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

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

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

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

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

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

Emily Dickinson

The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.

Letters of Emily Dickinson

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

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.

Showing results for: ‘Steve Roud’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter