A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called 'brilliant' (The Listener), 'dazzling' (The Guardian), 'elegant, rueful and witty' (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.
History and literature seem to be ......
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the greatest German language poet since Goethe, worked for a time as Rodin's secretary at Meudon. This title is a paperback edition of Stephen Cohn's celebrated translations and includes the complete German language text parallel with the English.
John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one.
The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes ......
The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the days immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents' wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child's future growth. The poems draw on a ......
This thematic selection of Lamb's writings not only demonstrates his literary achievements; it forms a self-portrait of the writer: generous, amused, and gregarious, finding imaginative escape from grim circumstances in the teeming life of London and the theatre.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation has sometimes been overshadowed both by the achievements of her husband, Robert Browning, and by the romantic story of their elopement. This selection recovers the best work of this independent, passionate and intelligent poet, presenting it on its own terms. Browning emerges as an acute observer of the ......
Poems, Songs and Jests on the Subject of Sensual Love
Sensual pleasure, gentle, violent or comic, is the theme of this anthology of 17th-century erotic writing. "Restoration Bawdy" brings vividly to life a "masquerading age". The book draws on high and low culture and the result is a lively social panorama of Restoration England.
Sir Walter Scott is the great poet of the Scottish people, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed sets Scott in context as both a European Romantic and a Scottish folk poet.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was known to his contemporaries as "the most accomplished gentleman of his age", noble, learned and elegant. A man of his time, at the centre of the dangerous power games of the court of Henry VIII, Surrey is revealed in this selection as a subtle and graceful poet.
