Other books that might interest you

• 

  Frieze

  Olga Dermott-Bond

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Frieze by Olga Dermott-Bond is an astonishing and spellbinding debut poetry collection. Goddesses, saints, dead girls, creatures, mothers, and muses all gather in this collection to confide their secret histories and desires. Voices are recovered from canvas, from behind museum glass, from the pages of literature and the tales of Irish folklore, to explore what can be recaptured and what remains still out of reach.
  'In these tender poems, Olga Dermott-Bond conjures a gallery in which we enter every painting, a museum where we slip inside glass cases and come out changed.' - Miriam Nash
  From a bold voice in women's poetry. Frieze is art obsessed and darkly magical, with a touch of gothic. Akin to poets like Victoria Kennefick, Helen Ivory and Pascale Petit.

  Show book

• 

  The Stone Serpent - Barates of...

  Nouri al-Jarrah

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah brings to life a story that can never again be lost in time after a single line in Aramaic on a tombstone fired his imagination. This inspiring epic poem awakens two extraordinary lovers, Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and Regina, the Celtic slave he freed and married, from where they have lain at rest beside Hadrian's Wall for eighteen centuries, and tells their unique story.
  Barates' elegy to his beloved wife, who died young at 30, is, however, not about mythologising history. With the poet himself an exile in Britain for 40 years from his birthplace of Damascus, the poem forges new connections with today, linking al-Jarrah's personal journey with that of his ancient forebear Barates, who resisted slavery with love.
  Barates' Eastern song also questions whether the young Celtic fighters, the Tattooed Ones, were really barbarians, as they emerged from forest mists to defend their hills and rivers and their way of life from the Romans, and died or lay wounded at the twisting stone serpent that was Hadrian's Wall.

  Show book

• 

  Poets on Poetry - The most...

  Matthew Arnold, Sarojini Naidu,...

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Who has not tried to write a poem?  The poetic form of words seems to be rather easy.  In its basic form, which we learn as children, the rhyming couplet is, in a child’s written and spoken words, pure joy - success!  In the hands of a Shakespeare it is magnificent with a reach and understanding that the rest of us enjoy but are far from even attempting.    
   
  As we listen to various poetic forms, schools and movements we can only react with wonder at how these innocent words are assembled to create symphonies of ideas, wonder and revelation.  The emotions they seek to invoke can be anything from happiness to sadness, from love to revulsion. 
   
  Arnold, Stevens, Keats, Akhmatova, Browning, Herrick, Hood, Killigrew are but a few of the roll-call of wordsmiths who with mere words create ravenous beauty that reveals tender lines and sensitive verse on how and why they are who they are. 
   
  01 - Poets on Poetry - An Introduction 
  02 - When I Write Poems by Anna Akhmatova 
  03 - Of My Poems by Thomas MacDonagh 
  04 - An Apology For Her Poetry by Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish 
  05 - Sonnet 76 - Why is My Verse So Barren of New Pride by William Shakespeare 
  06 - The Austerity of Poetry by Matthew Arnold 
  07 - Of Modern Poetry by Wallace Stevens 
  08 - Poetry by Claude McKay 
  09 - The Poetry of Keats by George Meredith 
  10 - Future Poetry by Alice Meynell 
  11 - Sonnet 17 - Who Will Believe My Verse in Time to Come by William Shakespeare 
  12 - Poetic Eggs by Ezra Pound 
  13 - Poem by William Carlos Williams 
  14 - On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats 
  15 - Ode on the Poetical Character by William Collins 
  16 - Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem by Alan Seeger 
  17 - A True Account of the Birth and Conception of a Late Famous Poem by Charles Sackville, Earl Of Dorset 
  18 - The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain by Wallace Stevens 
  19 - The Poet and the Poem by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 
  20 - Of English Verse by Edmund Waller 
  21 - Love, The Soul of Poetry by Anne Killigrew 
  22 - Why, If All Poets Crown Their Love with Verse by Emily Hickey 
  23 - Verse Making Was the Least of My Virtues by Robert Browning 
  24 - The Poet's Love-Song by Sarojini Naidu 
  25 - A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn 
  26 - Not Every Day Fit for Verse by Robert Herrick 
  27 - On the Poetic Muse by George Moses Horton 
  28 - Sonnet - Written in Keats by Thomas Hood 
  29 - Sonnet 86 -Was It the Proud Full Sail of His Great Verse by William Shakespeare 
  30 - Song in Imitation of Shakespeare by James Beattie 
  31 - The High-toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens 
  32 - Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens 
  33 - To My Most Dearly Loved Friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie by Michael Drayton 
  34 - His Poetry His Pillar by Robert Herrick 
  35 - To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses by Robert Herrick 
  36 - Poem for the End by Ivor Gurney

  Show book

• 

  The Misandrist

  Lisa Carroll

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  'Maybe it's in the air. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the pace of life. Maybe it's breathing in that black soot everyday on the tube. Maybe it's commuting. Maybe it's the cultural consciousness. Maybe it's being a millennial. Maybe it's the climate crisis. Maybe it's the patriarchy.'
  When 'intimidating' Rachel and eternal 'nice guy' Nick meet at an awkward work Christmas party, what was meant to be a one-night-stand becomes a sexual odyssey of self-discovery… and mutual destruction.
  Adrift, isolated and insecure, they scramble for new ways to connect. Can some playful, passionate pegging provide a pathway through the pitfalls of modern relationships and present the possibility of a deeper bond?
  A penetrating comedy about the search for sexual knowledge, true love and top-notch Tupperware, Lisa Carroll's play The Misandrist was first produced by Metal Rabbit Productions at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2023.

  Show book

• 

  Roses and Thorns - 100 Poems for...

  Angelina Scriptor

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Angelina Scriptor began writing poetry when she was only a child, but one fateful day, she decided to look back. It was only then that she realized she had something that most poetry books lacked. While still only a teenager, Angelina noticed that life encompasses more than the simple routes of love and loss that other poets tend to focus on. Life holds both hidden beauties and traumatizing horrors, tucked intricately within its own pages, jumbled amongst themselves to further hide the signs of their existence. 
  Life is telling a story, day in and day out. Slowly, it builds and breaks each of its characters, leaving them to individually collect the pieces of the puzzle that they constantly yearn to complete. And, in the meantime, they are left to create their own stories, whether they do so while coming together with others, or if they’re left to trudge down the dark path of life alone, barely making it to their next sentence. 
  If you choose to read this book of poems, you will be met with many stories that Scriptor experienced over the years, whether they be her own, or those she uncovered while peering down the path of another. 
  This book holds not only the beautiful rosebuds of life’s growth, but also its sharp, threatening thorns. Every page is left to fulfill another journey, never relying on that of another to do so. Sometimes, words sit seemingly simple, but more times than not, its vines will burrow deep into the root of life, tugging at its very existence. 
  That is for each reader to determine for themselves, may they decide to seek the answer.

  Show book

• 

  Oedipus

  Sophocles

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  'Vengeance will be taken on the killer, then the land will be clean. The contamination will be washed away. The rains will come and the people will be healed.'
  According to the Oracle, if the murderer of old King Laius is found and punished then all will be well. The people turn to their new ruler, Oedipus, the man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, to hunt down the perpetrator and bring salvation.
  He vows to succeed whatever the cost – and so begins an unstoppable pursuit of the truth through a harrowing labyrinth of fear and love.
  Intimate and revelatory, Ella Hickson's version of Sophocles' transcendent tragedy premiered at The Old Vic, London, in 2025, produced by The Old Vic in association with Hofesh Shechter Company. It was co-directed by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, and starred Rami Malek and Indira Varma.

  Show book