Everyman's Library POCKET POETS
4 total works
A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this anthology features the richly varied voices of sons and daughters, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves. From eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o's witty 'On the Birth of His Son' to Dylan Thomas's poignant 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night'; from Sylvia Plath's searing poem 'Daddy' to Yeats's tender 'A prayer for My Daughter'; from Homer to Seamus Heaney, from Shakespeare to Milosz, the poets and poems collected here range across cultures and centuries, and deal with every facet of the father-child relationship from birth to death and beyond. Gratitude, tenderness and awe infuse some of the poems. Others express anger or sorrow. Many are moving tributes to the first man in a child's life. And each one conveys the profound nature of fatherhood.
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.
If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.
From Chaucer to Billy Collins and from basset hounds to brindle bull terriers, Doggerel presents a robust brood of the most charming verse tributes ever offered to our beloved canine companions.
The rich and assorted cadences of some of the most distinguished poets across the centuries ring out from these pages–from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Pope to Merrill, Merwin, and Muldoon–celebrating pooches of every pedigree and persuasion. Here is Margaret Cavendish’s barking chorus of beagles on the hunt; Elizabeth Bishop’s “Pink Dog” alongside Robyn Selman’s “My Dog is Named for Elizabeth Bishop”; Charles Baxter’s villanelle “Dog Kibble,” whose dog-narrator decides that “Life isn’t meaningless because there’s food”; and the desultory charms of Jane Kenyon’s unleashed dog, nuzzling about on a drizzly afternoon.
From lazy dogs curled up by the fireplace to audacious hounds howling at the moon, from mutts to purebreds, puppies to old dogs, Doggerel is an irresistible gathering of fast and faithful friends.
The rich and assorted cadences of some of the most distinguished poets across the centuries ring out from these pages–from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Pope to Merrill, Merwin, and Muldoon–celebrating pooches of every pedigree and persuasion. Here is Margaret Cavendish’s barking chorus of beagles on the hunt; Elizabeth Bishop’s “Pink Dog” alongside Robyn Selman’s “My Dog is Named for Elizabeth Bishop”; Charles Baxter’s villanelle “Dog Kibble,” whose dog-narrator decides that “Life isn’t meaningless because there’s food”; and the desultory charms of Jane Kenyon’s unleashed dog, nuzzling about on a drizzly afternoon.
From lazy dogs curled up by the fireplace to audacious hounds howling at the moon, from mutts to purebreds, puppies to old dogs, Doggerel is an irresistible gathering of fast and faithful friends.