Peter Washington – författare

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover collection that draws on a wide variety of translations of Rumi’s deeply moving, sensually vibrant poetry.The poetry of the medieval Persian sage Rumi combines lyrical beauty with spiritual profundity, a sense of rapture, and acute awareness of human suffering in ways that speak directly to contemporary audiences. Trained in Sufism—a mystic tradition within Islam—Rumi founded the Sufi order known to us as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. Many of Rumi’s poems speak of a yearning for ecstatic union with the divine Beloved. But his images bring the sacred and the earthy together in startling ways, describing divine love in vividly human terms. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic.The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic.The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.

Tales about ghosts are as old as human culture itself but the ghost story as a distinguished literary form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As traditional religions declined in the West during those years, people looked for new ways of describing the spiritual realities explained by religion. The ghost story is a literary expression of this need, its rise corresponding to the growing popularity of Spiritualism. Ghost stories balance the increasingly powerful scientific materialism of the age with intimations that there are other orders of experience which we cannot define and only glimpse. The Everyman selection of ghost stories includes examples from this period by major writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James and Edith Wharton. M. R. James is featured as a specialist in the genre. Later writers include Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Lively and Ray Bradbury.One feature of this collection is to show that there is more to the ghost story than the thrill of horror, important though that is. These stories include comedy and tragedy, pathos, drama and even poetry. Each is a masterpiece in its own right, irrespective of whether or not we believe in the realm of spectres.

This is a glorious collection of some of the best sleuths in the business. It includes creators such as Poe and Conan Doyle to Hammet, Christie, Chandler, Rendell and Rankin.

Still little known in the West, Persian poetry offers extraordinary riches. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine and poetry itself, or telling anecdotes of everyday life, Persian poetry set these themes in the wider religious and philosophical context of Islam. Omar, Rumi, Saadi, Sanai, Attar, Hafez and Jami – the great lyric and didactic poets of medieval Persia – are all represented in this selection of translations spanning almost two hundred and fifty years.

This anthology of comic verse is drawn from sources which range from the Greek Anthology to the present day. Divided into thematic sections (to be determined) for case of use, it covers a wide range of forms including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets and nonsense verse. The prevailing tone is light, but satire and ridicule - even passion - have not been excluded

Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people’s lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Poems of Food and Drink abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations – in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plath’s ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in ‘Blackberrying’ to D. H. Lawrence’s lush celebration of ‘Figs’, from the civilized comfort of Noël Coward’s ‘Something on a Tray’ to the salacious provocation of Swift’s ‘Oysters’, from Li Po on ‘Drinking Alone’ to Baudelaire on ‘The Soul of the Wine’, and from Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’, Poems of Food and Drink serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.

Once confined to a literary elite in Japan, haiku are now written all over the world by poets who find their combination of brevity, technical discipline and expressive content irresistible. This collection brings together hundreds of poems by Japanese writers from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, with modern examples from Europe and America. In addition, there is a selection of poems influenced by haiku, and a section devoted to haiku-like passages from traditional English poets. The book is dominated by four great masters – Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki – who between them compress the gamut of human experience into the limits of seventeen syllables.

It is often said that Rumi (aka Jalal al-Din, 1207-73) is now the most popular poet in the United States. This conquest of the new world by a middle-eastern medieval writer who died before Chaucer was even born has been achieved with extraordinary speed in less than thirty years.The main key to Rumi's success is the spiritual appeal of his work. It combines lyrical beauty with philosophical profundity, a sense of rapture and an acute awareness of human suffering in ways which speak directly to contemporary audiences. Like the metaphysical poets, Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Rumi yokes together everyday images with complex ideas. He talks about divine love in vivid human terms. As a religious teacher of the Dervish order, he expounds the mystical doctrines of Sufism which focus on the notion of union with the Beloved to whom many of the poems are addressed.Persian poetry of this period is not easy to translate. In order to give the greatest possible access to a wonderful poet this selection draws on avariety of translations from the early 20th century to the present, ranging from scholarly renderings to free interpretations.

Ever since Pushkin, Russian poets have been famous for their ability to combine private and public experience in lyric poetry of a comprehensiveness and intensity unmatched elsewhere. Ranging in extremes from the melting tenderness of unrequited love to the bitter comedy of political chaos, this collection of poems covering two centuries includes work by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, Annensky,Mayakovsky, Bely, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky and others less celebrated but no less extraordinary. The text is divided into six sections. Russian poets constantly reflect on their art, so the first section is appropriately entitled 'The Muse'. Their other great topic is Russia herself, explored in parts two and three. Part four presents the inner world, parts five and six traditional themes of love and mortality. Poetry has often been a matter of life and death in Russia, where Mandelstam was not the only poet to perish in the Gulag. The comfortable private domain familiar to many English and American writers barely exists in a country where political realities are exigent - one reason for the fierce intensity found in so many of these poems.

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul.

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS. Assembled in this beautifully created pocket gift hardback is a wide range of erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.

There are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking Back

The pieces in this volume are taken from all religions and traditions with the purpose of providing material for prayer and meditation. They are arranged in seven sections following the Canonical Hours of the Chruch: Matins, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. Each section gathers poems and prose according to theme and mood and suiting the hours of the day. Sources include Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, Christina Rossetti, Cowper, St Anselm, Cardinal Newman, Bunyan, Blake, Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson, Herrick, Wesley, Mother Theresa, Tennyson, Spenser, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, St Francis, the Book of Common Prayer, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here are 200 irresistible love letters from over the centuries, love letters both historic and fictional, love letters by poets and by princes, love letters enchanting, tragic, comic, superbly selected, beautifully printed, conveniently portable, to have with you wherever and whenever you're in the mood for love.'There is such a strange and mysterious intimacy from exchanging letters. It mixes the emotional (the thoughts and sentiments) and the physical (writing it down). All in all this is both a fun yet stirring collection.'

This is the fourth volume in the series of Everyman Pocket Poet Love Poems, following the success of Love poems, Erotic Poems and Love Letters. LOVE SONGS AND SONNETS takes a wider view of love, covering all aspects of human relationships, from passionate first love to fianl regret. Includes poems by Shakespere, Donne, Dickinson, Lowell. Larkin, Herbet, Horace, Hardy, Rilke, Auden and Burns - and many more. Published in good time for Valentine's Day 1997.

The great Roman poets of Antiquity wrote some of the most compelling lyrical poetry of all time, to be read privately but also on occasion to be performed publicly on the field of victory, at a banquet or at a public festival. With a freshness that belie the nearly two thousand years that separate us Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Propertius and Catullus write movingly of the pleasures of love, of wine, of nature and the joys of pastoral life, a city and its contrasts, of friendship and of death. This edition brings together an exceptional selection with translations by Christpoher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Robert Herrick, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Alfred Tennyson, A. E. Houseman and Rudyard Kipling. This edition is illustrated with the magnificent classical engravings of Johannes Pine's great edition of Horace of 1737. Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today. Horace's ode iii, tr. by John Dryen

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.