English Poetry Literature

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war, beauty, and so on) is as changeable as the beings that inhabit its chapters. The sustained thread is power and how it transforms us, both those of us who have it and those of us who do not.

Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len are two crafty robbers with a cunning plan to steal the farmer’s fine prize cow. But little do they know that the tiniest, quietest creature of all has overhead their plot, and she has a plan of her own.... What the Ladybird Heard is a fantastically funny story from the stellar partnership of Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks. With brilliant rhyming verse read by Alexander Armstrong, this much-loved modern classic is perfect story for listening to together. This audio edition of the story features a read-along track and a song for lots of farmyard fun.

In this journey of self-expression and self-exploration, Wakefield Brewster overcomes educational systems, addiction, and mental despair to deliver messages of hope, wellness, and pride in his blackness. In his own words, “In an odyssey of self awareness and societal association, I have crafted a deeper communion with the world around me.”

Selected and accompanied by commentary from best-selling author and literature professor Joseph Pearce, this exciting collection of verse contains classic poems that every child should know to begin a poetic ascent towards God.

In 1945, the great American poet Ezra Pound was deemed insane. He was due to stand trial for treason for his fascist broadcasts in Italy during the war. Instead, he escaped a possible death sentence and was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane for more than a decade. While there, his visitors included the stars of modern poetry: T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, among others. They would sit with Pound on the hospital grounds and discuss everything from literary gossip to past escapades.

The debut US poetry collection from social media star Elvira Sastre, exploring the sharp, slippery moments that turn a beloved relationship into something self-destructive.

The Asking takes its title from the closing line of one of its newly appearing poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking.” In its substantial opening section of new work, Jane Hirshfield continues her signature affirmation of the central contradictions, uncertainties, and harvests of astonishment that shape our human lives. A forefront spokesperson for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, Hirshfield offers, as indispensable compass, the choice to embrace what comes. I

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by number one New York Times best-selling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.

Spend quality time with your little ones as you listen to these poems with newborns and young kids. This book is organized so that you and your baby can enjoy a poem every day of the year. With poetry, you will stimulate the early development of literacy skills and build your baby's vocabulary and imagination. Whether you're soothing your baby to sleep or it's story time, there is a poem to make every day special.

15-year-old Dylan has always felt like an outsider in his small town. Isolated when he was younger as the result of his unpredictable, now absent mother and feeling like a disappointment to his grandfather who has stepped in to raise him, Dylan finds relief in the woods behind his grandfather's auto shop. Amidst the cool quiet of the trees, Dylan thrives on bird watching and writing poetry. But one afternoon after spotting an injured hawk, Dylan finds himself pushing out of his comfort zone to track down help for the bird—and ends up rescuing a part of himself in the process.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a poetic marvel, a work that has survived translation into many languages, while losing little of its force and its wry character. As a source of literary imagery and memorable quotations it ranks with the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. While Edward Fitzgerald was neither the first nor the most scholarly of the English translators of the Rubaiyat, his translation has been largely responsible for the world-wide popularity of this monument of classic Persian poetry.

Including: "Europe, Europe", "America", "Howl", and more!

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

After a century of civil strife in Rome and Italy, the poet Virgil wrote The Aeneid to honor the emperor Augustus by praising Aeneas, Augustus's legendary ancestor. As a patriotic epic imitating Homer, The Aeneid also set out to provide Rome with a literature equal to that of Greece.

The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore performed by Glenn Haskell will no doubt become a Christmas tradition in many homes.

What elevates Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam, reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times - as in Tayeb Salih's work - and translating to the realm of lyric the work of the likes of Nawal El Saadawi.

From brave and bold to creative and clever, Emily Winfield Martin's rhythmic rhyme expresses all the loving things that parents think of when they look at their children.

What if there's another side to Donald Trump? A sensitive, poetic side? Driven by this question, Rob Sears began combing The Donald's words for signs of poetry. What he found was a revelation. By simply taking the President's tweets and transcripts, cutting them up, and reordering them, he unearthed a trove of beautiful verse that was just waiting to be discovered.

John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Thomas Carew, and Henry Vaughan: these were some of the 17th-century writers who devised a new form of poetry full of wit, intellect and grace, which we now call Metaphysical poetry. They wrote about their deepest religious feelings and their carnal pleasures in a way that was radically new and challenging to their readers. Their work was largely misunderstood or ignored for two centuries, until 20th-century critics rediscovered it, finding in it a deep originality and a willingness to experiment.