English Poetry Literature

Down in the big construction site, tough trucks work with all their might. But now it's time to say goodnight! Little truck drivers will drift off to sleep to this soothing good-bye to the day.

In this popular collection, actors Andrew Branch and Anne Rosenfeld perform over 50 fantastic nursery rhymes, from familiar favourites to lesser-known gems, speaking the rhymes aloud and chatting about their meanings. As they listen, children are encouraged to think about and appreciate the words, increasing their communication skills as they join in and play. This unique collection brings to life traditional nursery rhymes with music and sound effects to thrill a new generation, and is ideal for preschool children who can listen and follow along.

For the most part, Hannah's life is just how she wants it. She has two supportive parents, she's popular at school, and she's been killing it at gymnastics. But when her cousin Cal moves in with her family, everything changes. Cal tells half-truths and tall tales, pranks Hannah constantly, and seems to be the reason her parents are fighting more and more. Nothing is how it used to be. She knows that Cal went through a lot after his mom died, and she is trying to be patient, but most days Hannah just wishes Cal never moved in.

Virgil's Aeneid, one of the greatest classical poems, tells the story of Aeneas, son of Priam, after the fall of Troy. His quest is to find the site "in the west" where he will found a new town prophesied to be the seat of a world empire: Rome.

The Castle of Indolence was published early in the summer of 1748, four months after the poet’s death. The work was a slow and leisurely composition, which took nearly fifteen years to complete. The poem consists of 158 stanzas, divided into two cantos. It is presented as an allegory and was professedly written in imitation of The Faerie Queene. The origin of the poem appears to be the frequent remonstrances of Thomson’s friends about the poet’s well-known indolence, regarding both life and composition.

The follow-up to the internationally best-selling sensation The Lost Words, The Lost Spells is an audio treasure that evokes the magic of the everyday natural world.

As with The Prophet, Sand and Foam was not only a success on initial publication but was also a must read for many of those in the counter-culture scene in the sixties. John Lennon even borrowed a couplet, with a slight alteration, for his famed song 'Julia'.

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages.

Volume one of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume one contains four collections published between 1966 and 1975: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North.

Sometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice are tailored to those moments in life when we need them most, from general glumness to news overload, and from infatuation to losing the spark. Whatever you’re facing, there is a poem here that will do the trick. This pocket-size companion presents the most essential fixes in William Sieghart’s poetic dispensary - those that, again and again, have shown themselves to hit the spot.

Swimming Lessons explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion. Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-sized yet profound, Lili's poems reflect her trademark honesty and unique perspective. Swimming Lessons reveals the depths of female experience, and is the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own.

The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.

In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his ‘urban pastoral’ lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented.

When the mysterious Green Knight arrives unbidden at the Round Table one Christmas, only Gawain is brave enough to take up his challenge.... This story, first told in the 1400s, is one of the most enthralling, dramatic and beloved poems in the English tradition. Now, in Simon Armitage, the poem has found its perfect modern translator. Armitage's retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight captures all of the magic and wonderful storytelling of the original while also revitalising it.

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems - but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition. This volume presents the 1855 "Leaves of Grass" in its entirety, unchanged, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.

The Narrow Road to the Interior and Hojoki are two of the best-loved works of their kind; famous for their beautiful, delicate verse and subtle insight into the human condition. It has been said of The Narrow Road that 'it was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it'. It takes the form of a travel diary, and traces the poet's journey from Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to the northern interior.

So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West—a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?

After a painting triggers strange memories, Ben Martin comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, in search of answers. Although Annie and this enchanting outsider are from different worlds, she wonders why Ben's kindness seems so familiar and his presence so calming to her - and to the troubled husband of her best friend.

Thyestes is a tragic rendition of the fraternal civil war within House Atreides. This 1st century A.D. play was written by the Stoic philosopher Seneca and has been translated into readable prose for a 21st century audience.

Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman's preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman's thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and others join his own.