Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

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

Daisy Goodwin

From the first flush of love, through courtship and vows of eternal fidelity, to serving the writs and drowning your sorrows, 'The Nation's Favourite Love Poems' will meet all your romantic requirements. In this selection of 100 popular poems, poets of every age consider that most universal of themes:...

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	Simon Armitage
ISBN	0571166075

'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...

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	John Betjeman
ISBN	0719568501

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,...

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	Kathleen Jamie
ISBN	1555977022

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...

Author	Don Paterson
ISBN	0571249574

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...

Author	Ted Hughes
ISBN	0571192637

What has happened to the lost art of memorising poetry? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English language 'by heart'? In his introduction Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more...

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

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney describes the haw lantern as "small light for small people" but there is more than tiny illumination emanating from one of Ireland's premier poets. Heaney peppers this short collection of poems with crafty language and natural objects: "I heard the hatchet's differentiated/Accurate...

Author	Alice Oswald
ISBN	0571218520

Woods etc. is Alice Oswald's third book of poems, and follows on from the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem, Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. The poems in her new book compress this uniquely ruminative voice into a dazzlingly various sequence of lyrics about the natural order and...

Author

Carol Ann Duffy

Be terrified.
It's you I love,
perfect man,
Greek God, my own;
but I know you'll go,
betray me, stray
from home.
So better by far for
me if you were stone.
—from "Medusa"

Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau...

Author	Gerard Benson
ISBN	0304356395

An even bigger edition of the best selling poetry anthology, this time as a hardback, original format, in two colours throughout Originally published as 100 Poems on the Underground, this new tenth edition contains over 300 exceptional poems Total sales now exceed 275,000 - on a national basis, not...

Author	Billy Collins
ISBN	0330376500

This book contains all teachers need for a snappy, interactive start to each lesson. Each starter activity consists of a simple effective activity involving minimal preparation, with answers and suggestions for differentiation. This book allows teachers to: target objectives that can be broken...