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  Heroic Stanzas - The Age of...

  John Dryden

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  John Dryden was born on August 9th, 1631 in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire. As a boy Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School as a King's Scholar.  
  Dryden obtained his BA in 1654, graduating top of the list for Trinity College, Cambridge that year.  
  Returning to London during The Protectorate, Dryden now obtained work with Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. 
   At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden was in the company of the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell.  The setting was to be a sea change in English history. From Republic to Monarchy and from one set of lauded poets to what would soon become the Age of Dryden. 
  The start began later that year when Dryden published the first of his great poems, Heroic Stanzas (1658), a eulogy on Cromwell's death.  
  With the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 Dryden celebrated in verse with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. 
   With the re-opening of the theatres after the Puritan ban, Dryden began to also write plays. His first play, The Wild Gallant, appeared in 1663 but was not successful. From 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company, in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and '70s, theatrical writing was his main source of income.  
  In 1667, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It established him as the pre-eminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and then historiographer royal (1670). 
  This was truly the Age of Dryden, he was the foremost English Literary figure in Poetry, Plays, translations and other forms. 
  In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697), which was published by subscription. It was a national event.  
  John Dryden died on May 12th, 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later.

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  The Brightening Air

  Conor McPherson

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  'You'll remember how much of living is really just forgetting.'
  The family home is more than a building. It's a destination of pilgrimage, an inherited investment, a repository of memory or magic. But, for brother and sister Stephen and Billie, home is all they've got. Mucking along in their decaying farmhouse, they're doing just fine.
  That is, until the arrival of an ex-clergyman uncle with an unscrupulous plan, a sister-in-law seeking a miracle, and a prodigal brother hell-bent on trouble…
  An entrancing tale of fate, family and unseen forces in 1980s Ireland, Conor McPherson's play The Brightening Air was the winner of the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. It was first performed at The Old Vic, London, in 2025, directed by the playwright.

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  The Poetry of Radclyffe Hall -...

  Radclyffe Hall

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  Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was born on August 12th, 1880 to wealthy parents who separated while she was still an infant.  Her parents thereafter paid little attention to her. Hall was educated privately, and then at King’s College London. Later she travelled to Europe, settling in Dresden, Germany.  With the death of her paternal grandfather she inherited a large estate and was then able to live as she pleased. 
  In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the twenty-three year age difference. Batten gave Hall the nickname ‘John’ by which she was henceforward known in every circumstance throughout her life except in her work as an author. 
  In 1915, Hall met and, in 1917 moved in with sculptor Una Troubridge, with whom she would remain for the rest of her life. 
  Hall wrote poetry all throughout her twenties and thirties. She had published Dedicated to Arthur Sullivan as early as 1894, and five further volumes of collected works were released before she stopped writing poetry and published her first novel, The Forge, in 1924. 
  That same year also saw publication of The Unlit Lamp, the first work for which Hall was known as simply Radclyffe Hall. 
  The Well of Loneliness, the most important novel of Hall’s career, was published in 1928 to immediate sensation and controversy. It is Hall’s most direct artistic expression of her own personal sexual orientation. 
  After the controversy of The Well of Loneliness, Hall would publish only two more novels and a collection of short stories. 
  After years spent travelling in Italy and France and a series of long lasting affairs with other women (of which Troubridge was apparently aware), Hall retired with Troubridge to Rye, in East Sussex. Here, suffering from tuberculosis, she also underwent eye surgery and thereafter had difficulty reading and writing. 
  On October 7, 1943, Radclyffe Hall died from colon cancer at the age of sixty-three. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. 
  This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing.  Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.

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  Casual Conversation

  Renia White, Aracelis Girmay

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  A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy. 
  
  
   
  Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.
  
   
  Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going? 
   
  Read by the author.

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  Rudyard Kipling's Poems From The...

  Rudyard Kipling

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  ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.’
   
  
   
  Discover a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s poems written during the Great War. Depicting the war from the perspective of a patriotic citizen who struggles between his duty to his country and the outrage of the horrors that were coming out of the Western Front.

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  The Armchair Detective Mystery...

  Ian Shimwell

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  A chance meeting with a mysterious old man...Unearth the mystery of the Mayflower Court flats, and play find-the-lady at the murky, yet majestic, manor house.This is the first two plays of the groundbreaking, cozy mystery series, The Armchair Detective.

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