Poetry

This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In the Tell Tale Heart, a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and the Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.

Based on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about Khosrow and Shirin shares a shelf with the most intensely romantic classic stories readers love, from Tristan and Isolde to Layla and Majnun to Romeo and Juliet to Gatsby and Daisy.The love between an Iranian prince (Khosrow) and an Armenian princess (Shirin) is at the centre of this tumultuous tale in which the powers of politics and warfare intertwine with no less powerful forces of erotic desire and the quest for personal and spiritual fulfilment.Davis has captured the energy and poetry of Nezami's original in modern verse. Khosrow and Shirin will enchant both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new audience for Nezami's masterpiece.

"Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History examines a rich combination of writers and texts, from antebellum works like Martin R. Delany's novel, Blake, and the poetry of Les Cenelles to Patricia Smith's recent collection of poems, Blood Dazzler. The thirteen essays in Voices and Visions treat two hundred years of literature and include discussions on canonical, contemporary, and experimental writers. Authors often associated with New Orleans such as Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, and Walker Percy are treated in new ways, as are well-known writers who are not often thought of in relation to the city: Charles Chesnutt, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joy Harjo. Examining this wide array of voices demonstrates the myriad ways New Orleans's storied past has affected its present. Scholars find enduring themes-race, gender, religion, disease, art-but do so in the context of emerging conversations. Essayists in the volume address such topics as New Orleans as part of the global South and the Black diaspora, the transformation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the recovery of previously lost voices, including those of Native Americans and immigrants. They also discuss the legacy of pandemics and racial violence that in more recent years has been manifest in the COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter movement"--

"Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History examines a rich combination of writers and texts, from antebellum works like Martin R. Delany's novel, Blake, and the poetry of Les Cenelles to Patricia Smith's recent collection of poems, Blood Dazzler. The thirteen essays in Voices and Visions treat two hundred years of literature and include discussions on canonical, contemporary, and experimental writers. Authors often associated with New Orleans such as Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, and Walker Percy are treated in new ways, as are well-known writers who are not often thought of in relation to the city: Charles Chesnutt, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joy Harjo. Examining this wide array of voices demonstrates the myriad ways New Orleans's storied past has affected its present. Scholars find enduring themes-race, gender, religion, disease, art-but do so in the context of emerging conversations. Essayists in the volume address such topics as New Orleans as part of the global South and the Black diaspora, the transformation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the recovery of previously lost voices, including those of Native Americans and immigrants. They also discuss the legacy of pandemics and racial violence that in more recent years has been manifest in the COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter movement"--

Examines Gabriele D'Annunzio to re-evaluate cultural exchange and the political dimensions of global decadence and modernism

Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost's life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation's bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost's death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson's biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a "monster."In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost's life-one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships,heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost's enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.Moving through Frost's most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost's poetry, tracing Frost's distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together-the poet and the poetry-and draws us back into conversation with America's poet.

The poet writes: 'I'm always interested in the possibilities of change, moving through forms and aesthetic modes, and I'd like to think this Selected Poems epitomises these kinds of shifts'.

After many years writing books, stories and poetry, it has gradually dawned on me that I had not come across any book that gave, not only a fine collection of poems, but also contained a useful textbook that informed the reader of the skills used by the author in composing their extensive range of well-constructed work. I also felt that it would be interesting and useful if authors had added a note or two about where the idea for some of their poems had emerged.This poetry collection of mine is sprinkled with such titbits. The textbook serves to lead the reader through the basics of poetry and gives clear explanations for rhyme and meter that are essential for many, but not all, forms of poem. I have clearly described the construction of twenty-eight different forms including Sonnet, Ballad, Sestina, Haiku, Limerick, Cinquain, Luc Bat , free verse, blank verse, and many more.In the final part of the textbook, I have given the reader the whole of an anonymous ballad together with a complete dissection of its form and structure, poetic techniques, figures of speech, mood tone and impact and its summary and meaning.I believe that my book gives enough data and explanation to satisfy the needs of an aspiring poet, or indeed anyone who enjoys poems but wants to understand them a little better.

An eclectic gathering of new work from one of the outstanding English poets of our time.

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

A prose work interspersed with poetry, Le Printemps d'Yver was highly popular in its day, seeing thirty editions between 1572 and 1635. Jacques Yver's stories and their premise - three gentlemen and two noble women who spin five tales in order to distract each other from the horrors of the recent third religious war and to rejoice in the brief 1570 truce of Saint-Germain - provide an intriguing and distinctive continuation of this genre evocative of Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre. It reveals an author with a profound humanist education whose text, inspired by Bandello, engages the social and political controversies of late sixteenth-century France. Henry Wotton translated Le Printemps into early modern English in 1578, removing all references to the original author and title while also mistranslating, deleting, and substituting passages. This modern English translation constitutes the first complete translation of the original French text.

The deeply reflective and impassioned songs and sonnets explore themes of faith, morality, and the eternal nature of the soul. With verses that question the state of a world without God, they reaffirm the power of divine love and the importance of spiritual devotion. The poem calls for adherence to timeless principles, recognizing the order of creation and celebrating the sacred connection between humanity and the divine. Through vivid imagery and heartfelt praise, the poem invites on a journey toward a higher understanding of purpose, guided by the everlasting presence of God.

Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? Life expectancy begins to fall is a book of poems about how it feels to normalise an apocalypse. It is not a call to arms, it is a poet's book about the weight we all carry -uncompromisingly curious, emotional and authentic.

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's UK debut, defies categorisation. Using artefacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Jack Underwood's selection from Maurice Riordan's work over the last forty years allows us to rediscover a poet whose musicality, wit and emotional acuity rank him as a leading poet of this and any generation.

This debut collection explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet's uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran.

A stunning new collection from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Lost Arabs.