Poetry

Includes 14 poems by well known New Zealand poets.
Includes Allen Curnow, sam Hunt, Vincent O'Sullivan, Bill Manhire, Fiona Farrell, Charles Brasch, Jo Randerson, ARD Fairburn and Kateherine Mansfield.

In his new collection, Harry Ricketts finds room for three songs written in Hong Kong in 1975, and a 1979 poem about a War poet. Other poems remember departed friends and early experiences, and celebrate the abiding pleasure of reading, writing and cricket. Formally adroit, Just Then is by turns tender, funny and often surprising.

Love - that complicated, delicious, pleasurable, necessary feeling ties us to another human, to a mother, father, son, daughter, sibling, lover or friend. Love can also tie us to a place, an experience, an object. We love and we are loved; unexpectedly, gloriously, painfully, deeply. The majority of the 150 New Zealand love poems selected by antholigist Paula Green for this gorgeous clection reveal adult love - from the sparks of youth to the changing nature of love in old age - but she has also included examples of the love of off... read more

Sophie Hannah's first book was greeted with amazement. The "Poetry Review" declared, 'Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.' Each subsequent collection has been formally more inventive, thematically more complex, yet each has met with a similar welcome, and she has become that rare thing, an acclaimed and bestselling poet. Published for the first time in Penguin, this volume includes all of Hannah's best loved verses from "The Hero and the Girl Next Door", "Hotels Like Houses", "Leaving and Leaving You", and "First... read more

In this powerful, evocative collection, master storyteller John O'Donohue explores themes of love and loss, beginnings and endings. Inspired by the ancient wisdom of the Celtic tradition and the rugged, majestic landscape of his birth, the west of Ireland, here he also creates a unique vision of a place and time, and the echo of a memory that will never fade.

Finalist in the Poetry category. In 2007 Bernadette Hall spent six months in Ireland, not far from Blarney, on the Rathcoola Fellowship. The poems in this collection arise from that experience. With light-heartedness and daring, they track between dualities: the North and the South in Ireland; the rain-washed skies of Donoughmore, Co. Cork and the Queensland rainforest. Between national and personal histories. As for poetry, what is it to be, an axe or a peace offering?

First published in 2003, the award-winning Whetu Moana was the first anthology of contemporary Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians and was lauded by reviewers and widely read around the world. Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poetry in English is the follow-up volume to Whetu Moana - Whetu Moana Lua II - and includes poetry written over the last 25 years by over 70 writers from Aotearoa, Hawai'i, Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tahiti and Rotuma, and from Polynesian poets scattered around the world. Editors A... read more

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. "Human Chain" also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyric, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other 'hermits songs' which weigh equ... read more

This collection of 81 haiku exemplifies Owen's insight and skill in taking everyday moments and events, and somehow, in simple language, making them something much more - images that continue to resonate in our hearts and minds long after the page is shut. With him, we move from the delicately sensate, tiredI crouch in the grass - wild camomile, to the dark reflection of the rain heavierthan tears, then shift to the wry humour of wish I'd said goodbye . . .the key-ringswings in the lockand the final veridical imagethe skyand all of... read more

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory - Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken - "To".

A collection of poetry.

'Beirut39' is a Hay Festival project which aims to select and celebrate 39 of the best young Arab writers as a centrepiece of the Beirut World Capital festivities in April 2010. Following the successful launch of 'Bogota 39', which identified many of the most interesting upcoming Latin American talents, including Wendy Guerra, Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize), Santiago Roncagliolo and Juan Gabriel Vasquez (short-listed for the IFFP), 'Beirut 39' will bring to worldwide attention the best work from the Arab world. The judges will select ... read more

"Shakespeare's Sonnets" are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating and often irreverent guide, Don Paterson offers a fresh and direct approach to the Sonnets, asking what they can still mean to the twenty-first ce... read more

In this new book of poetry, acclaimed poet Roger McGough builds us a world of chance encounters and embarassing moments, of big questions and small wonders. Finding himself at 'that awkward age between birth and death', he wrestles with mortality; he resolves (and fails) to live every day as if it were his last; joins the Foreign Legion; jives in Macca's trousres; shares the pain of Mr Sappho and Lord Godiva and plans a prison break. With his inimitable warmth, wit and wordplay, McGough affirms his position as the pre-eminent poet ... read more

Birds are the most obvious wild things we have around us. Some of the best known, and most loved, poems in English are bird poems. This title features poems according to ornithological notes and provides fascinating information on the birds.

Shakespeare's Sonnets are universally loved and much-quoted throughout the world, while debates still rage as to the identity of the Dark Lady and how autobiographical the sonnets really are. First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, the Sonnets has been a consistent best-seller in the Arden Shakespeare series. Katherine Duncan Jones tackles the controversies and mysteries surrounding these beautiful poems head on, and explores the issues of sexuality to be found in them, making this a truly modern edition for today's reade... read more

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Well-known for his prose, as well as his TV appearances, Clive James has also established a name for himself in the world of poetry. His previous collections, Other Passports and The Book of My Enemy, were critically acclaimed and accomplished, yet simultaneously accessible and entertaining - and his new book promises more of the same. Bringing together poems written over the last five years, Angels over Elsinore is impressive not only in terms of its execution, but also in terms of its scope and versatility.

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This volume contains poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy from her first six acclaimed collections, from Standing Female Nude (1985) to Feminine Gospels (2002), and a handful of 'other poems' collected her for the first time. It shows a writer who hit the ground running, emerging into the world with an utterly distinctive voice, becoming one of the foremost poets of any generation. Her quicksilver intelligence shines throughout these poems and along with her gift for language for turning it inside out, for ringing its riches from the ev... read more