Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

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

The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. As a unifying principle, editor Marlé Hammond has selected eighty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds: for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland, and for change and renewal. Poets include the legendary pre-Islamic warrior 'Antara Ibn Shaddad, medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, the wandering poet Al-A’sha, and the influential Egyptian Romantic Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi. Here too are literary giants of the past century: Khalil Jibran, author of the bestselling The Prophet; popular Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani; Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan; Mahmoud Darwish, bard of occupation and exile; acclaimed iconoclast Adonis, and more. In their evocations of heroism, nostalgia, mysticism, grief, and passion, the poems gathered here transcend the limitations of time and place.

The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions.

Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, and Donald Justice, and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.

In 2009 Knopf published a new translation of Cavafy's Complete Poems by the brilliant and award-winning writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn. Now Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works for a Pocket Poets edition, including such favorites as "Waiting for the Barbarians," "Ithaca," and "The God Abandons Antony." Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poems make the
historic profoundly and movingly personal. A towering figure of twentieth-century poetry, Cavafy is a stellar addition to the Everyman Pocket Poets series.

James Joyce is most celebrated for his remarkable novel Ulysses, and yet he was also an accomplished poet. Chamber Music, his debut collection, fused the styles of the Celtic Revival with his own brand of ironic exuberance. Pomes Penyeach, a collection written when Joyce had published Dubliners and was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, explores intimate themes of adultery, jealousy, and betrayal that would reappear transformed in the later Ulysses. Joyce's occasional verse includes the well-known "Ecce Puer," written for his newborn grandson, and his satirical poems "The Holy Office" and "Gas from a Burner." These poems are brought together here with Joyce's play, Exiles--about an unconventional couple involved in a love triangle--in a beautiful, accessible hardcover edition for the general reader.

One of the foremost American novelists of the early twentieth century, Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia but grew up in Nebraska. Before she wrote the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. In such lyrical poems as ‘Prairie Dawn’, ‘The Hawthorn Tree,’ ‘Going Home’ and ‘Winter at Delphi’, Cather exhibits both a finely tuned sensitivity to the beauties of the physical world and a richly symbolic use of the landscapes of myth. The themes that were to animate her later masterpieces found their first expression in these haunting, elegiac ballads and sonnets.

Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Antonia are already available in Everyman’s Library.

Painting and sculpture have inspired great poetry, but so also have photography, calligraphy, tapestry and folk art. Included here are poems celebrating Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa', Monet's 'Waterlilies' and Grant Wood's 'American Gothic'; well-known poems such as Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and Auden's 'Musée de Beaux-Arts', Homer's immortal account of the forging of the Shield of Achilles and Garcia Lorca's breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dali. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cézanne, E. E. Cummings about Picasso, Billy Collins about Hieronymous Bosch, and Joyce Carol Oates about Edward Hopper. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words - or a few very well-chosen ones.

With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeated lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle has fascinated poets ever since it was introduced almost two centuries ago. Many well-known names in the past have tried their hand at it, and the villanelle is enjoying a revival among writers today. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century - by Thomas Hardy, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Oscar Wilde and others - to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night,' Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' and Sylvia Plath's 'Mad Girl's Love Song'. Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Sherman Alexie and Rita Dove, demonstrating the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single strict poetic form.

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.

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.

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.

With its roots in the devotional verse of the early Christian church and the long lyric poems of the Irish bards, Irish poetry has a rich and robust tradition both of engagement and self-reflection. It has grappled long with politics and has provided the most eloquent response to Ireland's turbulent history, mediating and mitigating histories of loyalty and loss; it has soaked itself in the Irish landscape and Celtic myth; it has encompassed religion, so much a part of Ireland's cultural heritage. At the same time Irish poets have given their own original slant to everyday experience and affairs of the heart.
Thematically organized and spanning many centuries, this selection also features a section of Gaelic poetry in translation, notably excerpts from the 18th-century epic masterpiece, Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court.

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.

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.

One of America's best-loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay's refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.

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.