Other books that might interest you

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  Short Poetry Collection 022

  Various

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  Librivox’s Short Poetry Collection 022: a collection of 20 public-domain poems.

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  Fugitive Pieces - Poetry of Lord...

  Lord Byron

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  George Gordon, later Lord Byron, published Fugitive Pieces in 1806 when he was only 18 years old. It was printed, but Byron's friends - particularly Reverend Thomas Beecher - advised him that it contained poems that were scandalously amorous, particularly the poem To Mary. Byron suppressed it by having all the copies destroyed - or so he thought. As it happened, Thomas Beecher himself kept his copy, and there were three other copies that were not destroyed.Reverend Beecher's opinion was certainly correct, though his advice was inexcusable. The amorous poetry in this volume, particularly To Mary, is some of the most erotic serious poetry in English up to that time. Byron was an intensely emotional, intensely sexual young man, and his poetry shows it very clearly. It also shows the work of a young man with the makings of not only a serious poet, but a skillful satirist and humorist as well. While many of the poems are deeply romantic, indeed rather melodramatic effusions of the sort one would expect from the young man who would become a founder of the Romantic movement, others read more like Ogden Nash—witty, lively and skillfully done in happy, bouncing rhymes and meters, not at all what one might expect. 
  This recording of the volume Fugitive Pieces is based on the original volume as later published in limited-edition form. For that reason, the reader who knows Byron’s poetry well will notice that some of the texts used here differ, sometimes markedly, from the versions more commonly found. Byron revised and republished these early poems several times under several titles, most notably Pieces on Various Occasions and Hours of Idleness. Later titles in this series, which aims to present the whole of Byron’s poetry, will use the later versions of these same poems. In some cases the two versions are nearly identical.A Freshwater Seas production.

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  Forever House (NHB Modern Plays)

  Glen Waldron

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  A darkly comic drama from an exciting new playwright.
  In three linked scenes, all set in the same terraced house, three ill-matched pairs search for a new beginning - but the past won't let any of them go without a struggle.
  Teenager Richard is plotting his escape to art college, just as lecturer Graham is settling in. Mum-to-be Laura has big plans for her forever home - if only Becci will sell it to her. And in the middle of the night, marine expert Mark has an unexpected visitor, a young woman with more than paddleworm samples on her mind...
  A story of buried secrets and new beginnings, Forever House is the debut play of West Country-born writer Glenn Waldron. It's a pitch-black comedy drama that asks the question: can you ever really start again?
  'Waldron has an exceptional ear for dialogue... every character rings with credibility' - Exeunt Magazine
  'a well-observed piece' - Whatsonstage.com

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  The Phantom-Wooer

  Thomas Lovell Beddoes

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 different recordings of The Phantom-Wooer by Thomas Lovell Beddoes. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of January 28th, 2007.

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  Baby's Own Aesop

  Walter Crane

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  "Baby's Own Aesop" presents the fables as one-stanza limericks, each "pictorially pointed" by Walter Crane, the noted painter and illustrator. He apprenticed to master wood-engraver, William James Linton, who furnished the draft of the book's poems for Crane to edit. "Baby's Own Aesop" is available in a beautiful facsimile edition of colored engravings from the International Children's Digital Library, with which your child can read along while listening to the recording. (Summary by Denny Sayers)

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  The Poetry Of Charlotte Smith

  Charlotte Smith

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  Charlotte Turner Smith was born on 4th May 1749 in London.  Her early years were dominated by her mother’s early death and her father’s reckless spending.  At age 15 she married Benjamin Smith in order to rid her father of his gambling debts.  Charlotte was later to write that she now became a "legal prostitute".   Benjamin was violent, unfaithful, more reckless with monies than her father and completely unsupportive with her writing that she had begun to spend more time on.  In 1766, Charlotte and Benjamin had the first of their twelve children. She helped with her father in law’s business and upon his death he left much to Charlotte and her children but this inheritance was tied up in legal wranglings that lasted for 40 years and became the inspiration for Dickens' central case in Bleak House.Her husband's spending landed him in prison and as was allowed at the time, Charlotte moved in to join him.  It was here in 1784, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets.  It was an instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison and contributing to a revival of the sonnet.  Charlotte moved to Chichester where she began to write novels believing she could earn more from their sale and rather unusually publishing all her work under her own name.Her first novel, Emmeline in 1788, was a success and in the next decade she wrote nine more.  However, despite their initial success, her finances were a constant source of concern and she was often in debt being forced to move home frequently and impacting on declining health.  By 1803, Smith was again poverty-stricken with severe gout which made writing painful and later almost paralysed her. On 23 February 1806, Charlotte finally received some of the inheritance, but was too ill to do anything with it and died on October 28th 1806.  William Wordsworth described her as a poet "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered".

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