Poetry

'we are the ones we have been waiting for'These poems of radical love, urgency and global consciousness reach across borders to break open the silence of oppression and the taboo, liberating both body and soul.Lively and enigmatic, Passion is June Jordan's most accomplished and animated collection. Her virtuosic, resolute words have inspired generations of readers and activists across the world, from Nobel Laureates to US Presidents.

'I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys'Allen Ginsberg's poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.An ancestor was rector thereLong years ago, a church stands near,By the road an ancient cross.No marble, no conventional phrase;On limestone quarried near the spotBy his command these words are cut:Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!'

Now you slip away in sleep.Your boat is sea-mist, dreaming, by the shore.Spain's most beloved poet, Federico García Lorca brilliantly captures the beauty and brutality of the twentieth century. His creative imagination transcends his own experiences - be it from the perspective of an ant, a gypsy nun, or Socrates - to meditate on death, love and honour, and to interrogate the decay and pretence of his society. Lorca's poetry excites, moves and disarms.

Luminous and intensely lyrical, Dylan Thomas' works have captivated generations of readers, inspiring artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Igor Stravinsky, and Phoebe Bridgers. This selection includes some of his best poetry, celebrating both inner and outer landscapes in the face of mortality, decay, human weakness, and beckoning readers to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light.' Together, they exemplify his legacy as the greatest Welsh poet of the twentieth century.

You sit at the roadside watching the traffic of your life go by. Everything passes you, including yourself. Nothing is permanent. But poetry is an alchemy, which transforms experiences and memories and fixes them (through words and images) in their time and place, as the poet's challenge to impermanence.

In this captivating poetry collection, author Byron Lafayette takes readers on a journey through the realms of gods, monsters, and the human spirit.Of Existential and Monolithic Ideals, paints a vivid landscape of struggle and hope. The collection explores humanity's relationship with deities, the world around us, and the darkness within our own minds.With nods to classical mythology, biblical imagery, and philosophical ponderings, these poems invite readers to contemplate the nature of existence, the power of ideals, and the enduring strength of the human spirit. Prepare to be transported to a world where gods walk among mortals, where heroes rise and fall, and where the struggle against darkness is eternal-yet hope always lingers on the horizon

"Examining the cultural confidence and metropolitan elitism identified with the 1870s, this volume establishes a new interdisciplinary literary history based on diverse authors, giving a fresh and accessible account of this key decade's debates about literature and culture as intrinsic to the Victorian era and even to 'Victorianism' itself"--

Refreshingly honest poems by a former refugee who returned home to a world turned upside down by war.Having lived through the horrors of war and displacement, Razi helps readers find their way. Razi has a rare gift of noticing what others don't see.Presented in Arabic with an English translation."Kills the pain that dances in my soul."- M. Albilal, literature student, Netherlands."This book is a gift to anyone who thinks they are alone, as Razi melds connections between pain and beauty in 'a cave of great sadness and extreme, unimaginable love'"- P. Y., psychologist and trauma specialist, USA."There is something intensely intimate in Razi's plaintive lamentation: a woundedness one only allows a close friend to hear."- J. K., lover of poetry.

About the BookA COLLECTION OF TWENTY-TWO FREE VERSE POEMS WRITTEN AS AN INNOVATIVE DIALOGUE WITH THE POET AND PHILOSOPHER VALLUVAR, ALSO KNOWN AS TIRUVALLUVAR, GREETINGS, VALLUVAR! WEAVES TAMIL MYTHS, EPIC HISTORY AND SYMBOLISM.How was it that your thoughts could soar beyond colour and caste?This profound question sets the tone for a dialogue between the poet Erode Tamilanban and the revered poet-philosopher Valluvar, or Tiruvalluvar. The result is a stunning collection of twenty-two free-verse poems interlaced with Tamil myths, epic history and rich symbolism, offering deep reflections on spirituality and societal norms.Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil in 2004, Greetings, Valluvar! is a testament not only to the enduring relevance of Valluvar's ideas of universality and secularism, but also to Tamilanban's literary prowess and his ability to bridge ancient wisdom with contemporary thought.

Breaking a Mare is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces.

The new poetry collection from Andrés N. Ordorica (picked as an Observer Best Debut Novelists for 2024), Holy Boys seeks to address the echoes of adolescence and the pains of living a life in the shadows of unspeakable desires and all-consuming longing. This collection is for readers who appreciate language and the multilingual power of poetry.

The November-December 2024 issue. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes the first translation of Dante's Inferno by a Jamaican poet (Lorna Goodison); the introduction of the Afghan poet Mahbouba Ibrahimi in translations by Parwana Fayyaz of the Forward Prize; Kirsty Gunn on key New Zealand writers; John McAuliffe on Heaney as translator and letter writer; and a letter from Madrid by Anthony Vahni Capildeo. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.

First published in 1980, Dante the Maker examines the great Italian poet's creative processes and presents a wider perspective on Dante.

An anthology of poetry on Nikkei incarceration, written by descendants of the WWII prisons and campsA tribute to the 150,000 people harmed by the United States and Canada during WWII, this anthology is the first of its kind. The poetry expresses a range of experiences and perspectives from the afterlife of this historical yet enduring injustice. With a foreword by acclaimed poet, activist, and concentration camp survivor, Mitsuye Yamada, and an introduction by the editors, poets Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, The Gate of Memory explores intergenerational trauma as the contributors, all of whom are descendants of those who were incarcerated, sift through an intimate record of wartime incarceration.Contributors to this anthology include poets of Japanese American, Japanese Canadian, Okinawan American, Okinawan Canadian, Japanese Hawaiian, Alaska Native, mixed race Nikkei, and Japanese descent. Their poems reimagine, reinhabit, and retell the story of incarceration while embodying its many legacies, through a diversity of modes and themes, creating a panoramic portrait of anti-Asian racism, assimilation, loyalty, resistance, and redemption. The anthology illuminates individual perspectives and reveals collective experience. It insists upon the imperative of poetry in the processes of solidarity and transgenerational healing.

1,000 haiku by Soseki Natsume, collected into one volume for the first time! Soseki Natsume is Japan's most popular writer, well known in the West for his satirical novels like I Am a Cat, Botchan and Kokoro. However, he first made a name for himself in Japan as a poet, publishing hundreds of haiku over a period of several decades. Until now very few of these have appeared in English. Soseki Natsume's Collected Haiku presents 1,000 of the author's most famous verses, selected and translated by Erik Lofgren, a leading Soseki expert. The poems are grouped into chapters corresponding to the five traditional Japanese seasons (New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter). In these poems, Soseki explores themes ranging from wabi sabi Zen simplicity to his personal experiences including several years studying in England. His verses are evocative of the splendor of the natural world, the power of human emotions, and the serenity found in living a peaceful life. Each poem is presented in the original Japanese with a Romanized version and English translation. Audio recordings of the English and Japanese versions are provided online.

A celebration of the Shipping Forecast in poetry and prose

A luminous collection of wonder, wildness and the capabilities of love in the face of destruction, from one of poetry's sharpest up-and-coming voices

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.The lode in Gillian Allnutt's title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability - economic, cultural, spiritual - of Britain's postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book. That sense of stability ended with Covid, which found Gillian Allnutt isolated in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book. The poems in the book's third part, Earth-hoard, are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world now threatened as never before.

A heartfelt collection of poignant poems embracing the core of whatbeing human is, coupled with the innate tendencies to judge and prioritise eachother's significance as human beings.

The early Industrial Revolution was not ignored by eighteenth-century writers. They addressed it in the Enlightenment Mock Arts, a curious genre of satires that fed into Gulliver's Travels, Tristram Shandy and Belinda. Paddy Bullard traces the oblique strategies that these authors used to avoid the constraints of Enlightenment instrumentalism.