Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, brings new perspectives and energy to a timeless poetic subject. Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance.
Leonard Cohen made his name as a poet before he came to worldwide attention as a singer and songwriter. This collection of his poetry was written in Montreal, Mumbai and during his retirement in Mt Baldy.
Losing none of the exuberance which has become a hallmark of Simon Armitage's poetry, these poems are more personal. The book is divided into three sections - the "Book of Matches" which are sonnets, "Becoming of Age" and "Reading the Bans", a series of poems about Armitage's marriage.
Edward Lear, the 20th child of a London stockbroker, entered the household of Lord Stanley as little more than a servant, but his sense of humour soon made him welcome above stairs and he began to amuse the children with comic drawings and rhymes. This book was first published in 1846.
more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.
Written during the three years Matt Broomfield spent living and working in the autonomous, Kurdish-led region of Syria known as Rojava, these poems paint a unique picture of the revolution there, from Broomfield's own place in the revolution as an 'internationalist' volunteer, to the future of the region in the face of war.
A poetry collection which encompasses subjects as diverse as World War I and the author's trip up the Amazon, as well as love poems and tributes to other poets, notably Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky.
Basil Bunting is one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. This title includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of "Briggflatts" in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting.
This collection, which contains all his most memorable works and a selection of his letters, is a feast for the senses, displaying Keats' gift for gorgeous imagery and sensuous language, his passionate devotion to beauty, as well as some of the most moving love poetry ever written.
Explores the impact of the first wave of mass migration to our shores, the Arab Spring, the allure of extremism along with a series of personal poems about the pressures of growing up in a traditional community. This book asks profound questions of our ethics and responsibilities at a time of great challenge to our sense of national identity.
A dual-authored volume of poems from the multi-award winning Dickman twins, which they wrote when their older sibling tragically took his own life. It features moving, grieving but life-affirming poems.
The author's poetry ranges in manner from sombre reflections on the loneliness and bestiality of human experience to the exuberance shown in his persuasive fantasy of Guinness's Brewery considered as the Garden of Eden.
Given that insects vastly outnumber us (there are approximately 200 million insects for every human) it is no surprise that there is a rich body of verse on the creeping, scuttling, flitting, stinging things with which we share our planet.