Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Don Marquis

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

A poet in a former life, Archy has been reincarnated as a cockroach who types by diving headfirst onto a typewriter (and is famously unable to operate the shift key to produce capital letters); his side-kick Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims to have once been Cleopatra. Archy's poems irresistibly evoke Jazz Age New York - as seen from the alley; funny, wise, tender and tough, they represent the very best of American humour. Including George Herriman's whimsical illustrations and a classic introduction by novelist E.B. White, this Pocket Poet selection will make a beautiful volume, perfectly sized for its tiny hero.

The Best of Archy and Mehitabel

Andrew Marvell

He is known chiefly for his brilliant lyric poems, including "The Garden," "The Definition of Love," "Bermudas," "To His Coy Mistress," and the "Horatian Ode" to Cromwell. Marvell's work is marked by extraordinary variety, ranging from incomparable lyric explorations of the inner life to satiric poems on the famous men and important issues of his time-one of the most politically volatile epochs in England's history. From the lover's famous admonition, "Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime," to the image of the solitary poet "Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade," Marvell's poetry has earned a permanent place in the canon and in the hearts of poetry lovers.

Marvell Poems

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Browning Barrett

Celebrated in their time and still popular over a century after their deaths, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had a unique relationship which is reflected in their work. Both were distinguished as poets before they met, and they learnt from one another without ever sacrificing their individuality. If Elizabeth recognized that Robert’s talent was the greater of the two, Robert understood that his wife’s voice was unique. All the great themes they shared are represented in this collection of their shorter poems – love, marriage, poetry, religion, England and Italy, the natural world – and the poems are accompanied by a selection from the marvellous letters they wrote to one another, especially in the years of their courtship. Among the items included are extracts from Aurora Leigh and Pauline, and the whole of Sonnets from the Portuguese, together with many lyrics and narrative poems by both poets.

Robert And Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems

In forms as various as the melodramas of old Scottish ballads and the hard-boiled poems of twentieth-century noir, here are assembled the most colourful villains and victims ever to be immortalized in verse, from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard to Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Mafia hit-men. Browning, Hardy, Auden, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Simon Armitage and Stevie Smith are only a few of the wide range of poets, old and new, whose comic, chilling and occasionally profound poetic musings on murder are gathered in this uniquely - and irresistibly - heart-racing volume.

Killer Verse

Poems of Murder and Mayhem

Many kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent war horses to cowboys' trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses. We encounter the famous Trojan horse in Virgil's Aeneid, only to see it from a quite different perspective in Matthea Harvey's whimsical 'Inside the Good Idea'. Longfellow shows us Paul Revere defying an empire from the back of a horse, while Shakespeare's Richard III vainly offers his kingdom for one. Robert Burns's 'Auld Farmer' dotes affectionately on his ageing mare, while Paul Muldoon's 'Glaucus' is devoured by his fierce young fillies. Robert Frost's little horse stopping by the woods is gently puzzled by human behaviour, while Ted Hughes is dazzled by a stunning vision of horses at dawn, 'grey silent fragments/Of a grey silent world'. 
 
Mythical and metaphorical horses cavort alongside vividly real ones in these poems, whether they be humble servants, noble companions, beloved friends or emblems of the wild beauty of the world beyond our grasp.

Poems about Horses

Thomas Hardy

Distringuished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose and then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.

Hardy Poems

Edgar Allan Poe

Probably the most important single figure in nineteenth century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exerted an enormous influence over later writers, especially French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire and Mallarme, and through them he affected the entire field of modern literature from THE WASTE LAND to LOLITA. Probably best known for his macabre short stories, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Poe's influence was spread primarily through his poems and essays which are here reprinted. The current volume includes all his extant poems and extensive selections from his essays on poetry.

Poe Poems and Prose

James Merrill

James Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait. Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues  - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature. An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.

James Merrill Poems

Willa Cather

One of the foremost American novelists of the early twentieth century, Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia but grew up in Nebraska. Before she wrote the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. In such lyrical poems as ‘Prairie Dawn’, ‘The Hawthorn Tree,’ ‘Going Home’ and ‘Winter at Delphi’, Cather exhibits both a finely tuned sensitivity to the beauties of the physical world and a richly symbolic use of the landscapes of myth. The themes that were to animate her later masterpieces found their first expression in these haunting, elegiac ballads and sonnets. 
 
Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Antonia are already available in Everyman’s Library.

April Twilights and Other Poems

Elves, changelings, leprechauns, pixies, brownies and sprites; England's Queen Mab, France's Melusine, Scandinavian nixies and Scottish selkies: these magical creatures are sometimes mischievous, sometimes dangerous, always enchanting. This collection brings together a diverse array of literary fairies: here are Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Titania, Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci, of course, but also Rimbaud's 'Fairy', Goethe's 'Erl-King', Denise Levertov's 'Elves', Sylvia Plath's 'Lorelei', Christopher Okigbo's 'Watermaid', Neil Gaiman's 'The Fairy Reel' and Patience Agbabi's changeling boy ('The Double').

Fairy Poems

Ever since Eve plucked a tempting apple in the Garden of Eden, the fruits of the earth have been essential to human culture and the stories we tell about our world. Poets from ancient times to the present have celebrated the harvest of our gardens, fields, and orchards. 
 
The delectable cornucopia of poems harvested in this volume includes many beloved old chestnuts, such as Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’, Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit a flavor has’, Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Bean Eaters’, and the famous chilled plums in William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’.

Fruits of the Earth

Harvest Poems

Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin was the first Russian writer of European stature, and he is among the very few artists - such as Homer and Shakespeare - to have shaped the consciousness and history of an entire nation and its language, thereby affecting the world at large. Eugene Onegin is not merely the greatest poem in the Russian language by its most influential poet: it is a global culture, social and political icon of the highest order. The historical power of this work - a novel in verse - is made all the more extraordinary by the simplicity of its subject. Eugene Onegin is a story of disappointed love. Tatyana falls for the handsome Eugene to whom she daringly makes advances. He cooly rejects her, then flirts with her sister, Olga. When challenged by Olga's fiance, Lensky kills him in a duel, seemingly indifferrent to the grief he causes. (Ironically, Puskhin himself was to be killed in similar circumstances in 1937, some seven years after he completed the work). Onegin leaves the district. When he returns four years later, Tatyana has married another man and it is her turn to reject his advances. But it turns out that Onegin's hauteur is affected: he has always loved her passionately. She loves him too and both reflect painfully on what might have been.

Pushkin Eugene Onegin And Other Poems

For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them— and poets have long chronicled the relationship. 
In this collection, Robert Frost’s “Birches,” Marianne Moore’s “The Camperdown Elm,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars,” and Zbigniew Herbert’s “Sequoia” stand tall beside Eugenio Montale’s “The Lemon Trees,” Yves Bonnefoy’s “The Apples,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Plum Tree,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Almond Tree,” and A. E. Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or ?owering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.

Poems About Trees

The variety of subjects is dazzling, from movie stars to bit players, from B-movies to Bollywood, from Clark Gable to Jean Cocteau. More than a hundred poets riff on their movie memories: Langston Hughes and John Updike on the theaters of their youth, Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell on Harpo Marx, Sharon Olds on Marilyn Monroe, Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, May Swenson on the James Bond films, Terrance Hayes on early Black cinema, Maxine Kumin on Casablanca, and Richard Wilbur on The Prisoner of Zenda. Orson Welles, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ingmar Bergman share the spotlight with Shirley Temple, King Kong, and Carmen Miranda; Bonnie and Clyde and Ridley Scott with Roshomon, Hitchcock, and Bresson. In Picturehouse Poems, one of our oldest art forms pays loving homage to one of our newest—the thrilling art of cinema.

Picturehouse Poems

Poems About the Movies

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is perhaps the most controversial major English poetof the last two centuries, not least because of his apparent enthusiasm for the empire. A child of British India, he first became famous for tales of imperial life, notably Kim, the Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads. Kipling wrote verse in every classical form from the epigram to the ode, but his most distinctive gift was for the ballads and narrative poems in which he draws vivid characters in universal situations and articulates profound truths in plain language. Yet he was also a subtle and deeply affecting anatomist of the human heart, with a feeling for the natural world which rivals his younger contemporary, D. H. Lawrence. Shattered by World War I in which he lost his only son, his work darkens and deepens in later years, but never loses its extraordinary vitality.

Kipling

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The greatest English religious poet of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was a Jesuit priest and literary scholar whose life ended prematurely after his exhausting pastoral work among the slums of Liverpool and Dublin. His poems are dazzling celebrations of God's endless creative power couched in a uniquely expressive poetic diction, and all his mature poetry is her reprinted, together with illuminating fragments from journals, letters, sermons and lectures in which he expounds his literary and religious outlook.

Hopkins Poems And Prose

George Herbert

Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems," the shape of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet who admonished his readers to "dare to be true." An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from "The Collar" and "Jordan" to "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.

Herbert Poems

Alexander Pope

As a young man Pope shot to fame with The Rape of the Lock, a light-hearted mock-heroic poem about a trivial society scandal, still his best remembered work. Wit and irony, dazzling technical mastery - he perfected the English heroic couplet - acute social observation and insight into human nature were to become the hallmarks of his verse. 
 
Pope is one of the most quoted of English poets - 'For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread', 'A little learning is a dangerous thing', 'To err is human, to forgive, divine', all originate from his pen. While his poetry generally has suffered some neglect in recent decades, Professor Claude Rawson's selection persuasively demonstrates why it should be back in fashion. 
 
He aspired to make out of verse satire a serious and dignified form, and his culminating work, The Dunciad, achieves a tragic gravity which transcends its satirical mockeries. An elevated and ironic reflection on culture, it created a new genre which led eventually to the modern masterpiece of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. 
 
Pope was a precocious talent and anxious to advertise the fact, inserting such subtitles as “Done by the Author at 12 years old” into his early published poems. He adopted many poetic forms, and this anthology includes graceful and witty lyrics, verse letters to friends in the Horatian mode, a number of devotional poems, and a variety of important discursive poems on literary and political themes, including An Essay on Criticism, Windsor-Forest, and An Essay on Man. 
 
This edition uses the text of the Oxford Standard Authors edition by Herbert Davis of Pope’s Poetical Works, 1966. Complete poems rather than excerpts have been selected. The beautifully typeset text is enhanced by illustrations by William Kent from the first edition of The Dunciad.

Alexander Pope Poems

James Joyce

James Joyce is most celebrated for his remarkable novel Ulysses, and yet he was also an accomplished poet. Chamber Music, his debut collection, fused the styles of the Celtic Revival with his own brand of ironic exuberance. Pomes Penyeach, a collection written when Joyce had published Dubliners and was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, explores intimate themes of adultery, jealousy, and betrayal that would reappear transformed in the later Ulysses. Joyce's occasional verse includes the well-known "Ecce Puer," written for his newborn grandson, and his satirical poems "The Holy Office" and "Gas from a Burner." These poems are brought together here with Joyce's play, Exiles--about an unconventional couple involved in a love triangle--in a beautiful, accessible hardcover edition for the general reader.

James Joyce: Poems

The feline has inspired poetic adoration since the days of the pharaohs, and the poems collected here cover an astonishing range of periods, cultures, and styles. Poets across the continents and centuries have described the feline family-from kittens to old toms, pussycats to panthers-doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves. Here are Yeats's Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart's Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, T. S. Eliot's Rum Tum Tugger, William Blake's tyger and Rilke's panther. Here are tributes from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan, from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr. Seuss. 
 
The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace, and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

The Great Cat

William Wordsworth

In the long history of English literature William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the writer who achieved the most dramatic transformations of the poetic scene almost singlehanded. A leading figure among the Romantic generation which included Coleridge and Scott, he created out of his personal communion with nature a new poetic which had a profound moral and spiritual influence on the entire nineteenth century. The present selection includes all his famous lyrics and substantial extracts from narrative poems including The Prelude.

Wordsworth Poems

Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. Contributors include John Milton, Ovid, E.E. Cummings, Thom Gunn, John Donne, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and many others.

Garden Poems

Constantine P Cavafy

In 2009 Knopf published a new translation of Cavafy's Complete Poems by the brilliant and award-winning writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn. Now Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works for a Pocket Poets edition, including such favorites as "Waiting for the Barbarians," "Ithaca," and "The God Abandons Antony." Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poems make the 
historic profoundly and movingly personal. A towering figure of twentieth-century poetry, Cavafy is a stellar addition to the Everyman Pocket Poets series.

Cavafy Poems

This is a collection of classic animal poems. The poems include: Robert Burns's &quot;To a Mouse&quot;; Ted Hughes's &quot;Hawk Roosting&quot;; Christopher Smart's &quot;My Cat Jeoffry&quot;; and e.e. cummings's grasshopper-shaped poem.

Animal Poems

John Milton

John Milton (1608-74) was celebrated in his time as a public servant of the Cromwellian regime and as the author of brilliant polemical pamphlets about education religion and freedom of speech, but his posthumous reputation rests principally on his work as a poet, noteably in PARADISE LOST. This poem, written after the poet was driven out of public life by the Restoration, and begun when he was already blind, is a worthy successor to the epics of Homer and Virgil. In majestic blank verse it describes Lucifer's fall from heaven, the creation of mankind, Eve's temptation, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. After the Bible, this is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Christian literature. The present volume contains extensive selections from PARADISE LOST, chosen to illustrate its author's genius for high drama, vivid description and savage irony. In addition, there are substantial extracts from COMUS and SAMSON AGONISTES, and many of Milton's sonnets and shorter poems, including the famous LYCIDAS.

Milton Poems

Christina Rossetti

An exciting addition to Everyman's Library: a new series of small, handsome hardcover volumes devoted to the world's classic poets. Our books will have twice as many pages as Bloomsbury Classics' 128pp and will cost 7. 99 against Bloomsbury's 9. 99. The binding, paper and production will be visibly superior in every way to that of Bloomsbury

Rossetti Poems

Rumi

Rumi: Unseen Poems – the second volume of Rumi in the Everyman Pocket Poet series – is a treasury of poems which have never been translated before, researched and translated by Rumi biographer Brad Gooch and the Iranian writer Maryam Mortaz. 
The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi was trained in Sufism, a mystic tradition within Islam. He founded the Mevlevi Order, often known as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. His poetry combines the sacred and the sensual, expressing both rapturous divine love, and aching human love for his companion and teacher, Shams of Tabriz. It has long been popular in the West, never more so than in the last twenty-five years, when a new wave of free translations introduced him to an ever-widening audience. 
However, some of these recent translations have been more in the nature of interpretations by writers who are not Persian speakers. Cultural and Islamic references central to an understanding of Rumi's poetry have been toned down or omitted. And so vast was Rumi's output that earlier scholarly translators were obliged to be selective, leaving a rich vein of verse still unmined. From this Gooch and Mortaz have made a selection of ghazals (short lyric poems) and rubaiyat (quatrains), aiming in their own translations to achieve fidelity to the originals while preserving all Rumi's lyric exuberance. 
This book makes a perfect companion to the first Everyman volume of Rumi, which presents the very best of the twentieth-century translations.

The Unseen Poems

Carmela Ciuraru

If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.

Dog Poems

Charles Baudelaire

An exciting addition to Everyman's Library: a new series of small, handsome hardcover volumes devoted to the world's classic poets. Our books will have twice as many pages as Bloomsbury Classic' 128 pp and will cost 7. 99 against Bloomsbury's 9. 99. The binding, paper and production will be visibly superior in every way to that of Bloomsbury

Baudelaire Poems

Percy Shelley

An exciting addition to Everyman's Library: a new series of small, handsome hardcover volumes devoted to the world's classic poets. Our books will have twice as many pages as Bloomsbury Classics'129pp and will cost 7. 99 against Bloomsbury's 9. 99. The binding, paper and production will be visibly superior in every way to that of Bloomsbury An

Showing results for: ‘Michael Symmons Roberts’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter