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This unique collection of poems from the Poet Laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology.Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore.Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World's Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.

Carol Ann Duffy has been a bold and original voice in British poetry since the publication of Standing Female Nude in 1985. Since then she has won every major poetry prize in the United Kingdom and sold over one million copies of her books around the world. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009.Her first Collected Poems includes all of the poems from her nine acclaimed volumes of adult poetry - from Standing Female Nude to Ritual Lighting - as well as her much-loved Christmas poems, which celebrate aspects of Christmas: from the charity of King Wenceslas to the famous truce between the Allies and the Germans in the trenches in 1914. Endlessly varied, wonderfully inventive, and emotionally powerful, the poems in this book showcase Duffy's full poetic range: there are poems written in celebration and in protest; public poems and deeply personal ones; poems that are funny, sexy, heartbroken, wise. Taken together they affirm her belief that 'poetry is the music of being human'. Collected Poems is both the perfect single-volume introduction for new readers and a glorious opportunity for old friends to celebrate thirty years' work by one of the country's greatest literary talents. It confirms indisputably that 'Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time' (Rose Tremain, Guardian).

Billy Collins is one of the world's most popular poets. While his poems often begin in the everyday and domestic, fans know that they might end anywhere - and that they will lift their heads from the book to a world startlingly different from the one they had left moments before. Billy Collins' previous collection, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, was an extraordinary success, introducing thousands of readers to his exhilarating poetry for the first time. By turns wildly funny and intensely moving, Nine Horses has won Billy Collins even more admirers.

In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions - and revisions - of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect - as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door. 'Part of Duffy's talent - besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety - is her ventriloquism . . . From verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets - that is, she makes it look easy' Charlotte Mendelson, Observer

Luis de Camoes is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusiads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes, the award-winning translator of The Lusiads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camoes's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camoes (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camoes's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camoes's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camoes would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.

This new critical edition, including Mark Musa's classic translation, provides students with a clear, readable verse translation accompanied by ten innovative interpretations of Dante's masterpiece.

'Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose TremainThe effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity. Yet in showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives, Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all.

A highly personal collection of poems written by Virginia McKenna, the star of Born Free, recollecting the people, places and animals that have inspired her.

Edward Lear was the greatest nonsensicalist of all time. He was the inventor of the limerick and created the Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat. This complete edition of Lear's nonsense verse - including the limericks, longer verses, alphabets and his own illustrations - is lovingly restored and beautifully presented, for adults and children to enjoy together.

I lay there alone in bed, feeling the black shadow creeping up the underside of the world like a flood tide. Nothing held, nothing was left. The silver airplanes and the silver capes all dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in coloured chalk from the colossal blackboard of the dark.The writings in this collection outline Plath's early preoccupation with issues of mental illness, creativity and femininity, all of which would become recurrent themes in her later work. They offer special insight into her development as a writer, and arguably paved the way for her only full-length piece of prose writing, the loosely veiled fictional autobiography, The Bell Jar.This second edition contains the thirteen stories included in the first edition together with five pieces of her journalism, as well as a few fragments from her journal; and a further nine stories selected from the Indiana archive.

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.' - Alice Oswald

Originally published in 1960, The Colossus was the only volume of Sylvia Plath's poetry published before her death in 1963. Showing a scholarly dedication to the craft, the poems in this collection are brimming with originality and the startling imagery that would later confirm her status as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. 'On every page, a poet is serving notice that she has earned her credentials and knows her trade.' Seamus Heaney 'She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. And she does so with a seriousness that demands only that she be judged equally seriously . . . There is an admirable no-nonsense air about this; the language is bare but vivid and precise, with a concentration that implies a good deal of disturbance with proportionately little fuss.' A. Alvarez in the Observer

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.-- She Walks in Beauty

Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin's Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkin's own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years - some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended.

When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: 'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.'Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkin's unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urban lives. It is a gift that makes him one of the most truly popular of the twentieth century's poets.

This volume replaced Ted Hughes's Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes's writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, What is the Truth? and Season Songs.

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator from the Greek, Latin, Italian and other languages. The book concludes with 'Crediting Poetry', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth'.

At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.'Throughout the volume Heaney's outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do without.' Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). With the sensuosness and physicality of language that would become the hallmark of his early writing, these poems graphically depict the author's rural upbringing, from the local forge to the banks of Lough Neagh, concluding in the preserving waters of the bogland and a look ahead to his next book, Wintering Out (1972).

In some respects a sequel to The Man With Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memorialising of friends who have died, an anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age. The poems are written under the sign of Cupid, 'devious master of our bodies', but their intimacies are always heard against the sociable human hum of an entire community which Gunn depicts in poems of fluent grace, as formal as they are relaxed.

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.-- Kubla Khan

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passionate'.This collection, first published in 1967, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

Widely regarded as the finest poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney is the subject of numerous critical studies; but no book-length portrait has appeared until now. Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, Stepping Stones retraces the poet's steps from his early works, through to his receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and his post-Nobel life. It is supplemented with a large number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O'Driscoll, Seamus Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced, providing an original, diverting and absorbing store of reflections, opinions and recollections.

Born on the fiesta of San Sebastian in her hometown of Lipa Batangas, Romalyn Ante left the Philippines at 16, when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to the UK. The poems in her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, are a bridge between these two worlds: lush with the smells and tastes of home back in the Philippines, they piercingly explore notions of identity, homeland and heritage across cultures, languages and the place one calls home.Soaked in a rich landscape of memory, Philippine mythology, and folklore, and studded with Tagalog, her poems speak of the ache of assimilation and the complexities of belonging, but also the healing and restoration that can be found through her work as a nurse. From a talented young poet already garnering prizes and praise, this is a debut alive with vitality and possibility, a feast for the senses, and one that offers a dazzlingly unique perspective on identity in an ever-expanding world.

The Book of Nature - Wordsworth's Poetry on Nature is a sublime collection of the best nature poetry by poet-laureate William Wordsworth, housed in a convenient pocket-sized edition.

Translation of Christine's autobiographical Vision, both dealing with her own life and career, and offering a possible solution to the troubled state of France at the time.