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Death of a Naturalist

10 best books like Death of a Naturalist (Seamus Heaney): The War Poems, The Tower, Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past, White Egrets, Dart, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Faber Library), High Windows, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, Kid, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

The War Poems
AuthorSiegfried Sassoon
ISBN0571202659
Sassoon, who lived through World War One and who died in 1967, was, as the introduction to this book tells us, irritated in his later years at always being thought of as a "war poet". Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered...
The Tower
AuthorW.B. Yeats
ISBN0743247280
The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly...
Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past
AuthorCarol Ann Duffy
ISBN0330448234
I'm not a big reader of poetry, but I'm
glad I read this, both for the opportunity to revisit poems by A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Ben Jonson, and D.H. Lawrence (who knew he had a sense of humour?), but also to see how contemporary poets have responded to their predecessors. I particularly...
White Egrets
AuthorDerek Walcott
ISBN0374289298
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career--the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the...
Dart
AuthorAlice Oswald
Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic...
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Faber Library)
AuthorTed Hughes
ISBN0571176550
Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost...
High Windows
AuthorPhilip Larkin
ISBN0571114512
Before I developed my own politics I loved Larkin, for his way with words and ability to tug the heartstrings with maudlin reflections. He's got some great lines. But I can't read him now; he looks down on people too much, he's too conventional, too conservative, too narrowly, comfortably English. Of...
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
AuthorTomas Tranströmer
ISBN0811216721
The Collected Poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Tranströmer, now available in this comprehensive edition.

In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.

Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of...
Kid
AuthorSimon Armitage
ISBN0571166075
'Without Photographs'

We literally stumble over the bits
and pieces, covered with ash
and tarpaulin, stashed into corners,
all that tackle under the old mill.
I don't know how we finally figure it out,
poking around in the half-dark,
coming across the neatly coiled...
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
AuthorWendy Cope
ISBN0571137474

When I was at university and writing endless essays about The Waste Land, few things gave me greater pleasure (because I am not a big Eliot fan) than pulling out Wendy Cope's ‘Waste Land Limericks’, in which she condenses the whole poem into five admirably no-nonsense quintains:

I
In...
Selected Poems
AuthorLouis MacNeice
ISBN0571233813
'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.'
Louis MacNeice's prescription...
Collected Poems
AuthorPatrick Kavanagh
ISBN0393006948
I was introduced to Kavanagh’s work through several quotations in Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Those lines convinced me I had to seek out Kavanagh’s poetry.

Patrick Kavanagh wrote of Irish farm life, which he knew so well, without romantic sentimentality....
Tell Me the Truth about Love
AuthorW.H. Auden
ISBN0571202608
Had he been writing now, W.H. Auden might well have penned a poem entitled "Tell me the Truth About Publishing", for the publication of this special, short collection was directly inspired by the runaway success of the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral in which one of Auden's poems was recited.

Stretching...
Belfast Confetti
AuthorCiaran Carson
ISBN0916390403
Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson’s third book of poetry, weaves together in a carefully sequenced volume prose pieces, long poems, lyrics, and haiku. His subjects include the permeable boundaries of Belfast neighborhoods, of memory, of public and private fear, and, indeed, of the forms of language...
Collected Poems
AuthorJohn Betjeman
ISBN0719568501
betjeman's great poem, "slough" is surely the inspiration for one of the great songs of the 20th century, dontcha think? check the excerpts:

slough

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come,...
Of Mutability
AuthorJo Shapcott
ISBN0571254705
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott...
Moy Sand and Gravel
AuthorPaul Muldoon
ISBN0374528845
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,...
The Overhaul: Poems
AuthorKathleen Jamie
ISBN1555977022
Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, the latest collection by Kathleen Jamie, “the leading Scottish poet of her generation” (The Sunday Times)

See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;
d’you ever imagine chasing just...
Collected Poems: 1945-1990 R.S.Thomas: Collected Poems : R S Thomas
AuthorR.S. Thomas
ISBN0753811057
Is there a good way to write poetry? In the late Sixties, like many thousands of other unwashed urchins, I encountered RS Thomas at school in a slap-in-the-face poem that has puzzled me ever since.

You remember Davies? He died you know
With his face to the wall, as the manner is
Of the poor...
In a Time of Violence: Poems
AuthorEavan Boland
ISBN0393312984
I am rather fond of this one:

The Pomegranate - by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the...
Rain
AuthorDon Paterson
ISBN0571249574
In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within...
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