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In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. It was said that every British ‘Tommy’ in the First World War had a copy of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in his knapsack, its easy rhythms and themes of lost youth and early death resonating with soldiers’ experience. On this recording, Samuel West reads Housman’s loosely connected narrative of 63 poems.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. Simon Russell Beale and Sarah Woodward join Samuel West and Michael Sheen on this recording of some of Keats’s finest works, among them, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the Odes – to a Grecian Urn, to Melancholy and to a Nightingale.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. Showing the variety and richness of Kipling’s verse, this selection of 23 poems includes ‘If’, ‘Gunga Din’, ‘Mandalay’ and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ – some of the most popular poems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. Jeremy Northam reads 38 poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), including ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘God’s Grandeur’, ’The Windhover’ and an excerpt from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote 1,775 poems in her lifetime, but none were published until after her death; now she is considered one of America’s greatest writers. Here, Teresa Gallagher reads 147 of the poet’s best-known works.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. This selection of 30 pieces includes excerpts from ‘Prometheus Unbound’, ‘Adonaïs’ and ‘Queen Mab’ as well as shorter poems including ‘Ozymandias’, ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’.

In the Great Poets series, actors read substantial selections from the work of Britain and America’s most celebrated poets, including less familiar pieces as well as their most famous poems. Each audio book is a single CD with around 70 minutes running time. As well popular works such as ‘Tintern Abbey', ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, this selection of 28 poems includes excerpts from Books One, Five and Twelve of ‘The Prelude’.

With his boundless energy and capacity to delight and inspire, John Betjeman (1906–1984) was the best-loved poet of the late 20th century and, in the words of Andrew Motion, 'a television celebrity before the term was invented'. The Collected Poems first appeared in 1958 and through several editions has sold over two million copies. This expanded edition, published on the poet's centenary, includes Betjeman's verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, and a new Introduction by Andrew Motion.Slightly off-mint.

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This volume is the most complete edition to date of his poetry and verse translations, and the first critical edition. The contents establish a definitive text and canon for the poetry, including previously unpublished material, with extensive commentary and notes placing each poem in context and identifying resonances across Beckett's work as a whole.

Published for the Renaissance English Text Society, this ‘historical edition’ of Ralegh’s poetry draws on materials and findings that have emerged since Latham’s critical edition of 1951 and includes poems attributed in printed books and manuscripts, the ‘Cynthia’ holographs, verse translations from The History of the World and poems attributed posthumously. No jacket.

Clive James describes this collection of short poems as combining ‘American cultural information with a British range of tones’. The ‘information’ covers intriguing topics, including the fate of Nefertiti’s statue in Nazi Germany, being hospitalized for leukaemia and the Iliad Hollywood-style.

Clive James (1939-2019) was many things – critic, essayist, television presenter, travel writer – but his most enduring work is likely to be his poetry, which has delighted readers for decades. This selection, chosen by James himself, ranges over a lifetime’s work, from his early satires to late poems of valediction. Wise, witty and richly humane, these verses resonate with a love of language, which James deploys with surgical precision in the contemplation of life’s absurdities.

Jerome K Jerome’s account of Montmorency’s appalling behaviour; the coming of the Pekinese to England; a heartfelt epitaph to a Newfoundland dog by Lord Byron: Mark Bryant’s anthology is an engrossing collection of poetry and prose, arranged by themes including clever dogs, the hounds of hell, and in memoriam.

Alexander McCall Smith’s anthology of Scottish poems is arranged in eight parts, on themes including love and marriage, islands, and war, conflict and loss, with poets spanning the centuries, from William Dunbar in the 15th, to Hugh MacDiarmid and Kathleen Raine in the 20th.

In his instinctive understanding of nature and man’s relation to it, Edward Thomas wrote poetry that is, in the words of Matthew Hollis, ‘eerily attuned to our own ecological age’. This volume presents Thomas’s poetry, along with prose pieces and his diary entries from England and France in 1917.

Published after the poet’s death in 2013, this companion volume to New Selected Poems 1966–1987 covers the second half of Heaney’s career and the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Presenting selections made by the poet, the book begins with Seeing Things (1991), followed by The Spirit Level (1996), Beowulf (1999), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2012), and concluding with his final poem, ‘In Time’.

From the earliest recorded Old English poem, ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, translated here by Paul Muldoon, to ‘Us’ by Zaffir Kunial, writing in the 21st century, this outstanding collection traces a history of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in poetry. Encompassing every kind of poem, from solemn elegy to nonsense rhyme, these are the findings of Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke’s ‘poetry treasure-hunt using a map and a clock to travel, and time-travel, these islands’.

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Christopher Carduff, this volume presents his personal selection of 129 poems by John Updike (1932–2009), ordered chronologically from ‘Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles are Cracked and Crooked’ (1953), to ‘Endpoint’, written shortly before his death.

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From the age of eleven, Jane Austen was writing short pieces of fiction, poetry and drama, often parodying contemporary novels and at times violent and risqué. She copied some of these stories into notebooks – ‘Volumes’ – for family and friends to read. This book presents a photographic facsimile of the first of the three surviving notebooks, offering a rare and sometimes quite shocking introduction to the young Austen, along with an introduction, ‘A Writer’s Apprenticeship’, by Kathryn Sutherland.

This is Seamus Heaney’s last completed work, an inspired translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas travels through death’s dark door, into the underworld to meet the spirit of his father. The poem is read here by Ian McKellen.

‘I used to think it was a narrow road/ From here to the underworld/ But it’s as broad as the sun’. Reflecting on mortality and her own journey, this was the final book by the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore (1952–2017). It was Costa Book of the Year, 2017.

Based on the authors’ 2007 edition of the Pearl manuscript, this volume provides close, accurate translations of the ‘superb, but linguistically difficult’ medieval English poems Pearl, Cleanness Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. No jacket.

Including designs suitable for all abilities, this collection includes a basic doll and bear (plus outfits to dress them in) and a menagerie of animals. Each project is illustrated with photographs.

Vanessa Mooncie’s designs for an entire menagerie of hats provide easy-to-follow instructions intended for knitters of all abilities. These fun hats in adult and children’s sizes range from a smart-suited penguin to a floppy-eared bunny, and the appendix explains how to line your hat and provides a guide to basic techniques, a glossary of abbreviations, conversion charts and a list of suppliers.

‘Cat: a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs and patronizes human beings’, wrote Oliver Herford (1863–1935) – but far from taking offence, we have sung the praises of cats in poetry and prose since the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead asked, ‘Who is this Cat?’ This anthology is arranged by theme, from the ‘Fireside Phoenix’ to ‘Requiescat’, and includes writers and poets from Aesop to Jerome K Jerome – and many famous literary cats.

This anthology brings together poetic responses to 80 great composers, from the Renaissance to the 21st century. The texts include John Dryden’s ode on the death of Purcell, Elizabeth Jennings’ poem on Mozart’s Horn Concertos and Michael Longley on Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.

Dating back to the seventh century, Irish verse ranges from the brief ‘Advice to Lovers’ to the epic Finn Cycle. This collection of accessible modern translations includes versions by Seamus Heaney, WH Auden, Kathleen Jamie, Paul Muldoon and Maurice Riordan, who also provides a historical introduction.

The Bellman, with his crew of Barrister, Beaver and Butcher, Baker and Banker, sets off in search of the Snark again, but this time his strange quest is recorded in drawings by the Tove Jansson, the creator of Moomin. The pictures, originally drawn for a Swedish-language edition in 1959, breathe new life into the English text of this wonderful adventure. Slightly off-mint. Felt tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

The renowned translator Walter Arndt (1916–2011) presents a collection of Pushkin’s narrative, lyric, polemic and ribald verse with three versions of each poem: the original Russian, a close translation into English, and a poetic verse translation that aims to capture the form and spirit of the original.

For this Naxos audiobook, the Royal Shakespeare Company actor, Alex Jennings reads all 154 sonnets, using the New Cambridge Shakespeare texts, accompanied by lute music performed by Christopher Wilson.

Within the framework of Shakespeare’s ‘Seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It, the 150 poems in this anthology are read by an extraordinary cast, including Dame Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine.

John Milton’s epic poem on the Fall of Man, in which the poet aimed to ‘justifie the wayes of God to men’ is presented here, unabridged, in a highly acclaimed reading by Anton Lesser. The complete text can be copied onto a hard drive from the final CD.

Although renowned for epics such as Don Juan, Byron wrote many memorable shorter works: this recording presents 32 complete short poems, among them 'She Walks in Beauty' and 'Prometheus', read by Simon Russell Beale.

On this recording from Naxos’ The Great Poets series, a Scot, the actor Forbes Masson, reads 25 works by Scotland’s most famous poet. The selection includes all Burns’s most popular poems, including, A Red, Red Rose, The Jolly Beggars, Address to the Haggis and Auld Lang Syne. 1 CD: 1hr 18mins.

Including poems from Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Poetical Sketches and Jerusalem, poetry from Blake’s notebooks and, of course, ‘The Tyger’, this collection of 42 works is read by Robert Glenister, Michael Maloney and Stephen Crithlow.

Between Anne Bradstreet (1612–72) and Alice Walker (b.1944) the major American poets represented here include Longfellow, Emily Dickinson and Whitman; plus popular anonymous works such as Frankie and Johnny and music from Grofe, Gershwin and Macdowell.

This volume starts with the Wife of Bath’s expert discourse on marriage (she has had five husbands), and continues with the tales told by the Clerk, the Reeve and the Nun’s Priest.

Beginning with The Charge of the Light Brigade, this fine selection of Tennyson’s poetry includes The Lady of Shallot and Morte D’Arthur in their entirety and excerpts from In Memoriam, read by Michael Pennington.