Literature & Poetry

A poet and banker who knew everybody, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a brilliant recorder of things said by his famous and powerful contemporaries, from Edmund Burke to Talleyrand, from Charles James Fox to the Duke of Wellington. He was all ears, very good at hearing what was said, and assiduous about ...

Love in a Life, Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry, marks a conspicuous development in the work of the founder of the modern Narrative School. Directness and a new colloquialism are wedded to Motion's distinctive obliquities in a volume where the idea of marriage governs the architecture of each poem and the book as a whole.

Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration and current British and American politics.

Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life.

It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others.

Ryuosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers. He lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period, including the devastating 1923 earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927.

Inpsired by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned an extraordinary novel of tales.

Penned with a dexterous wit and a steady nerve, The Noise of a Fly is a mesmeric imagining of our later years by one of this country's most senior and celebrated writers.

'It is hard to think of many poets who can equal his combination of imaginative ambition, formal resource and range of tone .

All Dylan Thomas' major works gathered together and featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary.

The story of Scotland at war in the poetry of the time, in English, Gaelic and Scots, by servicemen, volunteers, and those on the home front.

Contains 40 of his best poems. June 2014 marks the Centenary of Laurie Lee's birth - this will be marked with new editions of his most famous literary works.

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Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Claire's most personal essays - reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into ...

We all need a bit of poetry in our lives - to inspire and to elevate. But what happens when poetry goes wrong and how bad can it get? Stephen Robins has scoured the anthologies of the world to collect together the most delightful examples of really awful poetry.

Poems about horses by the world's greatest poets.

Julian Maclaren-Ross was one of the leading writers of the 1940s. His world is dingy, down-at-heel; a world of smoke-veiled bars, rented lodgings, blacked-out streets, and wartime army garrisons. Whether narrated in the slangy voice of an uneducated soldier, or the clipped cadences of a colonial expat, ...

Jeremy Reed is one of Britain's most outstanding and famously controversial poets, his originality of imagery and cutting edge subject matter distinguishing him from most of his contemporaries. His recent books include the poetry collections Piccadilly Bongo, Sooner Or Later Frank, Voodoo Excess and ...

It fills the persistent need to document women's poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

The joys of the world and of the imagination find their equivalent in Francis's joy in the possibilities of language:

'A basket of snow for the Empress / with a poem of
modest triumph: / I made this out of what does not last.'

The Curiosities is the eleventh book of poems from this most inventive and celebrated of British poets. Here and there the story-telling roams and sweeps: here are tales 'for' friends and loved ones, there are tales 'after' the great poets of history.