Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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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.

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

George Gordon Byron

Byron's poetry took Europe by storm in the early nineteenth century and the poems which made him a star are here represented by a selection of the early lyrics, including still popular pieces such as 'She walks in beauty' and 'We'll go a no more a-roving'. But Byron's real talent was for comedy. He is the greatest comic poet of the Romantic movement and his comic verse is here represented by BEPPO, A VISION OF JUDGEMENT and selections from his greatest masterpiece, DON JUAN, which satirizes the very reputation for amourous adventures which helped to make Byron himself famous.

Byron Poems

Carmela Ciuraru

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.

Beat Poets

Poets of all times, places and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. They have commemorated the Battles of Thermopylae, Agincourt and Shilph, and London in an air raid. They have announced the Charge of the Light Brigade; witnessed Break of Day in the Trenches; handed down through oral tradition, the Blackfoot Indian Song for a Fallen Warrior; sent a Newsreel from Vietnam. From Horace and Virgl to Steveie Smith, from the anonymous bards of ancient China to Adam Mickiewicz and Primo Levi, these poets have encompassed the entire spectrum of feeling - pride, compassion, courage anger fear excitement, anguish, even laughter. Here. in this anthology, are more than one hundred of their most memorable poems.

War Poems

Don Marquis

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

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

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

Fishing has inspired a wealth of poetry-Tang Dynasty meditations; Japanese haiku; medieval rhymes; classic verses by Homer and Shakespeare; poems by Donne, Goethe, Tennyson, and Yeats. Modern masterpieces abound as well, by the likes of Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, Richard Hugo, and Derek Walcott. In the hands of the poets collected here, fishing with a hook and line yields reflections both sparklingly light and awe-inspiringly deep. Filled with humour, nostalgia, adventure, celebrations of the beauties of nature, and metaphors for the art of living, The Art of Angling is sure to lure anglers and lovers of poetry alike.

The Art of Angling

Poems About Fishing

This anthology of comic verse is drawn from sources which range from the Greek Anthology to the present day. Divided into thematic sections (to be determined) for case of use, it covers a wide range of forms including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets and nonsense verse. The prevailing tone is light, but satire and ridicule - even passion - have not been excluded

Comic Verse

Poets have always drawn inspiration from the wild fancies of dream-life. We spend a third of our lives asleep, and throughout history our nocturnal visions have engaged the interpretive talents of our greatest writers. 
It includes poems about daydreams and nightmares, about falling asleep and about waking up, about insomnia, night thoughts, monsters of the dark, twilight, dawn, and the rebirth of morning. From Yeats's "Lullaby" to Rosetti's "Nuptial Sleep," from Salvatore Quasimodo's "Insomnia" to Thom Gunn's "Annihilation of Nothing," Poems of Sleep and Dreams evokes the whole haunting, magical spectrum of sleep and dream.

Sleep And Dreams

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

From ancient Greece and Rome (Sappho, Marcellus Empiricus) to the current Covid 19 crisis (Eavan Boland's 'Quarantine'), poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing is a small treasury of their words, illuminating many different experiences of illness, injury and convalescence, from John Donne's 'Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse' to Thom Gunn's 'The Man with Night Sweats'; from Anne Finch's 'Spleen' to Jane Kenyon's 'Prognosis'; from Emily Dickinson's 'The Soul has Bandaged moments' to Seamus Heaney's 'Miracle'. Here are poems from around the world, by Baudelaire, Hugo, Rudaki and Cavafy; by Masaoka Shiki, Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert. Shakespeare and Milton; Tennyson and Emily Bronte; Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Tony Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy are all present at the sickbed. Messages of hope in the midst of pain - in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World', Wislawa Szymborska's 'The End and the Beginning' and Stevie Smith's 'Away, Melancholy' - make this a perfect gift for anyone on the road to healing.

Poems of Healing

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS. Assembled in this beautifully created pocket gift hardback is a wide range of erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.

Erotic Poems

Selected Poems

Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people’s lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Poems of Food and Drink abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations – in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plath’s ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in ‘Blackberrying’ to D. H. Lawrence’s lush celebration of ‘Figs’, from the civilized comfort of Noël Coward’s ‘Something on a Tray’ to the salacious provocation of Swift’s ‘Oysters’, from Li Po on ‘Drinking Alone’ to Baudelaire on ‘The Soul of the Wine’, and from Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’, Poems of Food and Drink serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.

Poems Of Food And Drink

Poets from around the world give eloquent voice to the trials, hopes, rewards and losses of migration. 
Each year, millions join the ranks of intrepid migrants who have reshaped societies throughout history. Most recently, Middle Eastern and African people have risked their lives to reach safety in Europe, while central Americans have fled north seeking asylum. But whether they are refugees from war or violence, political exiles or immigrants in search of education, opportunity and freedom, these travellers share the challenge of adapting to being strangers in a strange land. 
Border Lines brings together more than a hundred poets representing more than sixty nations - Imtiaz Dharker, Ruth Padel, Bernadine Evaristo, Derek Walcott, Mahmoud Darwish, 'Dreadlock Alien', Dunya Mikhail and Hédi Kaddour, to name but a few. Their poems tell moving stories of displacement and new beginnings in the UK, France and Germany, Canada and the United States and challenge us to reexamine our own society from a new perspective.

Border Lines

Poems of Migration

In this enchanting collection, favourite bed-time songs for children – 'Rock-a-bye, Baby', 'Bye, Baby Bunting', 'Golden Slumbers' – mingle with less familiar lullabies from around the world. Added to these are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to your little ones, from Brahms's 'Lullaby' to Gershwin's 'Summertime'; from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen Titania to Langston Hughes's lullaby for a 'night black baby'. 
 
Here, too, are nursery rhymes, and poems for older children by a wide variety of authors – Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot and Ogden Nash, to name but a few. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there is something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult.

Lullabies And Poems For Children

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

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

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

China has a strong and ancient tradition of erotic poetry by both men and women, and this unique collection includes poems from three thousand years ago to the present day, ranging from the highly literary to the sexually explicit - many of them appearing in English for the first time. While literary poets such as Zi Ye ('Lady Midnight') and Emperor Li Yu of the Tang Dynasty are already known in the West, popular Chinese verse has been largely ignored by translators. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping mine a richly erotic vein, uncovering ancient Chinese Daoist sex manuals, erotic novels and plays (which contain poems at moment of sexual epiphany); the tradition of erotic prints, which were often accompanied by poems; folksongs and bawdy jokes. The contrast between the discretion and subtlety of classical Chinese erotic poetry and the earthy comedy of its popular counterpart makes for a fascinating and entertaining anthology.

Chinese Erotic Poems

Ever since Pushkin, Russian poets have been famous for their ability to combine private and public experience in lyric poetry of a comprehensiveness and intensity unmatched elsewhere. Ranging in extremes from the melting tenderness of unrequited love to the bitter comedy of political chaos, this collection of poems covering two centuries includes work by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, Annensky,Mayakovsky, Bely, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky and others less celebrated but no less extraordinary. 
The text is divided into six sections. Russian poets constantly reflect on their art, so the first section is appropriately entitled 'The Muse'. Their other great topic is Russia herself, explored in parts two and three. Part four presents the inner world, parts five and six traditional themes of love and mortality. 
Poetry has often been a matter of life and death in Russia, where Mandelstam was not the only poet to perish in the Gulag. The comfortable private domain familiar to many English and American writers barely exists in a country where political realities are exigent - one reason for the fierce intensity found in so many of these poems.

Russian Poets

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this anthology features the richly varied voices of sons and daughters, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves. From eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o's witty 'On the Birth of His Son' to Dylan Thomas's poignant 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night'; from Sylvia Plath's searing poem 'Daddy' to Yeats's tender 'A prayer for My Daughter'; from Homer to Seamus Heaney, from Shakespeare to Milosz, the poets and poems collected here range across cultures and centuries, and deal with every facet of the father-child relationship from birth to death and beyond. Gratitude, tenderness and awe infuse some of the poems. Others express anger or sorrow. Many are moving tributes to the first man in a child's life. And each one conveys the profound nature of fatherhood.

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