Showing titles in Poetry

Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral.

Everyone knows something of Shakespeare's sonnets, even if only in memorable fragments like "the darling buds of May", or "remembrance of things past", or "the marriage of true minds". For centuries these wonderfully crafted, intense lyrics have stood for something valued about youth, love, and the emotional complexities belonging to that time of life. This new recording presents all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, using the New Cambridge Shakespeare texts.

For every moment in your life there is a poem. In Dancing by the Light of the Moon, we have a remarkable collection of over 250 best-loved poems in the English-speaking world. Allow Gyles Brandreth to be your guide to not only the wonders of poetry - and there are many - but also its practical uses in everyday life.

Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.... Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers and listeners with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human - via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. This new edition celebrates Maggie Nelson’s uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape.

Change is in the air... Down Gilead Lane! College life for Brooke, a new addition to the family, and the office of Mayor for John - all situations that can bring stress, discomfort - and opportunities to trust. The Morrisons learn to turn to God for the answers to all of these changes and more in 12 compelling episodes.

So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West—a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?

One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, the Homeric saga of the shipwrecks, wanderings, and homecoming of the master tactician Odysseus encompasses a virtual inventory of the themes and attitudes that have shaped Western culture. The tale of Odysseus' encounters with such obstacles as Calypso, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the lotus-eaters, and his dramatic return to Ithaca and his patient wife, Penelope, forms a prototype for all subsequent Western epics.

The 12 Lays of Marie de France offer one of the most striking collections of short narrative poems of the 12th century - two centuries before Chaucer. Written in Anglo-French, they contain beguiling and entertaining stories of love and romance, of chivalry and adventure with sometimes even a magical twist. They are especially unique in early literature by being ascribed to a female poet, Marie de France: in the very first Lay - 'Guigemar' - is the introductory line: ‘Hear my Lords, what Marie says, who does not wish to be forgotten in her time.’

Prodigy Akiane Kramarik shares her artwork, poetry, and the fascinating story surrounding her talent. Growing up in a home with an atheistic mother and a non-participating Catholic father did not stop four-year-old Akiane Kramarik from finding God. This girl's dreams began a conversation in the home that has eventually brought them all to Christianity and the world's attention. Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry is a collection of the best of Akiane's full-color paintings and poetry created from ages 4 to 10.

Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory.

Sophisticated wit and intense emotion, religious fervor and erotic sensuality, delight in life’s pleasures and fascination with death, are all to be found in the paradoxical poetry of John Donne. One of the foremost metaphysical poets, Donne’s ingenious metaphors and inspired use of language has earned him affection and reverence in near equal measure to Shakespeare.

Three-time Christy Award winner Davis Bunn collaborates with Janette Oke to evoke the tumult of first-century Judea in the wake of Christ’s crucifixion. Although she prefers service in Pontius Pilate’s palace to a loveless marriage, Leah is betrothed to a Roman centurion. Before he can have Leah, however, he must go on a secret mission. But when a rabbi’s missing body sends Leah and Alban after the same answers, what they discover could change all they hold dear.

A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us. Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a “passionate madman.” Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living.

Since it was first published more than 25 years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of The Iliad are compared. Fitzgerald's work is accessible, ironic, faithful, written in a swift vernacular blank verse that "makes Homer live as never before" ( Library Journal).

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems - but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition. This volume presents the 1855 "Leaves of Grass" in its entirety, unchanged, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son was originally published in the 1953 edition of Essays and Studies. In December of that year, J.R.R. Tolkien took possession of a reel-to-reel tape recorder and, some time during the first few months of 1954, decided to record ‘the whole thing on tape’ as a way of ‘testing’ the performative quality of the dramatic dialogue between Tídwald and Torhthelm.

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive - the second book in a planned experimental triptych - is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm.