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Choose to love despite it all. How do you respond to fear, grief, heartbreak, war, loss, injustice, a world that seems more divided and messed up than ever? Poet Lucas Jones explores how we search for meaning in difficult times in this remarkable homage to the beautiful humanity of choosing to love despite it all. Powerful, uplifting and authentic, these are poems to hold close, to cry over, to remind you that there is profound and unwavering hope.
Here are the full poetic works of our wittiest and much-beloved writer, including many previously uncollected poems. When ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ was published in 1986 Wendy Cope became that rarest of creatures: a best-selling and celebrated poet. Her artful combination of clarity and wit made an extraordinary impact in poems that cocked a gentle snook at the pomposity of a literary world hitherto dominated by men. Since then, through four further collections, she has continued to delight, finding, through the viral nature of the web, a whole new generation of enthusiastic readers. Love and heartbreak; life and death – those daily desires and fears that underlie our existences – these are the subjects she tackles with an unpretentiousness that draws us in and an emotional resonance that keeps us coming back for more.
W.H. Auden was the consummate poet of love and heartbreak. ‘Stop All the Clocks’ presents a selection of his most well-known and lucid poems, poems that give shape and expression to our strongest emotions. Here are the anxieties that can beset our waking and sleeping hours: the delirium of desire, the torture of unrequited love, the trauma of loss and displacement. And here, in these resonant, dazzling poems, is the clarity and understanding we might be looking for.
Across the world, as midnight strikes on New Year’s Eve, Burns’s beloved song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is sung in a spirit of friendship and togetherness. But his exuberant wit, insight and generous-hearted humanity can be celebrated every day. This collection – perfect for Burns aficionados and Burns beginners alike – reminds us of old favourites and introduces new treasures. Thoughtfully curated by Dr Pauline Mackay of the University of Glasgow, it offers 366 glimpses into the genius of this remarkable bard, creating a panoramic view of his colourful life and multifaceted literary legacy.
Icon of women’s movement and author of over 20 books including a narrative series on love, bell hooks, makes this brilliant debut as a poet, now, reminding us of the good and bad moments we spend in love.
Stevie Smith was not only a famous poet in her lifetime but a poet before her time, a radical eccentric who relished the performance of poetry as spoken word (before that was a thing). The poems are distinctly unsentimental as she casts the ‘eye of an anarchist’ over propriety and convention, finding comedy in the tragic and tragedy in the comic. She asks the questions we don’t have the nous or courage to ask, speaking for the lonely, the troubled and the trapped, and for any of us who at one time or another have imagined ourselves not waving but drowning.
The travels of Aeneas are brought to life in Virgil’s epic poem, with an afterword by Coco Stevenson.
A gorgeous pocket-sized edition of Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, introduced by author and classicist Natalie Haynes.
A beautiful colour illustrated edition of William Blake’s most famous poems, with a foreword by Peter Harness.
If you stop and look around you, you’ll start to see. Tall marigolds darkening. A spring wind blowing. The woods awake with sound. On the wooden porch, your love smiling. Dew-wet red berries in a cup. On the hills, the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. The fowls singing and then settling for the night. Bright, silent, thousands of stars. You come into the peace of simple things. Tender and intimate, these poems are consoling songs of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging. They celebrate and elevate what is sensuous about life, and invite us to pause and appreciate what is good in life, to stop and savour our fleeting moments of earthly enjoyment. And, when fear for the future keeps us awake at night, to come into the peace of wild things.
Kahlil Gibran’s classic collection of poetic essays touching on subjects from love and friendship to pain and freedom.
The collected works of Ireland’s greatest lyric poet with an introduction by author and academic Dr Robert Mighall.
This collection of poems contains erotic, playful and provocative line drawings by the author, which interact in unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is at times darkly humorous.
