'A very fine anthology, with exemplary introductions. It is refreshing to see how much has been done so well.' - Peter Pierce Wide in scope and bold in ambition, this exciting anthology covers the range of Australian poetic achievement, from early colonial verse through to contemporary work, with a strong recognition of Indigenous voices. This collection brings together great and familiar names with those that deserve better recognition. Including valuable introductory essays by John Kinsella, and biographical notes for all the poets, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry presents the full measure of Australian poetic talent in all its richness and diversity.
This broad selection of Australian poets begins with Kenneth Slessor, and offers a challenging view of 'early modern' poetry up until the 1960s. It also presents the decade of turmoil from 1965 to 1975 in a new light, identifying currents of energy among the young writers and balancing new reputations with old. The years from 1965 to the 1990s are revealed as a time of growing vigour and diversity.
The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).
'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surprises that life offers; all are represented in these rich and colourful pages.
From the campfires and 'reserves' of the desert, from riverbeds and prison cells, from universities and urban ghettoes come the inside voices of Australia. These are tough poems that resist the silence of genocide and the destruction of culture. The collection is an angry call for justice and the restoration of the land and the Dreaming. The Aboriginal lives glimpsed give white Australians a hint of the deep possibilities of belonging in this land.
The ultimate anthology of Indian poetry from the Vedas to the present in all the major Indian languages These My Words is an anthology of magnificent breadth, ranging from Valmiki to Agha Shahid Ali, Aurobindo to Vikram Seth, Andal to Tagore, spanning Indian poetry in its myriad forms, styles and languages. The poems speak for themselves and to each other, as folk songs and tribal epics sit alongside classical Sanskrit and formal Tamil verse is a companion to contemporary Bengali or Dogri. There is Ghalib in praise of love, Tukaram on religious bigotry, Ksetrayya on divine love through the erotic, Gieve Patel on identity. In Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo’s carefully curated selection, each poem illumines exquisitely the tradition of Indian poetry.
