Books by Ted Hughes
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.
From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
“Careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found.” ―Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review
A monumental celebration of “one of the most significant poets writing today” (David Baker, Los Angeles Review of Books).
In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review). From “Apple Tree”
O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three,
this one, this one life.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
“One of the greatest American poets of her time.”—New York Times
Collected Poems features Edna St. Vincent Millay’s incisive and impassioned poetry and sonnets, as well as the poet’s last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay. Alongside Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings, Millay remains among the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century for her uniquely lyrical explorations of love, individuality, and artistic expression.
Millay, winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes plays, essays, short stories, and songs. She infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women’s sexuality in her poems and prose.
Yet Millay’s poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world.
This invaluable compendium of her work is not only an essential addition to any collection of the world’s most moving and memorable poetry but an unprecedented look into the life of Millay.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
“First Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.
This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."
This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.
Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.
From the Hardcover edition.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Gathered here is a half century’s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.
Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
William Blake is a poet without parallel, who remains a source of wisdom and inspiration to countless individuals throughout the world.
This selection was commissioned in 1905 by the firm of George Routledge from W.B. Yeats, who had previously been one of the pioneer editors of Blake's prophetic books. Yeats, one of the few poets whose work could be compared with that of Blake, prepared a unique selection of his poetic and prose writings. There is no better way to encounter the work of one poetic genius than as it is presented by another, and Yeats understood Blake in a way few others did.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
A compelling anthology of poetry, translations, and composition notes by the author of The Book of Illusions features selections from Spokes, Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, White Spaces, and other works, along with biographical details and the author's own thoughts on his writing.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
None
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The definitive collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award winner Galway Kinnell.
“It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.” —Galway Kinnell
This long-awaited volume brings together for the first time the life’s work of a major American voice.
In a remarkable generation of poets, Galway Kinnell was an acknowledged, true master. From the book-length poem memorializing the grit, beauty, and swarming assertion of immigrant life along a lower Manhattan avenue, to searing poems of human conflict and war, to incandescent reflections on love, family, and the natural world—including "Blackberry Eating,” "St. Francis and the Sow," and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”—to the unflinchingly introspective poems of his later life, Kinnell’s work lastingly shaped the consciousness of his age.
Spanning 65 years of intense, inspired creativity, this volume, with its inclusion of previously uncollected poems, is the essential collection for old and new devotees of a “poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.” (Boston Globe)
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The life’s work of “one of the true master poets of his generation,”* whose poetry helped shape the consciousness of an age
For Galway Kinnell, it was “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” This comprehensive volume includes “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” Kinnell’s stunning poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, the incantatory book-length poem The Book of Nightmares, the searing evocation of Hiroshima in “The Fundamental Project of Technology,” the iconic themes of his middle years—eros, family, the natural world (“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” “The Bear,” “Saint Francis and the Sow,” “Blackberry Eating”)—and the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of “a poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.”**
*New York Times
**Boston Globe
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Jane Kenyon is considered one of America's best contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon's Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
―from "Twilight: After Haying"
Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes―From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
Copies
No copies available.
Timmy the Tug
by Ted Hughes, Jim Downer
A literary coup: the publication of a recently discovered and specially illustrated Ted Hughes poem for children, lost for over fifty years. Timmy was a paddle-boat, sound as a gong,
Not a worm in his timbers, fresh paint all over.
He was hale as a whale and twice as strong,
And he sailed on the peaceful river.
So begins the tale of Timmy the Tug and his subsequent adventures as he escapes his moorings and explores the high seas. Timmy struggles to be helpful but doesn’t always succeed despite his best efforts. However, by trying and trying and trying again, he at last saves a beautiful ship in distress and so rediscovers his sense of pride.
Originally written in the mid-1950s and only recently rediscovered, this lyrical poem by Ted Hughes, created to accompany a story that was conceived and delightfully illustrated in watercolor by his friend Jim Downer, is presented here as a facsimile of the original manuscript. Illustrated in color throughout
Copies
No copies available.
A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse
by Ted Hughes
Shakespeare's best as chosen by the great English poet
"According to most anthologies, [Shakespeare] wrote only sonnets and songs for his plays. The reason for this [is the] reluctance of anthologists to break into the sacred precincts of his drama and start looting portable chunks . . . Yet when he great speeches of his plays are taken out of context they are no more difficult to understand and appropriate than those by other great poets."
This clear, compact, inviting selection of Shakespeare's verse opens the door to new readers of our greatest writer and deepens lifelong readers' understanding of his work. Ted Hughes spent his life considering Shakespeare's works and drawing on them for his own poetry; his book-length account of Shakespeare's development, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, was one of the most distinctive works of literary criticism of recent years.
For this selection, Hughes deliberately took strong, relatively self-contained passages of Shakespeare's verse out of the plays and arranged them in a pattern, like beads on a string, including the best-known songs and sonnets. The result is at once a revealing sequence of Shakespeare's verse and an anthology of his greatest bits―"read in less than a minute, learned in less than five," Hughes remarks in the introduction, and always "capable of striking up a life of their own in the general experience of the reader."
Copies
No copies available.
Selected Translations: Poems
by Ted Hughes
"EXPAND[S] OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THIS FASCINATING LITERARY CHARACTER." ―STEVEN RATINER, THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Known (with Philip Larkin) as the most distinctly English of the postwar British poets, Ted Hughes was a boundlessly curious reader and translator of poetry from other languages. This generous selection of his translations at once rounds out the publication of his major work and gives us a fresh view of his poetic achievement.
In 1965, Hughes, already famous in Britain, founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, and a number of the translations here are of poems by his contemporaries: the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, the Hungarian János Pilinszky, and the Serbian Vasko Popa. At the same time, Hughes was forever in search of older precursors, whether Homer, Lorenzo de' Medici, or the authors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his translations of them deepen our sense of his interest in pagan ritual and esoteric religion. These two strains of his work as translator were brought together late in his career, establishing him as one of the foremost interpreters of the classics in English.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Poems for Children
by Ted Hughes
This collection brings together the more than 250 children’s poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his career. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those published for younger readers and progressing to more complex and sophisticated poems that he felt were written “within hearing” of children. Throughout, Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child’s insatiable wonderment and sense of humor as well as his own instinctive and illuminating perspective on people and other creatures of the natural world.
With drawings that capture the wit, range, and richness of these poems, acclaimed illustrator Raymond Briggs helps make this a book any reader can return to again and again for amusement, inspiration, and reassurance.
Collected Poems for Children is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Copies
No copies available.
Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses
by Ted Hughes
A powerful version of the Latin classic by England's late Poet Laureate, now in paperback.
When it was published in 1997, Tales from Ovid was immediately recognized as a classic in its own right, as the best rendering of Ovid in generations, and as a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry; Hughes translated twenty-four of its stories with great power and directness. The result is the liveliest twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.
Copies
No copies available.
Selected Poems 1957-1994
by Ted Hughes
Poems from every phase of the career of a great poet
This selection of Ted Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor, Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated into Birthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.
Copies
No copies available.
The Iron Giant
by Ted Hughes
An iron giant saves the world in this contemporary classic.
A mysterious creature stalks the land, eating barbed wire and devouring tractors and plows. The farmers are mystified—and terrified. And then they glimpse him in the night: the Iron Giant, taller than a house, with glowing headlight eyes and an insatiable taste for metal. The hungry giant must be stopped at any cost.
Only a young boy named Hogarth is brave enough to lead the Iron Giant to a safe home. And only Hogarth knows where to turn when a space-bat as big as Australia, hungry for every living thing on Earth, darkens the sky.
First published in 1968, Ted Hughes's classic tale is a powerful tribute to peace on earth—and in all the universe. Of it Madeleine L'Engle wrote, "How grateful we should be for Ted Hughes's brilliant The Iron Giant. It speaks to all ages, and we need its message even more now." Philip Pullman called it "so gripping that when you begin to read it aloud, everyone stops to listen, young children and old people alike." Whether you think of it as a science fiction fantasy or a modern fairy tale or a tall-tale parable for today, you will never forget it.
Copies
No copies available.
The Iron Giant
by Ted Hughes
When a towering giant made of iron appears out of nowhere, young Hogarth sees him not as a monster, but a friend. The townspeople are terrified of the giant and devise a plan to bring him down. But Hogarth believes in his friend, and rescues him when no one else will. Together, they teach the people of the village and beyond to conquer their fears, for beneath the giant's rough armor there beats a mighty heart.
The late Ted Hughes, former poet laureate of England, wrote this modern fairy tale in 1968 (which went on to inspire the popular 1999 Warner Brothers animated feature). This illustrated edition, featuring the complete text, special effects such as foldouts and die-cuts, and striking full-color artwork on every page, offers the perfect family read-aloud.
Copies
No copies available.
Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid
by Ted Hughes
A new dramatization for the stage of Ted Hughes's highly acclaimed translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses
When it was published in 1997, Tales from Ovid was immediately recognized as the best rendering of Ovid in generations, a classic in its own right and a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. For Hughes, one of the most admired and widely read poets of our day, had translated twenty-four of Ovid's stories--legends connected by their transformational motifs--with the elegance and passion that distinguished his own poems.
His vigorous, fluid poetry is drama itself and demands to be spoken aloud. Tim Supple and Simon Reade take ten of the tales --including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, of Venus and Adonis, of Pyramus and Thisbe, among others--and transform them into elegant works for the stage. Erotic, violent, and magical, this dramatization of Tales from Ovid realizes the immense power of Hughes's original text, which Michael Hofmann celebrated in The Times (London) as "one of the great works of the century."
Copies
No copies available.
The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.
Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."
With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
Birthday Letters: Poems
by Ted Hughes
Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.
Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it is a truly remarkable collection of pems in its own right.
Copies
No copies available.
The School Bag
Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have chosen an eclectic range of poets read in today's schools, but also those poems that the editors themselves read at school, or those from which they learned the most. Balancing the canon with more personal selections, 'The School Bag' is an exhilarating introduction for any student of poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
A Ted Hughes Bestiary Poems
by Ted Hughes
“Ted Hughes was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world.” —Seamus Heaney
Originally, the medieval bestiary, or book of animals, set out to establish safe distinctions—between them and us—but Ted Hughes’s poetry works always in a contrary direction: showing what man and beast have in common, the reservoir from which we all draw. In A Ted Hughes Bestiary, Alice Oswald’s selection is arranged chronologically, with an eye to different books and styles, but equally to those poems that embody animals rather than just describe them. Some poems are here because, although not strictly speaking animal, they become so in the process of writing; and in keeping with the bestiary tradition there are plenty of imaginary animals—all concentratedly going about their business.
In Poetry in the Making, Hughes said that he thought of his poems as animals, meaning that he wanted them to have “a vivid life of their own.” Distilled and self-defining, A Ted Hughes Bestiary is subtly responsive to a central aspect of Hughes’s achievement, while offering room to overlooked poems, and “to those that have the wildest tunes.”
Copies
No copies available.
The Iron Man Chris Mould Illustrated Edition
by Ted Hughes
Stunning illustrations by Chris Mould make this one of the most exciting editions of The Iron Man to be published.
The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff.
Where had he come from? Nobody knows.
How was he made? Nobody knows.
Mankind must put a stop to the dreadful destruction by the Iron Man and set a trap for him, but he cannot be kept down. Then, when a terrible monster from outer space threatens to lay waste to the planet, it is the Iron Man who finds a way to save the world.
'Stunning.' WRD Magazine
'Whether you're already a fan of this classic children's story or a new reader, this wonderful new version is a real treat.' BookTrust
'Gripping . . a classic.' Phillip Pullman
'A visionary tale.' Michael Morpurgo
'One of the greatest of modern fairy tales.' Observer
Copies
No copies available.