Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) is famous as the author of The Decameron, but his Latin Eclogues are relatively unknown. Engaging and charming in themselves, these bucolic poems also address political issues of their day and offer insights into life in Renaissance Italy. They are translated here, with an introduction, by the poet and critic David Slavitt.

Keeping true to the style of the originals, the poet and translator David Slavitt renders John Milton’s Latin poems in deft and imaginative modern English. Introduced by Gordon Teskey, this collection is in three parts with titles referring to the metre of the poems: the elegies and epigrams and ‘The Book of the Woods’, containing various metres. Slightly off-mint.

First published in 1909, Apollinaire’s first book of poetry is here translated by XJ Kennedy, whose introductory essay, ‘A Natural History of the Poet’, describes this partly autobiographical work as containing ‘the genetic code’ of the later poetry. Recalling a medieval bestiary, the 30 short poems, in both French and English translation, are accompanied by 30 woodcuts by Raoul Dufy. American cut pages.

The first half of this collection, ‘My Own Blue Eye’, reflects on dreams, visions, identity, character and the passing of time. The second, ‘Laurels and Donkeys’, responds to the poets of the First World War and the ravages of today’s conflicts.

Selected by the late poet and scholar Suheil Bushrui, the 200 poems in this anthology include Arabic masterpieces by Rumi and Omar Khayyam, and Western classics from Sappho and Homer to Shakespeare and Donne. Ancient Chinese verses also feature, and examples from the indigenous peoples of Africa, Australasia and the Americas. Grouped by theme, they explore the many facets of love – desire and longing, joy and sorrow, and sensual and spiritual love.

Dante's great poem, the first book written in Italian, begins with his descent through nine circles of Hell to the lake of ice where Lucifer is trapped for all eternity. In this edition of Longfellow's verse translation, the Inferno's 34 cantos are each preceded by a brief introduction and illustrated with a selection of artists' representations of the Last Judgement, the landscape of Hell and scenes from Dante's infernal voyage of self-discovery.

In scrutinizing WH Auden’s September 1, 1939, Ian Sansom borrows two questions recommended by Auden himself for the study of a poem: ‘How does it work? And what kind of guy inhabits this poem?’ Sansom argues that this work offers a glimpse of the writer reinventing himself at a culminating moment in world affairs, and seeks to show why this poem is a masterpiece and how it has been incorporated into people’s lives.

This volume analyses the complexity and innovation of the two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and explains their major themes and characters as well as investigating who Homer was and the continuing resonance of his literature.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is considered one of the greatest works of English literature, yet is little read today, largely on account of its complexity. John Carey’s edition presents substantial extracts, including the work’s finest poetry, with linking passages that preserve its epic sweep while explaining the narrative, the ideas, and the protagonists’ motivations.

Although famous now for his Gothic horror tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was, first and foremost, a poet: The Raven and Other Poems brought him fame – but not fortune – when it was published in 1845. This collection covers the full range of Poe’s poetry, and includes a selection of prose poems.

Introduced and selected by the award-winning novelist Andrew O’Hagan, this anthology of Burns’s verse is arranged around the topics of love, drink and politics, and includes favourites such as ‘A Red, Red Rose’, 'The Silver Tassie’ and ‘To a Mouse’.

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.

Dante, with Virgil as his guide, descends through the circles of Hell, from the limbo of the unbaptized to Lucifer and Judas Iscariot in the deepest chasm. This is the first part of The Divine Comedy, translated by Longfellow in 1867, and now presented in Canterbury Classics’ Word Cloud series. Flexibound in mock leather with foil embossed quotations. Off-mint.

An ideal introduction to the poetry of WB Yeats (1865–1939), this selection of 75 works, including the famous ‘Easter 1916' and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, traces the development of Yeats’s verse and demonstrates his interest in Irish folklore and national identity, the occult, and contemporary politics. Selected, with notes and extra material by the poet JG Nichols.

In this verse memoir Andrew Motion recalls the experiences that have influenced his life and art: his mother’s riding accident and lingering death, his widowed father’s dementia, and an unexpected meeting with an old love.

From Heinrich Heine’s humorous ‘The Morning After’ to Louis de Berniere’s more intense ‘A Love Foretold’, this diverse anthology covers a wide range of sensual poetic expression. Predominantly by Western writers including John Donne, DH Lawrence and Carol Ann Duffy, the 45 works are complemented by erotic illustrations by artists such as Rodin, Klimt and Schiele. Sexually explicit.

From John Donne, through the great poets of the Romantic era – Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley – to WB Yeats in the early 20th century, this set of ten volumes presents the work of some of the most important and best-loved poets in the English language. Each book comprises a representative collection of poems, with a short introduction, and the set includes an eleventh volume, a journal. The other poets are Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde.

In this collaboration between poet and painter, Derek Walcott, born and living in St Lucia, responds to each of 50 paintings by Peter Doig, the Scottish-born figurative artist now resident in Trinidad. Together, their works enter a dialogue on the Caribbean’s colonial legacy, home and the boundaries of art.

‘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.

Before his early death, Robert Fergusson (1750–74) created a substantial body of verse, and Burns acknowledged the influence of its humour, vigour and craft. This edition contains all his Scots poems and a selection of those in English, along with an introduction and notes.

This poem describes Dorothy’s birthday on Christmas Day at the Wordsworths’ cottage in the Lake District, from before dawn, through a day spent with Coleridge and William, to ‘bawling the chorus’ with carol singers in the evening. Illustrated by Tom Duxbury.

‘Bored, the Baron mooched in his Manor/ on the brink of belligerence. Life lacked glamour/ and Christmas was coming.’ To liven things up, they appoint a peasant (‘anarchic fellow/ in pantaloons of violent yellow’) to be the King of Christmas. Illustrated by Lara Hawthorne.

An old Irish legend has it that St Stephen was betrayed by a wren’s song, and on St Stephen’s Day, boys hunt the wren and try to capture it by nightfall. On this December 26th, will the hunters succeed, or resort to subterfuge? Illustrated by Dermot Flynn.

A successor to TS Eliot's Book of Practical Cats, this illustrated collection of poems introduces remarkable canine characters from Flo the philosophical foxhound to Dog Juan, the Lothario of north London.

All three books of Dante’s Divine Comedy, narrating the poet’s journey through the circles of ‘Inferno’ and climbing the mountain of ‘Purgatorio’ to the earthly ‘Paradiso’, are presented here in the classic 1867 verse translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Chosen by the poet himself and described by Michael Hofmann as ‘a gift to old and new readers alike’, this selection comprises five poems from each of twelve published collections, from his first, New Weather, released in 1973 when Muldoon was a student at Queens University, Belfast, to One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), which includes ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, in memory of his mentor, Seamus Heaney.

Clive James describes these poems as combining ‘American cultural information with a British range of tones’, and they deal with intriguing subjects, including the fate of Nefertiti’s statue in Nazi Germany, Whitman’s final moments and the Iliad, Hollywood-style. Off-mint.

The great Persian poet Rumi (1207–73) was inspired by his eccentric spiritual guide Shams to compose these lyrical odes as metaphors for his love of God. Cowan’s translation presents 49 poems, with an introduction on the men’s deep friendship and their contribution to Islamic spirituality.

In this cultural history of the First World War, the conflict and the tremendous changes it wrought are seen from the perspective of poets and writers from all over Britain and Europe, including those who wrote propaganda or embraced the new violence, as well as more familiar 'war poets'.

To understand the nature of poetry and the power it exerts over heart and mind, Verity surveys the work of poets and the impact of their work, discussing and quoting lines by over 200 poets, from the anonymous author of Epic of Gilgamesh in around 2000 BCE to TS Eliot in the 20th century. Off-mint.

The best-loved British poet of the late 20th century, John Betjeman (1906–1984) was, in the words of Andrew Motion, 'a television celebrity before the term was invented'. This expanded edition of the Collected Works includes Betjeman's verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, and a new Introduction by Andrew Motion.

Edited, with an introduction, by the poet Michael Longley, this selection of war poetry by Robert Graves (1895–1985) includes the poems written at the Front and some, such as 'A Letter from Wales', written in retrospect during the 1920s. The book is part of Faber's Poets of the Great War series.

Although best remembered today as the author of the Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) was also a brilliant and prolific illustrator. This collection of nursery rhymes, first published in 1940, brings his dark magic to such perennial favourites as 'Rub-a-Dub-Dub', 'Sing a Song of Sixpence' and 'Little Jack Horner'.

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’.

Best known as a novelist, John Updike was also an accomplished poet. The 129 observations on life, love, art and science collected here are arranged chronologically to form a verse diary spanning his entire career and include such favourites as ‘Seagulls’ and 'Dog’s Death’. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Originally published in 1933, this little book of witty epigrams and epitaphs by the English writer and poet Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) is illustrated with wood-engravings by Eric Ravilious (1903–1942). The subjects of the verses are 54 professionals or types, ranging from a judge to a snuff-taker and a ‘boarding-house lift man’; and each one is accompanied by its own woodcut.

This anthology, which was first published in 1964, is designed as an introduction to a cross-section of poetry, in the original Latin, from the late Republic and early Empire. It presents 36 passages, in different genres and styles, by such authors as Catullus, Virgil and Juvenal. There are short introductions to each extract, detailed notes on language and content and a full vocabulary. Off-mint.

Both a critic and an acclaimed practitioner, Clive James (1939-2019) devoted a lifetime to poetry. In this collection of essays he distils all he has learnt about the art form to explain the formal structures and choice of words that give poetry its unique power. Blending erudition, insight and wit, he ranges across the panorama of 20th-century poetry, from Hart Crane to Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton to Ted Hughes, paying close attention to his favourites: Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur and Larkin.

Margaret Atwood’s inspiration for this collection of poems was Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush, in which the Suffolk-born writer recorded her life as a settler in the Canadian backwoods in the 1830s. Covering Moodie’s arrival in the country, her move to Belleville and her later years, the poems were published in a limited edition in 1980 with illustrations by Charles Pachter. This facsimile edition includes a memoir by Pachter. Slipcased. Off-mint.

From ‘A Medieval Schoolboy’s Complaint’ to Gillian Clarke’s ‘Catrin’, this collection of poems celebrates children, childhood and being a parent. The poems are arranged by ages, from infancy to schooldays – not forgetting childhood ailments in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Land of Counterpane’.

The second stage in Dante's journey to redemption, Purgatory is presented here in a verse translation by JG Nichols, with English and the original Italian on facing pages, notes and a concise introduction to each canto.

In this volume from the Faber and Faber Poet-to-Poet series, Stephen Romer introduces his choice of poems by Robert Herrick (1591–1674). Most of the selections are from the Cavalier poet’s Hesperides (1648) with its wine, women and song, but there are some works from Noble Numbers, Herrick’s ‘pious pieces’.

Our language is full of well-worn phrases from much-loved poems, but how often can we recall the rest of the poem, or the first line, or even the poet's name? This anthology presents the complete poems that gave us such immortal lines as 'Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink', 'not waving but drowning' and 'They also serve who only stand and waite'. The poems are arranged chronologically, from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, and indexed by title and the famous bits.

No jacket.

The popular ideal of the 'inspired' artist - beautiful, brooding and damned - owes its origins to the poets, writers and artists of the Romantic period. In this volume from the National Portrait Gallery's Insight series, Richard Holmes explores the portraits and the lives of the Romantics in a series of more than 28 subtly interwoven biographies, ranging from William Blake to JMW Turner, and including Byron, Shelley, Keats and the circle that formed around Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Chaucer is justly regarded as the father of English poetry for his wit, vivid characterization and narrative verve. This selection includes The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women and generous extracts from The Canterbury Tales. A general introduction outlines what is known of his life and work, while each poem is preceded by an illuminating commentary and accompanied by a glossary explaining unfamiliar words.

This collection contains Forster’s delightful and essays on subjects as diverse as Mickey Mouse, English liberty, life in India, writers such as Woolf, Conrad and Proust, and the two pageants he wrote for his Surrey village of Abinger.

Beginning with Wings (1906), Russia’s first gay-themed novel, this selection of works by Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) includes 13 short stories, two collections of poetry (The Trout Breaks the Ice and Alexandrian Songs) and a play. Translated, edited and introduced by Michael Green.

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.

Carol Ann Duffy’s last collection as Poet Laureate is a fitting culmination to her term in office. Looking both inwards on the personal life and outwards to a world in political turmoil, these verses reflect on youth, adulthood, bereavement and the passage of time.

Recorded in February 1980, in the garage of Larkin’s friend John Weeks, the two Sunday Sessions tapes contain 26 poems from four collections: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. The tapes were found in the garage in 2006 and are released on a vinyl LP recording, as befits Larkin’s love of records.

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.

Born in Dublin, Walter Quin (d. 1640) was poet to the Stuart court and his poetry and prose (in English, Latin, French and Italian) includes works in support of James VI, along with historical and philosophical writing. This first edition of Quin’s work includes a biographical introduction and translations of his non-English texts.

Originally composed around 1187 by an anonymous poet, The Song of Igor’s Campaign is a celebrated work of early Russian literature, and the basis of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. It is translated here by Nabokov with extensive, illuminating notes.

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.

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.

This collection, put together by one of Scotland’s best-known storytellers, celebrates the rich tradition of Scottish playground songs and rhymes; some hundreds of years old, others adapted or created by more recent generations of children. From ‘baloos’, or lullabies, with accompanying actions, to singing and counting games and clapping songs, these verses chart an alternative history north of the border.

To commemorate the First World War, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy asked modern poets to select a war poem and respond in verse. The resulting anthology contains familiar works by the great war poets as well as that of writers such as Akhmatova, Apollinaire and Trakl. Modern contributors include Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and Duffy herself.

'Once upon a time there were three little foxes Who didn’t wear stockings, and they didn’t wear sockses, But they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses, And they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.' The sheer fun of AA Milne’s poems, with their child’s view of the world and irresistible wordplay, has easily survived the century since they first appeared, while remaining evocative of British life in the 1920s. This book presents a selection from the two volumes of poetry on which Milne and his illustrator, EH Shepard collaborated: Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young.

Slightly off-mint.

First published shortly after her death, these poems by French Carmelite nun Elizabeth Catez (1880–1906) address themes including the Indwelling of the Trinity and the acceptance of suffering. Bancroft’s verse translation sets her poetry alongside prose passages by her contemporary, the celebrated Benedictine Abbot Marmion.

In a collection of 14 essays, this volume deals with classical Arabic poetry, defined here as covering a period from as early as c.500 CE to the consolidation of the High Ἁbbāsid court poetry in the late fourth/tenth century. Beginning with a study of oral composition in pre-Islamic poetry, the topics discussed include the uses of the form quaṣīda, animal nomenclature, and Ibn al-Rūmī’s singing slave-girl. No jacket.

Covering more than a hundred 19th-century American poets, arranged alphabetically from Henry Adams (1838–1918) to Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), the Encyclopedia comprises authoritative essays on the lives and writings of the poets, the provenance of their poetry, and its literary-historical and cultural significance.

This collection of verses by poets including Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Emily Brontë shows how the breadth of their interests defies the stereotype of the Victorian woman. The poems are paired with paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites, among them female artists such as Evelyn de Morgan and Kate Bunce, while the introduction explores the poets’ responses to love, the realities of life, and growing old.

Off-mint

‘Truth’ was the theme of the 25th National Poetry Day in 2019, and for this celebratory anthology a great range of people – writers, footballers, teachers and even an astronaut – were asked to nominate poems that spoke truth to them. The result was this volume of 100 ‘poems that matter’, whether dreaming of pleasure-domes with Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816) or facing the real and ‘half terrible’ world in Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones’ (2015).

In fiction, reportage and verse, writers including Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Jacob Ross and Andrew O’Hagan reflect on the diversity of contemporary London, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its streets and pubs, and its constantly evolving social landscape.

Written mainly in 2015–16, which Alice Walker describes as ‘a time of great sadness and feelings of loss and despair’, this volume comprises around 70 poems addressed to people around the world who have used their voice on behalf of the more vulnerable, starting with ‘The Long Road Home’, a poem for Muhammad Ali.

Since 1609, when they were first published, Shakespeare’s sonnets have fascinated readers, both with the depth of the poet’s insight into the variety of love and the passage of time and with the mysteries of the beautiful Young Man, the Rival Poet and the Dark Lady. This volume presents all 154 sonnets, with a brief introduction.

This selection of the finest works by the Lebanese-born American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) begins with the 26 fables of ‘The Prophet’ (1923), and presents seven more works in their entirety, including ‘Jesus, Son of Man’, ‘Sand and Foam’, and Gibran’s final prose poem, ‘The Earth Gods’.

Edinburgh’s brooding castle, steep slopes and far-reaching views have inspired poets for centuries. This thematically arranged collection celebrates the Scottish capital in the words of writers including Walter Scott and WE Henley. Robert Louis Stevenson explores the seamy side of ‘Auld Reekie’, William Dunbar excoriates its ‘stink of haddock’, while Liz Lochhead casts an ironic eye over its annual festival.

Celebrating the contributions to the English language made by 100 poets from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Ted Hughes and Mary Jo Salter, this collection introduces each one with a short biography and critical commentary. Every entry includes an excerpt which encapsulates the enduring nature of the writer’s work and how it has become integrated into everyday language.