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.

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.

Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 1911–1996) is widely recognized as the most significant writer in Scots Gaelic of the 20th century, who brought this ancient poetic tradition into the modern world. This definitive edition includes everything MacLean published in his lifetime, restoring suppressed passages from his love sequence Dain do Eimhir and his political epic about the Highland clearances An Cuilithionn. The Gaelic originals are presented opposite their English translations, many by the poet himself.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

'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.

This anthology brings together poems by 21 authors, including Wilfred Owen, DH Lawrence and Katharine Tynan, to illustrate how contemporary responses to the First World War changed from an initial excitement at the opportunity to display courage and chivalry, through years of bitterness and rage, to calls for compassion and reconciliation. The poems are juxtaposed with paintings, mostly from the Imperial War Museum’s collection, which depict wartime scenes on and off the battlefield.