The Whitsun Weddings

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

Lucy Prebble

One of the most infamous scandals in financial history becomes a theatrical epic. At once a case study and an allegory, the play charts the notorious rise and fall of Enron and its founding partners Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who became reviled figures from the financial scandal of the century, with...

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

John Keats

Among other things, I have John Keats to thank for bringing a bit of light to an otherwise hideously monotonous English A-level course. My new favourite word is also courtesy of Keats (synaesthesia - go on, say it out loud, you know you want to) as well as a very insightful introduction into second-generation...

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

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	Seamus Heaney
ISBN	0374518947

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibne. Its here, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. Heaney's translation not only restores to us a work of historical and literary...