Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

Scotland, like so many other nations, has produced poetry that is patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of Scotland has long been played out in verse, through Celtic devotional works, Catholic works, Protestant works, and not forgetting satires on the Puritanism in Scotland's post-Reformation identity. Language and culture have been equally multifarious in the nation so that three major languages: Scots, English and Gaelic (examples of which are translated in this anthology) compete and co-exist in poetry. The fifteenth century poet, William Dunbar, joked that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and there speaks something of the historic lowland attitude to the Gaidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking Scotland, principally the highlands). Hostility and eventual harmony is a marker of the Scottish highlands/lowlands divide as much as for that between Scotland and England. Historic tension is not to be dismissed but, certainly, the poetic palette of Scotland is one of multilingual richness, and shows an enduringly high quality whatever the cultural vicissitudes that play a part. The medieval Makars, most prominently Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, are often taken to represent a golden age when poetry in Scots ran the full range of mood, mode and subject matter. If this has, perhaps, never been bettered, the sixteenth century lyrics and sonnets of Alexander Montgomerie, Alexander Scott and other poets around the court of James VI, and the eighteenth century vernacular 'revival' of Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns represent at points equally brilliant periods; and the twentieth century 'modern renaissance' of Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob and William Souter proved that Scots remained a viable poetic currency, as a living poet such as Tom Leonard continues to demonstrate.
Poetry in Gaelic too has its tradition of peaks where the flame seems to burn more visibly at certain times than others. Alexander Macdonald (Alasdair Mac Mhaghstir Alasdair), Rob Donn (Rob Donn MacAoidh) and Duncan MacIntyre (Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir) make the eighteenth century a high point in achievement, while Sorley Maclean, George Campbell Hay and Iain Crichton Smith do similarly for the twentieth century: the latter three, arguably, making Gaelic verse the most able variety in Scotland during the last sixty years. Historically as many successes are scored in Scottish poetry in English. James Thomson, author of The Seasons, joins James Macpherson translator/creator of the poetry of 'Ossian' in promulgating works that are seminally iconic and influential right across the artistic genres, painting and music as much as literature, in western culture. The romantic, patriotic poetic image of Scotland is sounded in English as much as in any other language, as the writing of Walter Scott or Lady Nairne attests. James (B.V.) Thomson, John Davidson, Edwin Muir, Norman MacCaig, W.S. Graham, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson are all deeply Scottish poets speaking through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the worldwide audience that exists for creative utterance that both emanates from but is never limited by the particularity of place. Scotland's story is one that is never certain, but, enduringly and importantly its poetry is.

Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau; from Keats, Blake and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost's tribute to the evanescence of spring in 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' to Langston Hughes's moody 'Summer Night' in Harlem; from the 'stopped woods' in Marie Ponsot's 'End of October' to the chilling 'mind of winter' in Wallace Stevens's 'The Snow Man', the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage with the world outside ourselves.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A best seller in his lifetime though neglected in recent years, Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) is due to be restored to his rightful place in literary history as one of the first of the great American Modernist poets. His poetry was revolutionary, though because it was written in metre and rhyme it looked deceptively conventional. He cast aside the stiff archaism and prettiness favoured by his contemporaries, employing instead everyday language with dramatic power, wit and sensitivity. His lyric poems illuminate the most unlikely subjects - ordinary people, especially the downtrodden, the bereft and the mistunderstood. In the process he created the gallery of character portraits for which he is most fondly remembered, among them Eben Flood, Aunt Imogen, Isaac and Archibald, Miniver Cheevy and Richard Cory.Scott Donaldson, editor of this volume, is the author of a forthcoming biography of Robinson, to be published in February 2007.

The perfect gift for poetry lovers. A comprehensive collection of the Scottish Bard's songs and poems.

The 19th-century scholar and educationalist J S Blackie summed up Burns's importance to Scotland and the Scots with the words:
'When Scotland forgets Burns, then history will forget Scotland.'
Today, Burns is unique in the affection and fascination that his memory inspires. The fruits of his legacy can be seen not only in Scotland but around the world - on product packaging, in advertising and on a wealth of merchandise, as well as through continued scholarship and academic study.

It is often said that Rumi (aka Jalal al-Din, 1207-73) is now the most popular poet in the United States. This conquest of the new world by a middle-eastern medieval writer who died before Chaucer was even born has been achieved with extraordinary speed in less than thirty years.The main key to Rumi's success is the spiritual appeal of his work. It combines lyrical beauty with philosophical profundity, a sense of rapture and an acute awareness of human suffering in ways which speak directly to contemporary audiences. Like the metaphysical poets, Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Rumi yokes together everyday images with complex ideas. He talks about divine love in vivid human terms. As a religious teacher of the Dervish order, he expounds the mystical doctrines of Sufism which focus on the notion of union with the Beloved to whom many of the poems are addressed.

Persian poetry of this period is not easy to translate. In order to give the greatest possible access to a wonderful poet this selection draws on avariety of translations from the early 20th century to the present, ranging from scholarly renderings to free interpretations.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag.

Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

The 1200 or so letters of Mozart and his family form the most fascinating correspondence by any artist of the eighteenth century or earlier, and Mozart himself ranks high among letter writers of any age or occupation. A vivd and amzingly detailed picture emerges of Mozart's career as performer, teacher and composer, as well as a lively account of contemporary musical politics in the courts and opera houses of Europe. The inclusion of letters from his father, a dominant but loving parent determined to supervise his son's career evern after he had grown up, highlights the problems which Mozart encountered in breaking with his provincial background, as well as providing a glimpse of the social and domestic details that tell us so much about the kind of person Mozart was and how he lived. The correspondence ends with the pathetic begging letters of his last years and the touching, adoring yet protective letters to his wife. This edition is being published in May 2006 to coincide with the 250th anniversay of Mozart's birth. The selection has been made from the classic translation by Emily Anderson.

A delightful anthology that celebrates in verse the silent poetry of dance and the dancer.
Chinese dagger dances and Hindu festival dances, belly dancers and whirling dervishes, high-school proms and wedding waltzes, tango, tarantella, mambo, flamenco, reels and jigs, disco and ballet - dances of all kinds move through the poems gathered here, as do some of the world's most famous dancers, from Nijinsky and Pavlova to Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire; from Isadora Duncan, George Balanchine and Martha Graham to Baryshnikov and Bojangles. In the work of more than 150 poets - including Shakespeare, Milton, Hafez, Rumi, Li Po, Rilke, Rimbaud, Lorca, Akhmatova, Whitman, Dickinson, Cummings, Eliot and Merrill - we feel and see the grace, the drama, the expressive power, and the sheer joy to be found in dance, around the world and through the ages.

Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry, and this anthology offers a treasury of poems as varied and vital as the music that inspired them.

From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Movement, from the poets of the New York School to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force. We hear it the poems of Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyaka, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty and C.D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and also poems that themselves throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

A collection of poems which capture the experience of solitude- by day or night, in the city or in the country, in waking or in dreams. There are contented reveries, expressions of loneliness and despair, reflections on mind and soul, and meditations recorded in the stillness of the night. Poets can be said to be the custodians of the interior life, and from Sappho's "Tonight I've watched" to Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and from Yeats's communion with 'the deep heart's core' in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" to Bei Dao's veneration of "Ordinary Days", some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet's art. And for readers who either seek or escape from solitude,all of the poets in this anthology - from Sappho and Callimachus to Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur - offer words to console and inspire. They remind us that in cultivating solitude we explore the limits of our imaginations and realize our mostprofound feelings and needs.

In time for this year's Halloween revels comes a horrible array of spectres and sorcerers, ghosts and demons, hags and apparitions. From Homer and Horace via Pope and Poe to Graves and Hardy, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil summons Aeneas's wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. Ballads, odes, spells, chants, dialogues, incantations - here is a veritable witch's brew of poems from the spirit world.

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