Poetry by individual poets
Showing 1–16 of 74 results
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36 ways of writing a Vietnamese poem
£12.9936 ways of writing a Vietnamese poem
’36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem’ is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity – and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence – for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this – of language itself. Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
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A child’s Christmas in Wales & other stories and poems
£10.99A child’s Christmas in Wales & other stories and poems
A selection of the very best poems and stories by Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
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A Shropshire lad
£2.99A Shropshire lad
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
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A Shropshire Lad
£12.99A Shropshire Lad
A series of verses set in the half-imaginary Shropshire, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is Housman’s most famous collection of poetry. Initially self-published, with little profit, it became hugely popular during World War I.
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A year of last things
£14.99A year of last things
Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a ‘mongrel,’ someone born out of diverse cultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories – but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history.
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Alexa, What Is There to Know About Love?
£10.99Alexa, What Is There to Know About Love?
A hilarious and moving poetry collection from bestselling poet, Costa Prize shortlisted novelist and Twitter laureate, Brian Bilston.
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And so this is Christmas
£12.99And so this is Christmas
A brilliantly funny seasonal treat for bestselling poet Brian Bilston’s loyal fans and newcomers alike.
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Autobiography of Red
£9.99Autobiography of Red
Written in the form of an epic poem, Anne Carson’s story tells of how a young boy, Geryon, escapes to a parallel world of photography and falls in love with Herakles, a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the point of infatuation.
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Blood salt spring
£10.99Blood salt spring
Blood Salt Spring is a meditation on where we are – exploring ideas of nation, race and belonging. Much of the collection tackles the isolation and traumas of 2020, but it also looks to find some meaning and makes an attempt to heal the pain and vulnerabilities that were picked and cut open again in the recent cultural shifts and political wars.
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Blossomise
£10.00Blossomise
‘Blossomise’ celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of energetic leaps of imagination and language, the twenty-two poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom festival and stand-alone lyrical pieces that take in the stylistic tones of ballads, hymns, songs, prayers and nursery rhymes. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among skyscrapers and urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored here both as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a nervous marker of our vulnerable climate.
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Bright fear
£10.99Bright fear
These poems engage fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy. Questions of acceptance and assimilation are both explored through a family’s evolving dynamics and exposed through close attention to the microaggressions of queerphobia and the anti-Asian racism that accompanied the Covid pandemic. Yet ‘Bright Fear’ remains deeply attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace. It asks how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the ‘constructed space’ of the poem. The contemplative central sequence, Ars Poetica, traces the radically healing and transformative role of poetry during the poet’s teenage and adult years, culminating in a polyphonic reconciliation of tongues.
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Cane, corn & gully
£11.99Cane, corn & gully
‘Cane, Corn & Gulley’ is a genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe, question and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity. Using labanotation and rhythm to analyse movement from Caribbean dances to movements carried out in everyday rituals, Kinshasa uses these motifs as a form of cartography for the poems.
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Choose Love
£16.99Choose Love
In this moving sequence of poems Nicola Davies’s text combines with the superbly evocative illustrations of Petr Horácek to provide insight into the real-life experiences of refugees forced to leave their homes and previous lives behind to face an unknown future.
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Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water
£9.99Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water
An enchanting Christmas poem from Carol Ann Duffy, complete with gorgeous illustrations from Margaux Carpentier.
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Christmas Poems
£10.00Christmas Poems
Wendy Cope is a national treasure of the poetry world. This edition will be a highlight of the Christmas gift market, collecting together Cope’s twelve best festive poems – jewels from decades of glittering verse – including anthology favourites such as ‘The Christmas Life’. With lively illustrations to accompany the heart-warming words, this little hardback delightfully captures the spirit of the season.
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Collected poems
£20.00Collected poems
Here are the full poetic works of our wittiest and much-beloved writer, including many previously uncollected poems. When ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ was published in 1986 Wendy Cope became that rarest of creatures: a best-selling and celebrated poet. Her artful combination of clarity and wit made an extraordinary impact in poems that cocked a gentle snook at the pomposity of a literary world hitherto dominated by men. Since then, through four further collections, she has continued to delight, finding, through the viral nature of the web, a whole new generation of enthusiastic readers. Love and heartbreak; life and death – those daily desires and fears that underlie our existences – these are the subjects she tackles with an unpretentiousness that draws us in and an emotional resonance that keeps us coming back for more.
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