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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.
Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2006. Costa Book Awards 2006 Judges' comment: "Fierce poems with striking imagery and fine control of pace and tone."
Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2006. Judges' comment: "A vivid, thoughtful and multi-faceted verse-letter, which moves skilfully between life in post-colonial Nigeria and England."
First published in 1966 this is the debut offering from Seamus Heaney which went on to win numerous awards. The talent was there to see from the start. Simple and observant these are a joy to read. March 2010 Guest Editor Susan Fletcher on Death of a Naturalist... I've always loved poetry - and this the volume that started off that love. I was introduced to Heaney at school, studying the title poem from this collection in class. That might have put most people off him, but I loved the poem - and went on to buy this book. I love how he intertwines the natural world with human experience, how he captures a waterfall or the sky over a peninsular, or the sense of unrequited love, as it is - absolutely. I read a line and think, 'that's it! He's got it!' And it's hard not to be wildly impressed with someone who can manage that. And it is his last poem in Death of a Naturalist that speaks to me the most. He says that he "rhymes to see himself, to set the darkness echoing" - and, as a writer, I can understand that sentiment entirely. I have that quote written out, above my desk.
In Quicksand Beach, Kate Bingham captures snapshots of everyday life in her poetry. Her simple style manages to encompass weighty subjects effortlessly. It's special stuff.
Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2006. Costa Book Awards 2006 Judges' comment: "Elegantly crafted poems which have an emotional narrative that is both wistful and raw."
Written by Ted Hughes and illustrated by Raymond Briggs (The Snowman) this beautiful collection has been specially arranged to start with poems for younger readers and progress to the more complex and sophisticated for older children. Ted Hughes, a former Poet Laureate has an instinctive grasp of how children think and his poems will engage and stretch their imagination. Perfect for a gift and equally perfect on your own shelf so you can dip in whenever you like.
Winner of the TS Eliot Prize 2005. Carol Ann Duffy's wonderful new collection is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.
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.
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.
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?