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  Song of the Soldiers' Wives

  Thomas Hardy

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  Thomas Hardy is regarded as one of the best English novelists. His novels are heartbreaking, unconventional, sad and lyrical. He also wrote many poems. This is one of the best. This is the weekly poem for the week starting at 5 August 2012. (Summary by Stav Nisser)

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  S O S - Poems 1961–2013

  Amiri Baraka

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  “S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka’s own evolution as a poet-activist” (The Washington Post).   Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century (The New York Times). Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka’s rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.   Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.   A New York Times Editors’ Choice   “A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka’s poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure.” —William J. Harris, Boston Review   “The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work.” —Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review

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  Robert Holman: Plays (NHB Modern...

  Robert Holman

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  Robert Holman writes plays of startling beauty, combining close observation of the way people behave with a thrilling and often fiercely uncompromising mastery of dramatic form. He is the playwright most admired by other playwrights. To Simon Stephens, he is 'My favourite living writer'.
  Here, in this selection from Holman's first decade of playwriting, a monkey is taken for a French spy by an eighteenth-century fishing community; the inhabitants of a Greek island reside under the shadow of the atom bomb; and a group of lonely people converge on the North Yorkshire moors.
  With a new introduction by Holman himself, this volume contains The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, London, 1974), Mud (Royal Court Theatre, London, 1974), Other Worlds (Royal Court, 1983), Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984) and The Overgrown Path (Royal Court, 1985).
  'Holman's instinct for truth, and an unaffected ability to spot what's poignant in it, is what one remembers: that, and a paradoxical impression of spare richness, astringent abundance' - The Times

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  Sonnets from the Portuguese...

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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  Sonnets from the Portuguese chronicles one of the most famous romances in history. The renowned Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote the sonnet sequence during her courtship by Robert Browning, and later presented them to him as a wedding gift. Robert was astounded by the quality of the poetry, and encouraged her to publish, but Elizabeth objected on the grounds that the content was too personal. At last, Robert prevailed, and Elizabeth published her sonnets. The title of the book comes from a joke between Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Elizabeth was too embarrassed to publish the sonnets as a personal chronicle, so she decided to pretend they were a translation from a foreign language. Robert’s nickname for her was “My Little Portuguese” due to her dark hair and olive complexion, and so the sequence was forever known as “Sonnets from the Portugese.”  
  (Summary by Kirsten Ferreri)

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  A Poe-em of Passion

  Charles F. Lummis

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 18 recordings of A Poe-em of Passion by C. F. Lummis. This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 17, 2013, and is an amusing parody of Poe's Annabel Lee.

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  The Nightclub (NHB Modern Plays)

  Chloe Todd Fordham

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  The Nightclub features three very different women at a gay nightclub in Orlando, who are caught up in a terrifying hate crime.
  The play is taken from Women Centre Stage; a collection of eight short plays, commissioned and developed as part of the Women Centre Stage Festival, that together demonstrate the range, depth and richness of women's writing for the stage.
  Selected by Sue Parrish, Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre, these plays offer a wide variety of rewarding roles for women, and are perfect for schools, youth groups and theatre companies to perform. Other writers included in the collection include Winsome Pinnock, Timberlake Wertenbaker and April De Angelis.

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