No catches, no fine print just unadulterated book loving, with your favourite books saved to your own digital bookshelf.
New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop Plus lots lots more…
Find out moreShort and sweet poems and sonnets or lyrical and lengthy epics, sit back and relax while you enjoy the work of these wonderful wordsmiths.
Alan Spence's collection of haiku beautifully explores brief moments in time, from making a cup of tea to a summer downpour. There are 150 poems, perfect for dipping into or reading in one sitting. Delightful.
'Death could drop from the dark as easily as song - But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand, By dangerous tides, Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides' - from Returning, We Hear the Larks' Selected Poems & Letters . Isaac Rosenberg's poems, such as Dead Man's Dump and Break of Day in the Trenches , have been included in every significant war anthology and have earned him a place in Poets' Corner.He studied at the Slade School of Art at the same time as Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, showing great promise as a painter. His poverty, education and background made him an outsider, yet it was just that experience which equipped him to cope with the horror of war in the trenches: 'I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting.' Inexplicably for such a major figure, Rosenberg's work has been out of print for many years. In this Selected Poems and Letters , his biographer Jean Liddiard has made a substantial selection of his finest poems and most revealing letters, providing also an authoritative introduction and a detailed chronology.
Brilliant young woman poet joins Cape list Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with great clarity and precision, tenderness and care. These are vivid poems full of light and weather and water - awash with water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that 'lay like saints/unharvested, luminous'. There is an arresting imagination at work here, one as relaxed and at home in an alternative world of babies in filing cabinets, light collectors or the visiting dead, as it is in the world we think we know: supermarkets, empty flats, the A580 from Liverpool to Manchester. In the title poem, Sprackland sets out her store: 'I tried the soft stuff on holiday in Wales, a mania of teadrinking and hairwashing, excitable soap which never rinsed away, but I loved coming home to this. Flat. Straight. Like the vowels, Like the straight talk: hey up me duck...the blunt taste of don't get mardy, of too bloody deep for me, fierce lovely water that marked me for life as belonging, regardless. ' Lucid, sensuous and informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.
Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices, drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.
'The Faber Book of Beasts is a generous and intelligent round- up of old favourites, new juxtapositions, and poems we mightn't know about ... Will set heads shaking, as well as nodding with pleasure.' Independent William Wordsworth's 'To a Skylark' W.B. Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan' Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose' D.H. Lawrence's 'Bat' Marianne Moore's 'Elephants' William Blake's 'The Tyger' Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover' Thom Gunn's 'The Snail' Seamus Heaney's 'Otter' John Donne's 'The Flea' Christopher Smart's 'My Cat Jeoffry' 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' From childhood rhymes to canonical classics, Homer to Ted Hughes, this eclectic poetry anthology celebrating the earth's creatures brims with beastly delights. Celebrated poet Paul Muldoon's bestiary shows that we are 'most human in the presence of animals', whether tame or wild, common or exotic, mammals or reptiles, real or imaginary - and the result is a must-read for animal-lovers of all ages everywhere. 'Animals bring the best out in us [and make] the best art ... Elephants, skunks, otters, hedgehogs and hippos feature in Muldoon's menagerie; how charming it is to observe how they nuzzle along together in his engaging anthology.' Irish Times
A timely re-issue of one of award-winning poet Don Paterson's finest collections first published to great acclaim in 1997. As Don Paterson's reputation as one of the finest contemporary poets in English continues to grow we will be actively reprinting and repromoting his work into our new Faber poetry livery. 'Whisky, trains, women and stars waltz through the book, ontologically challenged.
July 2011 Guest Editor Alexander McCall Smith on Poems... In my view Auden is without equal among twentieth century poets. His is a profound voice, full of insight and wisdom. This is a handsome edition of his work. I first picked Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems off the shelf of a library. I had no idea at the time that this book would influence me so much. In fact, I think it changed my life, in that it very profoundly affected my outlook on so many things. Now I press that volume into the hands of anybody who asks me what to read.
his edition of 32 works combines a number of the English poet's best-known sonnets, ballads, and shorter works, along with her long masterpiece "Goblin Market." Others in this choice collection include "The Convent Threshold," "Up-hill," "Cousin Kate," "Winter: My Secret," "Maude Clare," "No, Thank You, John," and "After Death."
This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).
Cope's mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of aging she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.
.jpg)
From the Haiku to Xanadu, a well-crafted poem can speak of an experience of our world in a way that stays with us for a long time; often for life. Everyone has a poem they learned in school that holds increased sentimental importance as time goes by.
The ability of words and language to define us and the poet’s ability to harness it are what makes poetry such a powerful genre. The field is huge, the subjects covered too numerous to list. From the fields of Flanders to the kitchen sink there are poems that encapsulate all of human life. Funny, thought-provoking, challenging, evocative, story-telling, satire and tribute. All are here. Why not use our special recommendations to find something to inspire you today?