Other books that might interest you

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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 Top 10 Poets – The Men -...

  Edgar Allan Poe, Jalaluddin...

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  The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives.  Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives. 
   
  But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poets, who brim with talent and verse, on a range of subjects and themes that we can all enjoy. 
   
  Where do you go from Shakespeare?  The choice and talents of who to choose from among other classic poets is overwhelming.  And yet many names cannot be left out.  Once again choice is subjective in some cases but, in many others, there can be no argument.

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  HAPPYAGONY - A Collection of...

  Mem Ferda

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  Life can be a tumultuous journey, filled with both heartache and joy. Since his teenage years, the actor Mem Ferda has poured his soul into crafting poetry, and now feels compelled to share these words with the world. Through these verses, he strives to awaken deep emotions, ignite inspiration, and spread positivity, all the while offering a glimpse into the tapestry of reality, as seen through his own introspection and experiences.
   
  These poems are like kaleidoscopes, each revealing a unique pattern, open to interpretation based on one's worldview, values, and principles. They emanate from the depths of the author's being, bearing the weight of true-life encounters. As readers immerse themselves in these words, they will, hopefully, find solace and delight, just as he has found solace and delight in their creation. If these poems can elicit such a response, then they will have accomplished their purpose.

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  Ten Bridges I've Burnt - A...

  Brontez Purnell

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  In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. "The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in," Purnell writes, "is simply existing." 
   
   
   
  The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I've Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers' rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. 
   
   
   
  With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I've Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

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  Poems Of Peace

  James Allen

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  Wordsworth held that every true poet was a teacher; and he said, “I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing.” The poems in this volume are designed to teach; and as instruction is best administered by methods which please while they elevate, the immediate object of these poems is to comfort, to bless, and to make happy; and, being framed on the principles of Truth, I doubt not that they will inspire men to embrace loftier ideals of life, draw them to a closer acquaintance with virtue, and lead them to a more intimate union with that perfect Wisdom whose ways are “ways of pleasantness,” and whose paths are “paths of peace.” 
  - James Allen 
  In this unusual departure from his usual practical and direct style, Allen here writes a series of thoughtful, reflective and inspirational poems laying out his unique thoughts in a new style.  
  Spiritual, secular, and deeply embedded in the genuine practice of faith, the book begins with Eolaus, an extended work following a man struggling through the depths of his spiritual sorrow, comforted and assailed by the vocies of earth and nature.  
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  James Allen wrote nineteen self-help books combining Buddhism, Confucianism, and classical Christianity between 1903 and 1912. Born to improvrished parents, one of whom was murdered when searching for work in America when Allen was fifteen, he went on to combine the esoteric and philosophical slant of eastern religions with the solid practicality and common-sense approach of a Victorian Englishman from Leicester.

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  Please make me pretty I don't...

  Tawanda Mulalu

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  The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry 
   
   
   
  Please make me pretty, I don't want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. 
   
   
   
  The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

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