Poetry Audiobooks | Literature

Various Authors (Author), Bart Wolffe (Narrator)

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"DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: Includes 5 additional poems only available on the digital download. "Billy Collins puts the 'fun' back in 'profundity.' "-Alice Fulton From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines new poems with selections from four previous books-Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins's unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard with every word, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he sells out reading venues all across the country. Appearing regularly in The Best American Poetry series, his poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins's poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder. In the poet's own words, he hopes that his poems "begin in Kansas and end in Oz." Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this "poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace" (The New Yorker). Envoy Go, little book, out of this house and into the world, carriage made of paper rolling toward town bearing a single passenger beyond the reach of this jittery pen and far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp. It is time to decamp, put on a jacket and venture outside, time to be regarded by other eyes, bound to be held in foreign hands. So off you go, infants of the brain, with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice: stay out as late as you like, don't bother to call or write, and talk to as many strangers as you can."

Billy Collins (Author), Billy Collins (Narrator)

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Walt Whitman's Selected Poems

Walt Whitman (Author), Brian Murray (Narrator)

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After the Fire: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose

"New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance's heartrending collection of poetry and essays recounts a dark chapter of her own life, her first marriage to an alcoholic—a powerful look at the emotional cost of addiction and an inspiring story of courage and triumph in the wake of crushing defeat Before she found fame as a bestselling mystery author, Judith Jance wrestled with the anguish of being married to an alcoholic. For years she channeled her pain into words, composing the poems in this moving volume, first published in 1984, a year before her debut novel. In searing and direct language, After the Fire chronicles the collapse of Jance's first marriage under the weight of her husband's addiction—and her own unwitting denial and codependence while she struggled to find herself. "I will not be the price of your redemption," she wrote then. "I will not pay my life to ransom yours." An intimate, deeply personal look into a wrenching time in Jance's life, After the Fire is a portrait of addiction and its insidious effects on lives and love. It illuminates universal truths about unbearable loss and finding the courage to carry on, and offers inspiration and profound insight into the heart and work of a beloved bestselling author."

J.A. Jance (Author), J.A. Jance (Narrator)

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Imagining Alexandria

"Poetry was Louis de Bernières’ first literary love. Here the much-loved author returns us to the vivid Mediterranean landscape of his fiction. Introduced to Greek poetry while in Corfu in 1983, de Bernières’ own poems about the distant past, the erotic and the philosophical owe much to the influence of the great Alexandrian poet. This is a collection rich in sensuality and nostalgia, with an introduction to each poem by the author."

Louis De Bernières (Author), Louis De Bernières (Narrator)

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The Best of Edgar Allan Poe

"Twenty hours of the very best of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories: The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal, The Gold Bug, The Balloon Hoax, Von Kempelen and his discovery, Mesmeric Revelation, The Facts in the case of M Valdemar, The Thousand and Second Tale of Sheherazade, MS Found in a bottle, A Descent into the Maelström, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Purloined Letter, The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Imp of the Perverse, The Island of the Fay, The Oval Portrait, The Assignation, The Telltale Heart, The Domain of Arnheim, Landor's Cottage, William Wilson, Berenice, Eleonora, Ligeia, Morella, Metzengerstein, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains."

Edgar Allan Poe (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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The Great Poets: John Clare

"John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the ‘Peasant Poet’ he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth’s for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: ‘I feel a beautiful providence ever about me,’ Clare wrote. But his life was a long struggle against poverty and mental collapse. Some of his finest poems were written in the local asylum."

John Clare (Author), David Shaw Parker, Thomas Goose (Narrator)

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The Prelude

"Wordsworth’s Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it, and his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turned its back. Subtitled ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, The Prelude is both a key document in the history of English literature, and an inspiring work of imagination, as fresh and challenging today as when it was written two centuries ago."

William Wordsworth (Author), Andrew Riches, Neville Jason, Nicholas Farrell (Narrator)

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The Great Poets: John Masefield

"John Masefield (1878–1967) was one of the most prolific, popular and successful poets of the twentieth century. Masefield broke upon Edwardian literature with the startling work entitled The Everlasting Mercy, which described the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher. Over the span of his lifetime, he was appointed Poet Laureate and amassed a large number of admirers, which included such high-profile names as John Betjeman, Robert Graves and W.B. Yeats. This collection contains thirty-six poems and spans Masefield’s entire career. There are early poems from Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and Ballads (1903), followed by extracts from the narrative poems The Everlasting Mercy, Dauber and Reynard the Fox. The selection also includes a number of sonnets including ‘On Growing Old’, as well as his poetry on the Romans, alongside a number of rarities."

John Masefield (Author), Ronald Pickup (Narrator)

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[German] - Festspiel der deutschen Sprache, Vol. 7: Nathan der Weise

"Eine szenische Live-Lesung Zum siebten Mal fand im September 2012 das FESTSPIEL DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE statt. Norbert Beilharz, Hermann Beyer, Christian Grashof, Benjamin Krüger, Hans Stetter, Anna und Katharina Thalbach und Elisabeth Trissenaar standen auf der altehrwürdigen Bühne des Goethe-Theater in Bad Lauchstädt und haben in einer szenischen Lesung von NATHAN DER WEISE die hohe Kunst der Interpretation dargeboten und das Publikum begeistert. Lassen Sie sich von diesem einmaligen Abend in den Bann ziehen!"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Author), Anna Thalbach, Benjamin Krüger, Christian Grashof, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Hans Stetter, Hermann Beyer, Katharina Thalbach, Norbert Beilharz (Narrator)

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Poems from The Mara Crossing

"Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems."

Ruth Padel (Author), Ruth Padel (Narrator)

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The Ring And The Book

"Robert Browning's poetic masterpiece of sex, lies and murder, adapted by Martyn Wade. Episode 1: Rome is rife with speculation in the aftermath of a triple stabbing. Starring Anton Lesser as Browning, with full cast. Directed by Abigail le Fleming.Episode 2: Accused of murder, Guido fights desperately for his life. Starring Anton Lesser as Browning, with full cast. Directed by Abigail le Fleming."

Robert Browning (Author), Anton Lesser (Narrator)

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Poetry Audiobooks in Literature