"Lord Byron's satirical take on the legend of Don Juan is a moving and witty poem that sees the young hero in a reversal of roles. Juan sheds his image as a womanizer and instead becomes the victim of circumstance as he is relentlessly pursued by every woman he meets. Comprising seventeen cantos of rhyming iambic pentameter, the poem is a crisp and accessible meditation on the madness of the world."
"Poems For Halloween - An Introduction. I should be whispering this because Halloween is almost upon us. A time of Witches, Ghouls and Hauntings and all kinds of scary things that come out the evening before All Saints Day to wreak.......... I'm glad you're listening so let us begin- Many of us remember that feeling from childhood when an adult or even our friends would tell us scary stories of things that go bump in the night. It was a time to scare and be scared and no matter how terrifying the stories were it was a good feeling punctuated by yelps and laughs. Halloween is now firmly established in the Calendar as a favourite; to go trick or treating and an excuse for kids everywhere to dress up in outlandish attire and collect vast quantities of sweets. Equally adults everywhere are prone to switch off the lights and pretend to be out! In our collection the poems show that words have been used to enthral and suggest dark mysterious forces beyond our control for quite some time. With authors of the ability of Keats, Poe, Byron, Sheehan & Shakespeare, to nourish these primeval fears the poems have an unsettling nature as all bad things should! This collection of poems is read to you by Ghizela Rowe & Gideon Wagner."
"In this moving poem, Byron recounts the final, desperate resistance of the Venetians on the day the Ottoman army stormed Acrocorinth: revealing the closing scenes of the conflict through the eyes of Lanciotto - a Venetian renegade fighting for the Ottomans - and Francesca - the beautiful maiden daughter of the governor of the Venetian garrison: Minotti. Lanciotto - whose impasioned suit for Francesca's hand had been previously refused by Minotti: had later fled the Venetian empire after being falsely denounced by anonymous accusers via the infamous "Lion's Mouth" at the Doge's palace.
Enlisting under the Turkish flag, Lanciotto repudiates both his nationality and his religion: only to be challenged by Fransesca herself the night before the final assault to repent his apostasy, to forgive his accusers, and to save the Venetian garrison from certain slaughter. - Can Lanciotto - after years of unjust persecution and betrayal - bring himself to relent and save the Venetian garrison now on the verge of wholesale slaughter? - Will Francesca's years of constant, faithful devotion succeed in winning the renegade back from his suicidal slide to perdition? (Summary by Godsend)"
"Cain: A Mystery is Lord Byron's retelling of the classical Biblical story from the point of view of its antagonist. Undoubtedly influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost, Byron's Cain is defiant and questioning. In trying to come to terms with the mortality humanity has been punished with, he comes face to face with Lucifer, who takes him to the "Abyss of Space," shows him a vision of Earth's violent natural history, and gives him a true understanding of death. Upon his return, a devastated Cain carries out the familiar end of his tragedy. Cain: A Mystery is a closet drama, a popular form for Romantic writers, where the script is not intended to be performed onstage, but rather read aloud with a small group. - Summary by Sarah Terry"
"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood. Canto IV describes Harold's travels in Italy. (Summary by Wikipedia and alan mapstone)"
"Poems For Halloween - An Introduction. I should be whispering this because Halloween is almost upon us. A time of Witches, Ghouls and Hauntings and all kinds of scary things that come out the evening before All Saints Day to wreak.......... I'm glad you're listening so let us begin- Many of us remember that feeling from childhood when an adult or even our friends would tell us scary stories of things that go bump in the night. It was a time to scare and be scared and no matter how terrifying the stories were it was a good feeling punctuated by yelps and laughs. Halloween is now firmly established in the Calendar as a favourite; to go trick or treating and an excuse for kids everywhere to dress up in outlandish attire and collect vast quantities of sweets. Equally adults everywhere are prone to switch off the lights and pretend to be out! In our collection the poems show that words have been used to enthral and suggest dark mysterious forces beyond our control for quite some time. With authors of the ability of Keats, Poe, Byron, Sheehan & Shakespeare, to nourish these primeval fears the poems have an unsettling nature as all bad things should! This collection of poems is read to you by Ghizela Rowe & Gideon Wagner."
"Today Byron is regarded as the ultimate romantic - a rebel, a Casanova and a man of intense, brooding passion. He was the most famous literary man of his time, and his poetry, endlessly witty and often insightful, was immensely popular and hugely influential. From the delicate romanticism of She Walks in Beauty to the evocative reflections of So We'll Go No More a Roving, Byron's poems were unrivalled in their power and potency. Lesser-known poems such as Destruction of Sennacherib, a reimagining of the biblical story of Sennacherib, Prometheus, a sardonic poem about the Greek gods, and Darkness, an apocalyptic story of the last man on earth, also included here, reveal Byron to be a poet of great range and variety. 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know', Lord Byron was without equal in English literature."
"Juan, captured by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery is bought by a beautiful Princess as her toy-boy. Dressed as an odalisque, he is smuggled into the Sultan's harem for a steamy assignation. Unbelievably, Byron's publisher almost baulked at this feast of allusive irony, blasphemy (mild), calumny, scorn, lesse-majeste, cross-dressing, bestiality, assassination, circumcision and dwarf-tossing. This was the last Canto published by the stuffy John Murray (who had, however, made a tidy fortune on the earlier parts of the Epic). Although Byron's mood starts, after this, to grow darker and his bitterness at English hypocrisy to grow sharper, his discursive comedy and precise and intriguing rhyme is rarely better than in Canto V. (Summary by Peter Gallagher)"
"Narrative Verse - Volume 2 Poetry can capture the imagination in a few short lines but Narrative Verse or Poetry takes the form of telling a story whether it be simple or complex in a longer form. Among the most ancient forms of poetry it has widespread roots through almost every culture. In Volume 2 we bring you the classics of Sohrab & Rustum - Matthew Arnold, The Prisoner Of Chillon - Lord Byron and Faithless Sally Brown - Thomas Hood. They are read for you by the renowned actors Sean Barrett and David Shaw-Parker."
"January - the first month of the year in the Gregorian calendar ushers in the New Year. The cold and bleak landscape of winter however provides a rich background for our esteemed poets such as Byron, Longfellow, Cowper and Bronte to offer us their reflections and counterpoints.
Among our readers are Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe. The tracks are; January - An Introduction; January 1 1828 By Nathaniel Parker Willis; Written January The 1st, 1792 By Janet Little; Written January 1st 1832 By Henry Alford; Promises That Fail Their Makers Lips By Daniel Sheehan; The Old Year By John Clare; At The Entering Of The New Year By Thomas Hardy; Written During An Aurora Borealis January 7th 1831 By Henry Alford; The Meeting By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; A Sonnet Occasioned....... January 1616 By William Drummond; January 1795 By Mary Darby Robinson; A Tale Founded On A Fact Which Happened In January 1779 By William Cowper; The First Snowfall By James Russell Lowell; Arm The First Rifle Ballad, January 1852 By Martin Farquhar Tupper; On The Discoveries of Captain Lewis, January 14th 1807 By Joel Barlow; A Calendar Of Sonnets - January By Helen Hunt Jackson; Eden In Winter By Vachel Lindsay; It Is Winter By Daniel Sheehan; Sonnet 59 By Henry Alford; Snow Flakes By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Work Without Hope By Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Snow Beneath Who's Chilly Softness By Emily Dickinson; GH On My Thirty Third Birthday, January 22nd 1821 By Lord Byron; January Cold Desolate By Christina Georgina Rossetti; The Farm Woman's Winter By Thomas Hardy; The Winters Are So Short By Emily Dickinson; A Song For January 26th 1824 By Charles Thompson; Ode On The Present Time, 27th January 1795 By Amelia Opie; Winter - My Secret By Christina Georgina Rossetti; Month Of January By Hilaire Belloc; Pray To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong By Henry David Thoreau; January By Alice Carey."
"Sports Poetry. It is human nature to create and compete. Both of these are brought together in Sport. Many games began in distant eons and gradually adapted and became codified to those we know today. In this volume we celebrate, through the verse of so many well known poets, sports of all kinds. Sports for the rich sports for the poor and all manner in between. As Henry Newbolt would say 'Play Up Play Up and Play The Game. Our collection is read by many including Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe."
