Poetry

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.

Best known as a writer of prose, Laurie Lee (1914–1997) was also a gifted poet. This selection of poems from his three published collections was made by the poet himself and re-issued to mark the centenary of his birth.

Inspired by the series of poetry evenings organized by Josephine Hart at the British Library, Words That Burn presents more than 50 poems, both on the page and in audio format on a CD of live readings by great actors. Hart's brief introductions outline the lives of the poets, who range from Milton to Robert Lowell, drawing attention to the themes and techniques which are prominent in the selected texts.

Ana Sampson has put together a delightful collection of verse by more than 80 poets, dating from the 13th century to the present day, whose work has proved enduringly popular in schools and stuck, more or less accurately, in our memories. She has also provided entertaining notes on the poets and arranged the poems by themes such as the natural world, battle and talking to gods.

Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 1911–1996) is widely regarded as the most significant 20th-century writer in Scottish Gaelic. This complete edition highlights the breadth and ambition of his radical vision, and its relevance beyond his native land.

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.

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.

Though 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.

‘To the agnostic as well as the devout,’ writes Kevin Gardner, ‘the need to remember what is almost forgotten has remained a powerful poetic urge.’ His anthology comprises more than 90 poems on English churches, written by post-war poets including Sir John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Fleur Adcock and Simon Armitage, and sharing an elegiac mood inspired by the architecture of church buildings, their place in a changing landscape and their significance as sites of collective memory.

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.

Born in Suffolk in 1803, Susanna Moodie was already a successful creative writer when her family emigrated to Canada in 1832 and adjusting to life in the backwoods was hard. Susanna’s book Roughing It in the Bush (1852) was Margaret Atwood’s inspiration for this illustrated book, a collaboration between poet and artist. The book was originally published in a limited edition in 1980; this facsimile edition includes a memoir by the artist, Charles Pachter. Slipcased. Off-mint.

The response of one writer to the work of another can be doubly illuminating. In this series a contemporary poet introduces and selects works by a poet of the past that they have particularly admired.

Although famous as a novelist, Vikram Seth had written three books of poetry before A Suitable Boy was published in 1993. In this volume the poems evoke a serene and melancholy awareness of the seasons passing, from summer's end to spring.

In the century between 1870 and 1970, some 27 million migrants left Italy to live and work abroad, a worldwide diaspora now exceeding 60 million. This heavyweight volume is the first international selection of works by more than 70 Italian-language poets writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. The poems are grouped geographically, with a critical overview and brief biography of each poet, and the English translations are given en face.

Arsenii Tarkovsky’s first collection of poems was published in 1962; the same year, his son’s first feature film won the Golden Lion at Cannes. This collection of Arsenii’s poems, with introductory essays, explores the relation between poet and filmmaker.

In an A–Z of poems, from ‘Above all rivers thy river hath renown’ by William Dunbar to ‘The Wye Below Bredwardine’ by John Powell Ward, this anthology brings together more than 180 poems celebrating the importance of rivers in our lives and imaginations.

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.

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.

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.

'My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.' The response of Wilfred Owen to the war around him is just one of the many poems by British, Irish, Australian, Canadian, French and German writers in this evocative anthology. The poems' themes are echoed in paintings by artists including Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. With an introduction and biographical notes on the poets and artists.

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. 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.