From established poets such as Andrew Motion and James Fenton, to mid-career poets such as Glyn Maxwell and Kathleen Jamie, to recent T.S. Eliot Prize-winner Alice Oswald, the work is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with traditional forms and an exhilirating range of styles. --Graywolf Press.
Collects poems chosen by editor Denise Duhamel as the best of 2013, featuring 75 poets including Sherman Alexie, Daisy Fried, Elizabeth Hazen, and Noelle Kocot.
This Companion brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of post-war poetry.
Writing very bad poetry requires talent. It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence. The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius. From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism. Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).
Deep in limestone country, at the corner of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, lies the village of Coleshill. This haunting new collection from Fiona Sampson is a portrait of place, both real and imaginary; a dreamscape with its roots deep in the local soil. The poems hum with an evocative music of their own: there are hymns of the orchards, verses for walkers, songs for bees. These are slices of life and states of mind; poems of grief, fears and maledictions, but also of renewal, resurrections and the promise of spring. Coleshill emerges as a “parish of sun / and shade”; its darkness and light perfectly balanced. From the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet comes a deep, interrogative collection of astonishing clarity and power.
More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.
Burning Eye are to Spoken Word Poetry what City Lights were to the Beat Generation: indispensable champions and publishers dedicated to a distinctive literary movement. Editors Jenn Hart and Clive Birnie present the highlights from the first five years and one hundred Burning Eye books. Here are the hits and anthems; the foot-stomping, finger-clicking, belly-laugh inducing crowd-pleasers gathered togther under one cover. FEATURING: Dan Cockrill * Raymond Antrobus * Jack Dean Anna Freeman * Megan Beech * Emily Harrison Sally Jenkinson * Kirsten Luckins * Keith Jarrett Paula Varjack * Hannah M. Teasdale * Jeremy Toombs Liv Torc * Joelle Taylor * Agnes TÖrÖk Sophia Walker * Thommie Gillow * Rosy Carrick Tina Selderholm * Crysse Morrison * Lucy Lepchani Salena Godden * Jenn Hart * Sam Boarer A. F. Harrold * Harry Baker * Robert Garnham Matt Panesh * Ash Dickinson * Johnny Fluffypunk Rob Auton * Joe Hakim * Selina Nwulu * Hollie McNish Toby Campion * Andrew Graves * Amani Saeed James Bunting * Lucy English * Emma Joliffe Laurie Bolger * Penny Pepper * Kate Fox Jemima Foxtrot * Molly Case * Elvis McGonagall Jess Green * Mark Grist * Nasser Hussain Molly Naylor * Dan Simpson * Sophia Blackwell Amy McAllister * Stef Mo * Sara Hirsch Fergus McGonigal * Keshia Starrett * Tony Walsh Shruti Chauhan * Hannah Chutzpah * Jamal Mehmood Shagufta K Iqbal * Vanessa Kisuule * Michelle Madsen Deanna Rodger * Mairi Campbell-Jack * Lydia Towsey Malaika Kegode * Rebecca Tantony * Chris Redmond Pete Bearder * Henry Raby * Scott Tyrrell