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  Ode - The Age of Dryden' is a...

  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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  Losing Time - Meditations of a...

  Kristina V. Kairyte

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  "Let me tell you a story," she begins. "Because tonight, I am hurting, and I need you to listen. Tonight, I need you to see me again." 
  Losing Time is captivating exploration of love, loss, and healing inspired by autobiographical elements where the echoes of a past love still resonate. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, the woman, cloaked by the foreboding night in the stillness of time, beckons her lost lover to hear her voice once more. In poetic prose and evocative poetry, she weaves their story through the tapestry of pain and emotional turmoil, seeking solace in shared experiences and a path toward closure. 
  As the narrative moves between Europe, India, and Abu Dhabi, it gathers fragments of the events, revealing the elusive nature of time in moments of anguish. Narrative progression is not the goal of this story, which resembles a Borgesian labyrinth of emotion: the heroine wanders amongst her past, continuously reinterpreting the same events, observing them like snowflakes slowly spinning in a snow globe. The text is dense with symbolism as her memories and feelings converge, blurring the lines between reality and dreams, and eventually solidifying into complex artifacts of emotional experience. It is in this reliving of the past that she finds herself "losing time," yet paradoxically discovering new revelations. 
  Losing Time touches upon themes of intercultural romance, temptation, loyalty, and the profound significance of rediscovering one's voice. This book is a must-listen for those who crave an atmospheric and ephemeral narrative with a rich emotional undercurrent that seamlessly blends melancholic and meditative poetry with literary fiction.

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  Vivienne and the Reaper - The...

  Rachel Lawson

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  originally written as separate poems for contests on allpoetry.com I tacked them together to make this epic the story in verse of the Life and death of Vivienne and the Reaper, Incidentally, the first part is told by the unnamed Jack Taylor who has a bigger part in the later version of Vivienne and the Reaper and appears in my Magicians series as the annoying orderly.

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  Menopause: The Anthology

  Cherry Potts, Catherine Pestano

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  The subject of Menopause is just beginning to break the barrier of taboo, and become a mainstream discussion point, but that discussion has until now been very serious, medical, and, we would argue, heterosexual and white. This anthology of poems and short fiction aims to address that, with wild and wonderful writing from humour and anger, relief and distress, by women who have experienced menopause, whether naturally or as a result of surgery; with a healthy dose of views from the global majority and the lesbian, bisexual and trans communities.

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  The Clearing - Poems

  Allison Adair

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  Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, “asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines” (New York Times).
  
  
  
  The women in Allison Adair’s debut collection—luminous and electric from the first line to the last—live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being “the planet’s stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.” And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. “What if this time,” they ask, “instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.”
  
  
  
  Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, “from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss.” There is a dark tension in this work, and its product is wholly “an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty” (Boston Globe).

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  The Pre-Raphaelite Poets - A...

  William Morris, Dante Gabriel...

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  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began as a group of painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, who wished to reject the stern and academic strictures of current painting and return to the simpler and more uncomplicated days before the Italian High Renaissance and the days of Raphael. 
  The movement was short lived but very influential and, as well, was taken up by a number of different arts. 
  For poetry, it was a major movement and, because of its depiction of pleasures of the flesh, was, at the time, heavily criticised.  One critic called it ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. However, the sensationalist aside, it unleashed works that had instant appeal.  The movement pushed back against contemporary writings which seemed full of tradition and the more mundane problems of society.  
  To exploit and gain attention for their ideas, the Brotherhood started their own periodical; The Germ, which, although it only lasted four numbers did much to bring them attention.  
  Its devotion to the Mediaeval, to symbols and a more naturalistic and detailed approach to poetry were refreshing, especially as the movement sprang up from a Victorian Society that believed morals should be strictly managed, or at least in public. 
  The Pre-Raphaelites as an organised group eventually went their own way but had behind them works which heavily influenced painting and literature for decades to come. 
  With poets of the calibre of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti, William Morris, Charles Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith poetry of great beauty, tenderness and even rawness was placed on the page. 
   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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