Kid

Author	Siegfried Sassoon
ISBN	0571202659

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...

Author

Alice 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...

Author	Seamus Heaney
ISBN	0571202403

Some books are thin and light, yet they carry so much weight, like Heaney's Death of a Naturalist. Each poem in this collection is a work of art, a masterpiece. There is neither pretentiousness nor symbolism here. The collection is one of his most accessible and the best place to start with his work. Each...

Author	Ted Hughes
ISBN	0571176550

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...

Author	Philip Larkin
ISBN	0571114512

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...

Author	Wendy Cope
ISBN	0571137474

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...

Author	W.H. Auden
ISBN	0571202608

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...

Author	Jo Shapcott
ISBN	0571254705

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...

Author	Louis MacNeice
ISBN	0571197450

“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable...

Author	Carol Ann Duffy
ISBN	0856463035

Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award 1993 In her fourth collection, Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are...

Author	Adrian Henri
ISBN	0141189266

'I wanted your soft verges
But you gave me the hard shoulder'

The Mersey Sound brought poetry down from the shelf and on to the street, capturing the mood of the Sixties and speaking to real lives with its irreverent, wry, freewheeling verses of young love, petrol-pump attendants, CND leaflets...