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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.

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

Lord 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

There are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking Back

Poems Of Friendship

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. 
Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere, commanding their love, earning their veneration. For Emily Dickinson they are frigates that 'take us Lands away'; for Wordsworth they are 'a substantial world, both pure and good'; Alberto Rios calls them 'the deli offerings of civilization itself'. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: libraries where one can best hear "a choir of authors murmuring inside their books," as Billy Collins has it; bookshops, especially second-hand ones, 'too small for the worlds they hold, where words that sing you to sleep, stories that stalk your dreams, open like windows in a wall' (Gillian Clarke). 
 The poets collected here include Catullus, Horace, T'ao Ch'ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Marvell, Blake, Pope and Keats; more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.

Books and Libraries

Poems

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

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

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

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

Poems Of Mourning

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

Arthur Rimbaud

Burnt-out at twenty-three, Rimbaud has become a model for the poet as wayward genius. Nevertheless, he wrote a substantial amount of lyric and dramatic verse in his few years of activity. This volume contains all his mature output, together with several short prose works, including A SEASON IN HELL, and relevant passages from the poet's letters.

Arthur Rimbaud Selected Poems

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

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

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

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

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

There is a great deal more to Greek poetry than the Iliad or the Odyssey. Shorter masterpieces abound, and the lyrical and elegiac poems, odes, and epigrams in this volume give an unparalleled sampling of them. Included here are selections from the early Greek poets - from Hesiod, Pindar and Bacchylides, Alcaeus and Sappho; from the later Alexandrian poets Theocritus, Bion, Apollonius of Rhodes, and many more. A whole section is devoted to poems from the celebrated Greek Anthology, which spans a thousand years from the Classical to the Byzantine age, and another to the Anacreontea, the delightful collection of odes on the pleasures of drink, love, and beauty which has been popular for centuries both in the original Greek and in English. Excerpts from somewhat longer poems include Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Homeric Hymn to Mercury' and the hugely entertaining Homeric pastiche 'The Battle of the Frogs and Mice'. 
Paul Quarrie's selection of English translations draws fruitfully on the work of lesser-known as well as more famous names. In these pages poets jostle with Regius Professors of Greek at Oxbridge, professional writers and translators with enthusiastic amateurs including teachers, librarians, aristocrats, diplomats, civil servants, bankers, soldiers and clergymen. Historically their translations range from anonymous versions produced in Tudor England through the golden age of translation presided over by George Chapman in the seventeenth century, to modern translations by James Michie, Fleur Adcock and Robert Fagles. The editor provides an informative preface, introductions to the Greek Anthology and the Anacreontea, and biographies of translators where bibliographical detail is set off by colourful anecdote.

Poems from Greek Antiquity

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

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

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.

Conversation Pieces

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

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

Leonard Cohen

This anthology contains a cross-section covering his career, including such legendary songs as 'Suzanne', 'Sisters of Mercy', 'Bird on the Wire', 'Famous Blue Raincoat' and 'I'm Your Man' and searingly memorable poems from many collections including Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers and Death of a Lady's Man. Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.

Leonard Cohen Poems

Emily Brontë

* In size, price, and elegant packaging, these books will make ideal gifts * Beautiful 3-colour jacket designed to give a uniform look * Unique and highly distinctive black-and-white pattern on each spine * Full-cloth, flexible covers * Sewn bindings * Silk ribbon markers and headbands * Gold stamping on front and spine * Decorative patterned endpapers * Newly designed typographic settings in classic typefaces * Portable format-size 6 1/4 x 4 ins (15. 75 x 10. 25 cm) * Cream wove acid free paper * 256pp each volume

Brontë 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

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

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

Peter Ashley

Railway Rhymes is probably the first time that the poetry of railways has been brought together into one dedicated volume. Here will certainly be found the old favourites - Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings', W.H. Auden's 'Night Mail', John Betjeman's 'Distant View of a Provincial Town', - but equally this little book is stuffed with forgotten gems like Edmund Blunden's 'Two Wars' and Patricia Beer's 'The Branch Line'. Divided up into chapters entitled Navigation, Engineering, Waiting, Travellingand Musing, Railway Rhymes is the perfect pocket companion for waiting room and train compartment alike

Railway Rhymes

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

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul.

Love Poems

This selection of poems from across the ages brings to life a staggering array of 
zombies, ghosts, vampires, and devils. Our culture's current obsession with zombies 
and vampires is only the latest form of a fascination with crossing the boundary between 
the living and the dead that has haunted humans since we first began writing. The poetic 
evidence gathered here ranges from ancient Egyptian inscriptions and the 
Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh to the Greek bard Homer, and from Shakespeare and 
Milton and Keats to Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Here too are terrifying 
apparitions from a host of more recent poets, from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Rita 
Dove and Billy Collins, from Allen Ginsberg and H. P. Lovecraft to Mick Jagger and Shel 
Silverstein. The result is a delightfully entertaining volume of spine-tingling poems for 
fans of horror and poetry both

Poems of the Dead and Undead

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