Publisher: Ethos Books
Vital Possessions by Marc Nair contemplates how city-dwellers negotiate their uneasy relationship with nature in a world where growth is both man-made and natural. The jungle is always one trim away from over-running us and we are often oblivious to it. The poems question what we hold as vital amid ceaseless consumption and our urban existence.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13. In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army. In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre. Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life. For them this was The Jazz Age. For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names. The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews. As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t. Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936. His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check. His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents. Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers. On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. In ‘Winter Dreams’ Fitzgerald carefully unravels the life of a young entrepreneur who, many years before, meets a hauntingly beautiful woman at the summer resort where he caddies.Show book
James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best selling author, born in the town of Greenfield, Indiana. During his lifetime he was known as the "Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and his children's poetry respectively. His poems tended to be humorous or sentimental, and of the approximately one thousand poems that Riley authored, the majority are in dialect. - Summary by WikipediaShow book
Collected poems from one of the Twentieth Century's most influential voices. Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, “which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.” Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O’Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, “the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.”. This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O’Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, “you just go on your nerve.Show book
The Imaginary Invalid (French: Le Malade imaginaire) is a three-act comédie-ballet by the French playwright Molière. It was first performed in 1673 and was the last work he wrote. In an ironic twist of fate, Molière collapsed during his fourth performance as Argan on 17 February and died soon after. (Summary by Wikipedia) Cast:Argan, an imaginary invalid: Allen JohnsBeline, second wife to Argan: Nadine Eckert-BouletAngelique, daughter to Argan: Arielle LipshawLouison, Argan's young daughter: Elizabeth KlettBeralde, brother to Argan: Delmar H. DolbierCleante, lover to Angelique: mbMr. Diafoirus, a physician: WupperhippoThomas Diafoirus, his son: engineerdstMr. Purgon, physician to Argan: Bellona TimesMr. Fleurant, an apothecary/Mr. De Bonnefoi, a notary: Alan MapstoneToinette, maidservant to Argan: AvailleNarrator: ToddHWAudio edited by Arielle LipshawShow book
In the ruins of a garden in rural England, in a house which was once a home, one woman searches for seeds of hope. Mike Bartlett's play Albion was premiered in October 2017 at the Almeida Theatre, London, in a production directed by Rupert Goold. 'Something remarkable. Our country needs it' - Telegraph '[Has] a deeply reflective and humane quality to it: Bartlett draws his confused characters with a Chekhovian mix of wit and compassion… explores national identity through private mourning, and the meaning of the garden shifts, grows and deepens with the seasons' - Financial Times 'Scintillating… in the sometimes abrasive but always compelling Audrey, Bartlett has written a richly imagined female lead who can be mentioned in the same breath as the self-dramatizing Arkadina in The Seagull' - New York Times 'A work of deeply absorbing emotional richness and symphonic density' - Independent 'Fascinating, complex… what makes the play so enormously intriguing is that, as in his King Charles III, Bartlett shows us as a deeply divided people torn between the urge to preserve the past and to radically reform it' - GuardianShow book
There is one universal word which all babies instinctively sound in every language and that is ‘mama’. It produces a bond the like of which there is no other. Women are hard-wired by Nature to nurture and raise. Along the human chain of generations we would wish that every infant has depended on this woman, found shelter within her arms, food within her breast and the confidence to experience life and all its wonders from her love. Whether we understand it or recognise it, it is women who have shaped the course and journey of humanity. It is true, that mothering, the maternal instinct, comes in all shapes and shades and sizes. Some women find it difficult and others easy. Society with its norms and ever-readiness to make all conform, places pressures and difficulties in the paths of many. Families may not all be harbours of milk and honey but in this volume we take a different view. Here we journey with our classic poets from Christina Georgina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy to Frances W Harper and Kipling, not only the ways, the wonders and the women who take on the responsibility to raise children no matter the problems or dangers to themselves, but also the difficulties and sometimes desperate tragedies that motherhood can involve. We hope these poems inspire every generation to reach out and better themselves and those around. This is our tribute to mothers everywhere. 1 - 50 Shades of Mothers - An Introduction 2 - The Bravest Battle by Joaquin Miller 3 - The Hand That Rocks The Cradle by William Ross Wallace 4 - Mama's Mama by Anonymous 5 - Sonnets Are Full of Love by Christina Rossetti 6 - Mother O' Mine by Rudyard Kipling 7 - My Mother by Ann Taylor 8 - My Mother Dear by Samuel Lover 9 - To My Mother by Christina Georgina Rossetti 10 - My Mother by Francis Ledwidge 11 - To My Mother by Lucretia Maria Davidson 12 - Shall We Not Love Thee Mother Dear by Henry Williams Baker 13 - Mother's Eyes by Mary D B Hull 14 - My Mother's Hands by Anonymous 15 - I Am Your Mother by Daniel Sheehan 16 - The Bedtime Kiss by Anonymous 17 - To A Little Invisible Being by Anna Laetitia Barbauld 18 - Infant Sorrow by William Blake 19 - Babies Don't Keep - Anonymous 20 - Songs From Prince Lucifer II. Mother Song by Alfred Austin 21 - Untitled by Alice Carey 22 - The Modern Mother by Alice Meynell 23 - Mother's Treasures by Frances Ellen Watkins 24 - Monologue Of A Mother by D H Lawrence 25 - Mother & Daughter (Extract) by Augusta Weber 26 - The Jigalo's Son by Jean Graham 27 - Somebody's Mother by Anonymous 28 - To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe 29 - To Mother by Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva 30 - The Mother Of God by William Butler Yeats 31 - San Lorenzo Giustiniani's Mother by Alice Meynell 32 - To a Young Lady Whose Mother Was Insane by Lucretia Maria Davidson 33 - Mothers of Men by Edwin J Ellis 34 - The Slave Girl's Address to Her Mother by Sarah Louisa Forten 35 - The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother by John Greenleaf Whittier 36 - The Slave Mother by Frances E W Harper 37 - The Mother's Son by Rudyard Kipling 38 - Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe 39 - The Mother by May Herschel-Clarke 40 - The Young Mother by Katharine Tynan 41 - Mother and Poet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 42 - Pensive on Her Dead Gazing by Walt Whitman 43 - On Receipt Of My Mother's Picture by William Cowper 44 - The Sailor's Mother by William Wordsworth 45 - The Old Arm Chair by Eliza Cook 46 - My Mother's Kiss by Frances E W Harper 47 - The Mother's Grave by Peter John Allen 48 - WhereShow book
