the central figures in the 'Age of Saints', this is a major work of early Irish and Scottish history.In A Rare Time Of Rain
By Milner Place. 1995
Described in the Telegraph as 'Huddersfield's Melville', Milner Place has spent much of his life sailing the seven seas as…
a skipper of a trading boat, while also writing beautifully crafted poetry. His two pamphlet collections. The CONFUSION OF ANGELS and WHERE SMOKE IS, has sold out and been reprinted, and this (at the age of sixty) is his first full length collection, Simon Armitage's first acquisition for the Chatto Poetry list. Place's poems have an international or universal quality, influenced by Neruda and Rilke rather than Auden: they are lyrical and wise, rather than quotidian and clever. Some of the poems are sea-going yarns, others are set in South America and read like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in verse. There are also a handful of characters portraits, and a wonderful long poem, 'Lum Street', based on a row of terraced houses, its tenants and their relationships to each other. IN A RARE TIME OF RAIN is a powerful and assured first collection, and brings an unusual new voice into British Poetry.Kneelers: The Unsung Folk Art of England and Wales
By Elizabeth Bingham. 2019
A charming and witty history of the quirky - but surprisingly widespread - craft of embroidering kneeler cushions. The perfect…
gift book this Christmas, for those who love kneelers and those who don't!'A lovely look at a not-quite-vanishing craft that lies, literally, below our knees ... Inventive and interesting' The Oldie, 'Best Reads for All Ages This Christmas''A treasure of a collection' Amber Butchart, of BBC's The Great British Sewing Bee'I think I may already have discovered the best non fiction book of 2023' Reverend Richard Coles, author of A Murder Before EvensongKneelers is a celebration of the most widely practised - but often overlooked - folk art in England and Wales over the past ninety years: the design and craft of church kneelers. Featuring charming stories and enchanting designs from churches across the country, the book traces the history of kneelers; from their spectacular beginnings at Winchester in the 1930s to their booming popularity after Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the present-day congregations who are keeping the tradition alive.In their range and diversity, the kneelers collected here form a fascinating social record of the concerns and interests that occupied their makers - including local fauna and flora, cricket, dragons, post-war tributes and the thrills of high-speed travel.Filled to the brim with beautiful full-colour images, Kneelers displays the quirky artistry and widely varied (and often surprising) motifs which have characterised church kneelers in the twentieth century. It rejoices in the personal stories of some of the people who have practised and advanced the art form, and is a wonderful commemoration of what happens when communities come together to celebrate their history and their environment.'A glorious and delightful salute' Tracy Chevalier, author of A Single Thread'This book is a Godsend!' Alan Titchmarsh, author of The Gardener's AlmanacLife is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007
By Paul Durcan. 2009
Famous for his electrifying poetry readings, Paul Durcan marks four decades of composing silently and reciting aloud with this magnificent…
collection, which brings together for the first time the critically acclaimed poet's own choice of his work from his first book, Endsville (1967), to The Laughter of Mothers (2007). Life is a Dream represents the whole range of Durcan's writing - funny and subversive verse narratives and self-mocking poems of underachievement; poems celebrating love and sex or the lives of famous writers and artists; as well as tender, poignant verses commemorating the dead. Throughout his long career, Durcan has continued to make passionate and moving poetry out of his own and his country's misfortunes. He is by turns a surrealist, a mystic, an Irish comedian with perfect comic timing and an angry champion of the oppressed. Life is a Dream reaffirms the constant vision and artistic integrity of one of the most powerful, humane and original voices in modern poetry.Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ - A Study In Creative Mythology
By Alvar Ellegard. 1999
The starting point for the book is the following anomoly: If Jesus lived as has been supposed at the beginning…
of the 1st century AD, the only NT documents written by a near contemporary, the Epistles of St Paul, make no mention of him as an historical figure, neither do they record any of his sayings, but rather they talk of him as a vision or mystical experience of the risen Christ. Further, the same is true of the earliest Christian non-NT texts, such as the Epistles of St Clement, roughly contemporary with Paul. Furthermore, contemporary records of the region from non-Christian sources, such as those by the Jewish historian Josephus, fail to mention Jesus at all where we would expect them to; the mentions that there are have recently been shown to be later interpolations by medieval Christian apologists - the gospel accounts of Jesus and his millieu are inaccurate in all major respects e. g. the relative dates of Herod and Pilate, if contemporary Roman and Jewish historians, who had no theological axe to grind, are taken as measure. By comparative textual studies, the author shows that the gospel accounts of Jesus' life and sayings were written approximately 100 years after Jesus is supposed to have lived, and so 100 years later than alleged contemporaries such as Paul, Clement, Josephus etc.Juggling with Gerbils
By Brian Patten. 2000
A great new collection of poetry, wide-ranging in both form and subject matter. Full of Brian Patten's wonderful wit and…
moments of beauty as in GERANIUMS IN THE SNOW: Like children snuggling down under a white duvet Slowly the red geraniums Vanish under the snow. Brilliantly complemented by Chris Riddell's illustrations.Imagist Poetry (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Peter Jones. 1972
Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century…
poetry which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets, described as ‘a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth … half-melted, lumpy’. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should ‘use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something … it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech’. It was this freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluable Introduction, ‘imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice’.Imagining Alexandria
By Louis De Bernieres. 2013
Poetry was Louis de Bernières’ first literary love and Imagining Alexandria is his debut poetry collection. Here the author of…
the much-loved Captain Corelli’s Mandolin returns us to the vivid Mediterranean landscape of his fiction.De Bernières was introduced to Greek poetry while in Corfu in 1983, and since then he has always travelled with a book of Cavafy's poetry in his pocket. Not surprisingly, his own poems about the distant past, the erotic and the philosophical owe much to the influence of the great Alexandrian poet.Beautifully illustrated with line drawings by Donald Sammut, this is a collection rich in sensuality, nostalgia, and music.Journey: A Spiritual Odyssey
By Peter France. 1998
Peter France looks at the various stages of his own spiritual odyssey and talks intimately of his long search for…
knowledge and enlightenment. Warm, lucid, humorous, Journey is grounded in France's own life and experience. He takes us from the beginning of his journey in a small Methodist chapel in Yorkshire, and his first perception of Christianity, through Oxford where he rejected Christianity and became a humanist and a career as a colonial administrative officer in Fiji, to his later position as an investigative reporter for BBC religious television. Finally-and movingly-he writes about his conversion to the Greek Orthodox Church, and describes his baptism at the age of 57 on the Greek island of Patmos by total immersion in a 44 gallon oil drum of lukewarm water. Illuminated by personal anecdote and information by a broad knowledge of different religions and religious experiences, Journey is both immensely engaging, and studded with powerful spiritual insight.The Illustrated Woman: SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2022
By Helen Mort. 2022
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory,…
wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL________The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen MortLet me kneelbefore the sky and let me be humble, untidy,let me be decorated.Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLANThe Iliad
By Homer. 2003
'The first great book, and the first great book about the suffering and loss of war' GuardianOne of the foremost…
achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. At its centre is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, who refuses to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - knowing this will ensure his own early death. E. V. Rieu's acclaimed translation of The Iliad was one of the first titles published in Penguin Classics, and now has classic status itself.Originally translated by E. V. RIEU Revised and updated by PETER JONES with D. C. H. RIEU Edited with an Introduction and notes by PETER JONESJabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems
By Lewis Carroll. 2012
The first collected and annotated edition of Carroll's brilliant, witty poems, edited by Gillian Beer. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy…
toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more.This edition also includes notes, a chronology and an introduction by Gillian Beer that discusses Carroll's love of puzzles and wordplay and the relationship of his poetry with the Alice books'Opening at random Gillian Beer's new edition of Lewis Carroll's poems, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense, guarantees a pleasurable experience - not all of it nonsensical' - Times Literary Supplement Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898.Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cambridge and past President of Clare Hall College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her works are Darwin's Plots (1983; third edition, 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).If Only I Had Told
By Esther W.. 2013
‘The satanic sex ring takes place around a quarry, near your friend’s house. As well as your family there are…
four others, so far that we know of, involved.’When her dad was arrested and imprisoned for violently abusing his 15 children, Esther thought her life could begin at last. She couldn't have been more wrong. Another man was ready to take advantage of this vulnerable girl. Social services stepped in again, but this time they made things much, much worse . . .If Only I Had Told is Esther’s personal and very brave memoir that tells the truth about Orkney’s 1991 satanic sex scandal. It is a shocking account of how two evil men and a flawed system let down not just a young girl but a whole community.John Keats: Selected Poems (Macmillan Collector's Library #188)
By John Keats. 2019
Keats is one of the major figures in the second generation of Romantic Poets and was considered by Tennyson to…
be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. The preoccupying themes of Keats' poetry are love, art, sorrow, the natural world and thenature of the imagination. However, his poetry is often also indirectly critical of conventional political, religious, and sexual beliefs. This collection contains pieces from different periods in his short life, from his earliest verse to his later unpublished poems. It also includes his best-loved works, such as The Eve of St Agnes, Lamia, and the Odes, and extracts from Endymion.John Donne: Collected Poetry
By John Donne. 2012
Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures…
of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Collected Poetry reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful songs and sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as 'The Flea', which transforms the image of a louse into something marvellous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigour into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.If I Should Die Before I Wake
By Eileen Munro. 2011
In her bestselling memoir As I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Eileen Munro vividly documented the abuse she experienced at…
the hands of her adoptive parents and, later, within the care system. The birth of Eileen's son, Craig, and her escape from the authorities' clutches should have seen her turn a corner, but she remains haunted by the spectre of her past.In If I Should Die Before I Wake, Eileen chronicles her search for her real parents and her battle for an education for both Craig and herself. She faces exploitation, suffers further sexual and physical abuse, and endures periods of homelessness and bad health. Still she perseveres, clinging to her hopes for the future, until she eventually finds the sense of belonging that has previously eluded her.In this harrowing but ultimately inspirational second volume of memoir, Eileen Munro proves that, against all the odds, happiness does sometimes come to those who never give up hope.