Everyman's Library POCKET POETS - Böcker

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.

‘‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument,’’ said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets. The sonnets in this collection – whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair or celebration – reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines. Here are classics such as Milton’s ‘‘On His Blindness’’, Yeats’s ‘‘Leda and the Swan’’ and Frost’s ‘‘The Oven Bird’’, juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke’s ‘‘Sonnet Reversed’’, the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn’s ‘‘Caring for Surfaces’’ and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin’s ‘‘To Failure’’. From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring. This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter – a marvellous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s ‘‘Love Misinterpreted’’ to Noël Coward’s ‘‘Mad About the Boy,’’ from May Swenson’s ‘‘Symmetrical Companion’’ to Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘‘Looking at Each Other,’’ these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind's nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea-pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis-have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed.This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson's seductive sea-fairies next to Poe's beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge's darkly brooding "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five." And here is Masefield's "I must go down to the seas again" alongside Cavafy's "Ithaka" and Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." In the wide variety of lyrics collected here-sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers-we feel the encompassing power of our planet's restless

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

In this enchanting collection, favourite bed-time songs for children – 'Rock-a-bye, Baby', 'Bye, Baby Bunting', 'Golden Slumbers' – mingle with less familiar lullabies from around the world. Added to these are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to your little ones, from Brahms's 'Lullaby' to Gershwin's 'Summertime'; from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen Titania to Langston Hughes's lullaby for a 'night black baby'.Here, too, are nursery rhymes, and poems for older children by a wide variety of authors – Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot and Ogden Nash, to name but a few. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there is something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult.

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.

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.

Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry, and this anthology offers a treasury of poems as varied and vital as the music that inspired them.From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Movement, from the poets of the New York School to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force. We hear it the poems of Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyaka, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty and C.D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and also poems that themselves throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

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.

If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.

According to the Kama Sutra, the erotic handbook written two thousand years ago, when the wheel of ecstasy is in motion "there is no textbook at all, and no order." Indian Love Poems is a unique gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalog the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora.Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire-both male and female-in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.

The blues has left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes and "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden, to "Blues on Yellow" by Marilyn Chin and "Reservation Blues" by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues--inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics-poems in their own right-from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters.The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

This collection includes, of course, such celebrated poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade." There are extracts from all the major masterpieces-"Idylls of the King," "The Princess," "In Memoriam"-and several complete long poems, such as "Ulysses" and "Demeter and Persephone," that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as "Come into the Garden, Maud" and "Break, Break, Break," for which he is justly celebrated.

Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one's own experience. From the embattled farmers who "fired the shot heard round the world" in the stirring "Concord Hymn," to the flower in "The Rhodora," whose existence demonstrates "that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being," Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature. Combining intensity of feeling with his famous idealism, Emerson's poems reveal a moving, more intimate side of the man revered as the Sage of Concord.

Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems," the shape of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet who admonished his readers to "dare to be true." An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from "The Collar" and "Jordan" to "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.

The feline has inspired poetic adoration since the days of the pharaohs, and the poems collected here cover an astonishing range of periods, cultures, and styles. Poets across the continents and centuries have described the feline family-from kittens to old toms, pussycats to panthers-doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves. Here are Yeats's Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart's Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, T. S. Eliot's Rum Tum Tugger, William Blake's tyger and Rilke's panther. Here are tributes from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan, from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr. Seuss.The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace, and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example: "Don't you fall now- / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Brontë's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

In time for this year's Halloween revels comes a horrible array of spectres and sorcerers, ghosts and demons, hags and apparitions. From Homer and Horace via Pope and Poe to Graves and Hardy, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil summons Aeneas's wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. Ballads, odes, spells, chants, dialogues, incantations - here is a veritable witch's brew of poems from the spirit world.More than 670,000 copies sold worldwide of our 25 Pocket Poet anthologies.

A collection of poems which capture the experience of solitude- by day or night, in the city or in the country, in waking or in dreams. There are contented reveries, expressions of loneliness and despair, reflections on mind and soul, and meditations recorded in the stillness of the night. Poets can be said to be the custodians of the interior life, and from Sappho's "Tonight I've watched" to Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and from Yeats's communion with 'the deep heart's core' in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" to Bei Dao's veneration of "Ordinary Days", some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet's art. And for readers who either seek or escape from solitude,all of the poets in this anthology - from Sappho and Callimachus to Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur - offer words to console and inspire. They remind us that in cultivating solitude we explore the limits of our imaginations and realize our mostprofound feelings and needs.

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.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.

The 1200 or so letters of Mozart and his family form the most fascinating correspondence by any artist of the eighteenth century or earlier, and Mozart himself ranks high among letter writers of any age or occupation. A vivd and amzingly detailed picture emerges of Mozart's career as performer, teacher and composer, as well as a lively account of contemporary musical politics in the courts and opera houses of Europe. The inclusion of letters from his father, a dominant but loving parent determined to supervise his son's career evern after he had grown up, highlights the problems which Mozart encountered in breaking with his provincial background, as well as providing a glimpse of the social and domestic details that tell us so much about the kind of person Mozart was and how he lived. The correspondence ends with the pathetic begging letters of his last years and the touching, adoring yet protective letters to his wife. This edition is being published in May 2006 to coincide with the 250th anniversay of Mozart's birth. The selection has been made from the classic translation by Emily Anderson.

China has a strong and ancient tradition of erotic poetry by both men and women, and this unique collection includes poems from three thousand years ago to the present day, ranging from the highly literary to the sexually explicit - many of them appearing in English for the first time. While literary poets such as Zi Ye ('Lady Midnight') and Emperor Li Yu of the Tang Dynasty are already known in the West, popular Chinese verse has been largely ignored by translators. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping mine a richly erotic vein, uncovering ancient Chinese Daoist sex manuals, erotic novels and plays (which contain poems at moment of sexual epiphany); the tradition of erotic prints, which were often accompanied by poems; folksongs and bawdy jokes. The contrast between the discretion and subtlety of classical Chinese erotic poetry and the earthy comedy of its popular counterpart makes for a fascinating and entertaining anthology.

A best seller in his lifetime though neglected in recent years, Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) is due to be restored to his rightful place in literary history as one of the first of the great American Modernist poets. His poetry was revolutionary, though because it was written in metre and rhyme it looked deceptively conventional. He cast aside the stiff archaism and prettiness favoured by his contemporaries, employing instead everyday language with dramatic power, wit and sensitivity. His lyric poems illuminate the most unlikely subjects - ordinary people, especially the downtrodden, the bereft and the mistunderstood. In the process he created the gallery of character portraits for which he is most fondly remembered, among them Eben Flood, Aunt Imogen, Isaac and Archibald, Miniver Cheevy and Richard Cory.Scott Donaldson, editor of this volume, is the author of a forthcoming biography of Robinson, to be published in February 2007.

The perfect gift for poetry lovers. A comprehensive collection of the Scottish Bard's songs and poems.The 19th-century scholar and educationalist J S Blackie summed up Burns's importance to Scotland and the Scots with the words:'When Scotland forgets Burns, then history will forget Scotland.'Today, Burns is unique in the affection and fascination that his memory inspires. The fruits of his legacy can be seen not only in Scotland but around the world - on product packaging, in advertising and on a wealth of merchandise, as well as through continued scholarship and academic study.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is perhaps the most controversial major English poetof the last two centuries, not least because of his apparent enthusiasm for the empire. A child of British India, he first became famous for tales of imperial life, notably Kim, the Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads. Kipling wrote verse in every classical form from the epigram to the ode, but his most distinctive gift was for the ballads and narrative poems in which he draws vivid characters in universal situations and articulates profound truths in plain language. Yet he was also a subtle and deeply affecting anatomist of the human heart, with a feeling for the natural world which rivals his younger contemporary, D. H. Lawrence. Shattered by World War I in which he lost his only son, his work darkens and deepens in later years, but never loses its extraordinary vitality.