BRITISH POETS 

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The Best of Peter Redgrove's Poetry: The Book of Wonders

Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall: A Flood of Poems

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

Brigitte's Blue Heart

Claudia Schiffer's Red Shoes

By-Blows: Uncollected Poems

Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, Between East and West

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

Emily Bronte: Poems

Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

D.H. Lawrence: Selected Poems

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Shelley: Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats: Selected Poems

Henry Vaughan: Poems

John Donne: Poems

Robert Herrick: Selected Poems

Edmund Spenser: Poems

Edmund Spenser: Amoretti

William Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets & Verse

William Shakespeare: The Sonnets

William Shakespeare: Complete Poems

Shakespeare: Love, Poetry and Magic in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Feminism and Shakespeare

Sir Thomast: Poems

The Crescent Moon Book of Nature Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Love Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Mystical Poetry in English

The Crescent Moon Book of Metaphysical Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Elizabethan Love Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Romantic Poetry

Poetic Forms: A Handbook of Stanza-forms from the History of Poetry

Gorgeous Little Orpheus

Radiance: New Poems

LIST OF SUBJECTS
ORDER INFO
 
 

by Peter Redgrove

edited and introduced by Jeremy Mark Robinson

Poems of honey, wasps and bees; orchards and apples; rivers, seas and tides; storms, rain, weather and clouds; waterworks; labyrinths; amazing perfumes; wet shirts and 'wonder-awakening dresses'; the Cornish landscape (Penzance, Perranporth, Falmouth, Boscastle, the Lizard and Scilly Isles); the sixth sense and 'extra-sensuous perception'; witchcraft; alchemical vessels and laboratories; yoga; menstruation; mines, minerals and stones; sand dunes; mud-baths; mythology; dreaming; vulvas; and lots of sex magic. This book gathers together poetry (and prose) from every stage of Redgrove's career, and every book. It includes pieces that have only appeared in small presses and magazines, and in uncollected form.
 
 

This new edition includes a new introduction and bibiliography, and many new poems.
 
 

British Poets Series  280pp  ISBN 1-86171-063-1  New, 2nd edition  £15.00 / $30.00
 

I am down, and within her! I have vaulted into her boundaries and I am as black as she is. I am buried deep in her flesh. I pull her flesh off her in handfuls and cover my skin in hers. I prance, cool and nightladen with exterior cunt. The black bed before me is rucked. The black woman-outline has risen from it and I dance within her skin. I am the black woman. I am petal-soft, and my surfaces are rounded and shining. The bosom of my shirt is heavy with mud. It hangs and flounces like large breasts full of black milk. The black lady minces sadly loverless over the mud, she smells of tar and sunlight. Where is this white lover? She dances sadly on her own. Soon her lover will return, but her disappearance is the condition of his return. She will enjoy the sunlight while she can. Soon her ladyhood will pour like black blood through the drains of his bathroom, she will fade like a shadow in a shower of clear water.

(Peter Redgrove, from Dance the Putrefact)

A marvellous collection of poems by one of Britain's best but underrated poets, Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003. This book brings together some of Redgrove's wildest and most passionate works, creating a 'flood' of poetry. Philip Hobsbaum called Redgrove 'the great poet of our time', while Angela Carter said: 'Redgrove's language can light up a page.' Redgrove ranks alongside Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He is in every way a 'major poet'. Robinson's essay analyzes all of Redgrove's poetic work, including his use of sex magic, natural science, menstruation, psychology, myth, alchemy and feminism.

This new edition has been completey rewritten, with many new poems added.

'Robinson's enthusiasm is winning, and his perceptive readings are supported by a very useful bibliography' (Acumen magazine)

'Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall is a very rich essay... It is like a brightly-lighted box. (Peter Redgrove)

'This is an excellent selection of poetry and an extensive essay on the themes and theories of this unusual poet by Jeremy Robinson' (Chapman magazine)
 
 

PBK   ISBN 1-86171-070-4  £15.00 / $30.00
 

British Poets Series  320pp
 

MARRIAGE CONTINUED

I wake up in your body. The talking
Bed, the mountains like a fleecy
Breath, the sky queerly lustred

By an indistinct sun. I wake up
Inside you, as it is the marriage today.
We must withdraw, and dress.
 

(Peter Redgrove, from 'Marriage Continued')

A full-length journey through the erotic and magical underworld of one of Britain's best poets. Packed with quotes from Redgrove's most powerful pieces.
 

'Peter Redgrove is really an extraordinary poet' (George Szirtes, Quarto magazine)

'Peter Redgrove is one of the few significant poets now writing...His 'means' are indeed brilliant and delightful. Technically he is a poet essentially of brilliant and unexpected images...he never disappoints' (Kathleen Raine, Temenos magazine).

Bibliography, notes, index 173pp ISBN 1-871846-32-3  £14.99 / $23.50
 

by Jeremy Reed

New poems from the acclaimed British writer. Jeremy Reed's many poetry books include Saints and Psychotics (1979), By the Fisheries (1984), Nero (1985), Selected Poems (1987), Dicing for Pearls (1990),  Nineties (1990) and Kicks (1995). Reed's books on poets include studies of Rimbaud (Delirium: An Interpretation of Rimbaud), Rilke, Hopkins, Madness: The Price of Poetry and Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes (1999). Reed has translated Novalis's Hymns of the Night and Montale. His novels include The Lipstick Boys (1984), Blue Rock (1987), Isidore (about Lautréamont), When the Whip Comes Down (on the Marquis de Sade), and Chasing Black Rainbows (1994, a fictionalized account of Antonin Artaud). His biographies include Lou Reed, Brian Jones: The Last Decadent (1999), Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls (2001) and Marc Almond (1999). Other books include: St. Billie (2001), Sister Midnight (1997), Heartbreak Hotel  (2002), The Purple Room (2000), Dorian (1997), Inhabiting Shadows (1990), Diamond Nebula (1994), Black Sugar (1992), Escaped Image (1988) and Red Hot Lipstick (1996), The Pleasure Chateau Omnibus (2000), Pop Stars (1994), Trucks in Camera: Bedford (1996). Reed has won an Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the National Poetry Competition.
 

'Reed proclaims his poet's calling through fine writing and lush imagery' (The Independent on Sunday)

'Reed is a poet of rich and subversive imagery' (The Times)

'The most beautiful gorgeous outrageously brilliant poetry in the universe' (Björk)

British Poets Series   60 pages  2nd edition   ISBN 1-86171-177-8    £8.00 / $16.00
 
 
 

HYACINTHS

The whorled ribcase
a smoky scent that bites at memory
so tangy that it turns the head
of an old love affair, small mouth

redly printed across my neck,
blond hair blown out of a French film.
Two blue, a pink, a pristine white,
topheavy coiffures in a bowl

(Jeremy Reed, from 'Hyacinth')
 
 
 

 To read more of Jeremy Reed's poetry, click here
 

Sex, jazz, glam icons, green crochet bikinis, Gossard wonderbras, white nights and blueblack seas - the usual colourful, sensual Jeremy Reed imagery in this brand new collection. Jeremy Reed's many poetry books include Saints and Psychotics (1979), By the Fisheries (1984), Nero (1985), Selected Poems (1987), Dicing for Pearls (1990),  Nineties (1990) and Kicks (1995). Reed's books on poets include studies of Rimbaud (Delirium: An Interpretation of Rimbaud), Rilke, Hopkins, Madness: The Price of Poetry and Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes (1999). Reed has translated Novalis's Hymns of the Night and Montale. His novels include The Lipstick Boys (1984), Blue Rock (1987), Isidore (about Lautréamont), When the Whip Comes Down (on the Marquis de Sade), and Chasing Black Rainbows (1994, a fictionalized account of Antonin Artaud). His biographies include Lou Reed, Brian Jones: The Last Decadent (1999), Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls (2001) and Marc Almond (1999). Other books include: St. Billie (2001), Sister Midnight (1997), Heartbreak Hotel  (2002), The Purple Room (2000), Dorian (1997), Inhabiting Shadows (1990), Diamond Nebula (1994), Black Sugar (1992), Escaped Image (1988) and Red Hot Lipstick (1996), The Pleasure Chateau Omnibus (2000), Pop Stars (1994), Trucks in Camera: Bedford (1996). Reed has won an Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the National Poetry Competition.
 

'Remarkably talented' (J.G. Ballard)

'One of the most original virtuoso voices to be heard in the poetry of our fin de siecle' (Lawrence Ferlingetti)

British Poets Series   60 pages  2nd edition   ISBN 1-86171-149-2    £8.00 / $16.00
 
 
 

GREEN CROCHET BIKINI

The holes are burnt into my nerve linings -
the gaps, emissions, show up on the tape
fed into the pilot's black box
only to be replayed at death. I stand
under high trees, your hair dye in my coat,
a poppy coloured henna compacted
into a foil sachet. Identity.
Tomorrow, you'll be the anemone
on a thin stem I've waited for. Scarlet.

(Jeremy Reed, from 'Hyacinth')
 
 
 

New poems from the British author of numerous books. His recent poetry volumes include Under the Circumstances (Oxford University Press, 1991) and Old Men and Comets (OUP, 1993). His memoirs, Interplay and Play Resumed, appeared in 1995 and 1999. He received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981. Of Enright's 1987 Collected Poems (OUP) Gavin Ewart wrote in The Observer: 'Anybody at all interested in English poetry should read this book. It has in it the best autobiographic sequence written this century... It also contains... some of the wittiest and wryest comment on the modern world to be written in our time'
 
 

British Poets Series  64pp  ISBN 1861711506    £8.00 / $16.00
 
 
 

SADNESS OF CARS

One after another, cries of alarm
Arise from the parked motors.
Abandoned by mummies and daddies
They are hungry and thirsty.
They have a pain in their innards.
They need to go to the garage.
They would like to visit the seaside.

(D.J. Enright, from 'Sadness of Cars')
 

A new critical survey of the novelist who died in 1990. The author studies in detail all of Durrell's work; the late series of novels The Avignon Quintet, the Tunc and Nunquam novels, the travel books, the Antrobus diplomatic sketches, the letters, the poetry, and the books that made Durrell's name in the late 1950s, The Alexandria Quartet. Robinson discusses Durrell's creative friendships with Henry Miller especially, and also Anais Nin, Richard Aldington and others. The inter-related themes of love, art and death form the core of all Durrell's work. Durrell emerges as a major writer, who developed the literary modernism of Proust, Eliot and Joyce and fused it with Oriental philosophy. Still critically neglected, this study offers a much-needed new appraisal of Durrell.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  290pp  ISBN 1-86171-066-6  £15.00 / $30.00
 

For an extract from this book about Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, click here

D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell

Alexendria Revisited: Durrell, Cavafy, Keeley and Others
 
 

So today, after many years, we meet
at this high window overlooking
the best of Italy, smiling under rain,
that rattles down the leaves like sparrow-shot,
scatters the reapers, the sunburnt girls,
rises in the sour dust of this table,
these books, unfinished letters - all
refreshed again in you O spirit of place,
Presence long since divined, delayed, and waited for,
And here met face to face.

(Lawrence Durrell, from Deus Loci')

An expanded version of the essay that appeared in the recent collection of essays on Durrell's art, published by UMI Research Press, Michigan. Focuses on Tunc and Nunquam, and Durrell's exotic fusion of psychology and Gnosticism, culture and architecture, humour and insight, anecdote and poeticizing.
 
 

20pp  ISBN 1-871846-60-9  £3.99 / $6.00
 
 

Samuel Beckett's art is much debated in critical circles: this book sets out to discover why. Beckett's sense of poetry and language and its relation to creativity and culture is central to his art. All the major fiction and plays are studied, including the Unnamable trilogy, Waiting For Godot, Endgame, How It Is, the short prose pieces of the 1960s and 70s, and the late plays and texts. Other chapters discuss the collaboration with Billie Whitelaw; Beckett's æsthetics of theatre; his relation to philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger; and his use of silence.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  121pp  ISBN 1-871846-41-2  £14.99 / $23.50
 

This book discusses the luminous beauty and dense, rigorous poetry of Beckett's late works, Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said and Worstward Ho. Johns looks back over Beckett's long writing career, charting the development from the Molloy-Malone Dies-Unnamable trilogy through the 'fizzles' of the 1960s to the elegiac lyricism of the Company series. Johns compares the trilogy with late plays such as Ghosts, Footfalls and Rockaby.

Gregory Johns taught English at the University of Iowa until his return to England in 1987. His articles have appeared in many leading journals. His books include critical studies of Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver and Paul Verlaine. He lives in Cornwall.
 
 

Bibliography, notes.   120pp  ISBN 1-86171-071-2      £10.00 / $20.00
 
 
 

From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star's revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindlebacked kitchen chair. It emerges from out the last rays and sinking ever brighter is engulfed in its turn. On. She sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom.

(Samuel Beckett, from Ill Seen Ill Said)

Robert Graves, who died in 1985, is one of Britain''s best love-poets, though he was first known as a war poet and author of Goodbye to All That and later the I, Claudius novels. This book focuses on his highly individual love-poetry, which is marked by lucidity, passion and freshness. The author relates the poetry to the central Gravesian concerns of the White Goddess; the magical landscapes; the role of the true, dedicated poet; the concept of Muse-poetry; his relations with Laura Riding; the Single Poetic Theme of the Goddess and Her consort, the dying god; and the mythological surveys, in particular The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. Throughout the book Graves is set alongside the erotic poetry traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, Sufism, courtly love, Elizabethan and Romantic poetry. His poetic oeuvre is compared with Petrarch's Rime Sparse and Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as the English poetic tradition: Skelton, Donne, Keats, Hardy, Eliot and Yeats. The author also discusses Graves'' associations with symbolism, witchcraft, mythology, folklore and psychology. All the major poems are featured in this important contribution to Graves studies. This is the only study of the whole of Graves'' late love-poetry available.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  161pp  ISBN 1-871846-11-0  £14.99 / $23.50
 

Desire, first, by a natural miracle
United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty;
Transcended bodies, transcended hearts.

Two souls, now unalterably one
In whole love always and for ever,

Soar out of twilight, through upper air,
Let fall their sensuous burden.

Is it kind, though, is it honest even,
To consort with none but spirits -
Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours
In enforced night-long separation,
Each to its random bodily inclination,
The thread of miracle snapped?

(Robert Graves, 'The Snapped Thread')

'Alone I sat; the summer day', 'High waving heather'', 'O Dream, where art thou now?'', 'Shall earth no more inspire thee' and 'No coward soul is mine'' are among the heartfelt poems in this new collection.
 

British Poets Series  ISBN  1861711794  108pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 
 

The wind, I hear it sighing
With Autumn's saddest sound;
Withered leaves as thick are lying
As spring-flowers on the ground -

(Emily Brontë, from "The wind, I hear it sighing")

Many of Thomas Hardy's best poems are collected here, including 'The Darkling Thrush', 'In Tenebris', 'Wessex Heights' and 'Afterwards'. This selection includes many of Hardy's most poignant love poems, such as 'The Recalcitrants', 'The Picnic' and 'He Prefers Her Earthly'.
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  ISBN 1861711433  108pp     £10.00 / $20.00

 
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

(Thomas Hardy, from 'The Self-Unseeing')

There are surprisingly few feminist analyses of Hardy, and most do not get beyond vague notions of sexism and misogynism, in the Kate Millett manner. Elvy's book, however, uses up-to-date research in the fields of cultural studies, feminist poetics, gay, lesbian and queer theory. This new, postmodern and incisive exploration of Hardy offers an exciting and radical reappraisal of the discourses of gender, desire, class, economy, socialization, identity and patriarchy in his fiction and poetry.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 

This new edition includes a new introduction and a new bibliography.
 

Thomas Hardy Studies     Extensive bibliography and notes  190pp  ISBN 1-86171-065-8  £15.00 / $30.00
 

"Now, my own, own love," she whispered, "you are mine, and only mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died! but I - whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee again. Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven!...but no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things."

(Thomas Hardy, the ending of The Woodlanders)
 

To read an extract from Sexing Hardy, click here
 

The discourses of societal oppression, sexual repression, love, education, identity, pain and tragedy, myth and religion are Thomas Hardy's main themes. This lucid analysis of Hardy's ethics begins with the major novels and ends with an investigation of Hardy's philosophy. Not a pessimist or a 'negative' thinker, Hardy emerges as a socially committed realist, who saw that much of the pain of life is created by people, not necessarily by 'fate', time, circumstance, luck, chance or the world.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, 121pp  ISBN 1-871846-40-4  £14.99 / $23.50
 

 

Let us off and search, and find a place,
Where yours and mine can be natural lives,
Where no one comes, who dissects and dives
And proclaims that ours is a curious case,
Which its touch of romance can scarcely grace.

(Thomas Hardy, from 'The Recalcitrants')
 
 

Both Hardy and Powys created a poetic Wessex landscape. Hardy's Wessex has entered popular folklore and myth, and is used in the promotion of holidays, walks, tours, museums, hotels, even town councils. John Cowper Powys's Wessex, in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, among other novels, is less well-known: a place of secret corners, mossy walls, ancient earthworks, Somerset wetlands and ferny hollows. Both writers are discussed thematically for their sense of nature, mythology, philosophy, painting, sensualism, labour, folklore and the family. D.H.Lawrence is referenced throughout as a bridge between Hardy and Powys. Finally Robinson considers the film versions of Hardy's novels. This is a valuable addition to the criticism of Hardy and Powys.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, index and illustrations   276pp.  ISBN 1861711239   £20.00 / $40.00
 

      To read an extract
 

D.H. Lawrence's strident and idiosyncratic evocations of sex, touch, Spring, flowers, nature, love, black suns, fish and other glories are gathered here in this new selection.
 
 

British Poets Series Bibliography, notes  ISBN 1861711441    108pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 

Glory is of the sun, too, and the sun of suns,
and down the shafts of his splendid pinions
run tiny rivers of peace.

Most of his time, the tiger pads and slouches in a burning peace.
And the small hawk high up turns round on the slow pivot of peace.
Peace comes from behind the sun, with the peregrine falcon, and the owl.
Yet all of these drink blood.

(D.H. Lawrence, 'Glory')
 
 

This book explores why the fiction of D.H. Lawrence continues to fascinate critics and delight readers. With television and film adaptions being churned out (notably by Ken Russell), biographies and feminist tracts being written, and pious chattering in the media about the Lady Chatterley trial, D.H. Lawrence's work remains as topical as ever.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
 
 

With notes and bibliography. 140pp  ISBN 1-871846-36-6  £14.99 / $23.50
 

She was in revolt. For once, she was free, she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere she felt deep, deep inside her.

(D.H. Lawrence, from The Rainbow)

This book analyzes the rich discourses of mythology, symbolism, form, eroticism and landscape in D.H.Lawrence's fiction. Foster traces Lawrence's symbols (tigers, suns, fish, peacocks) in many of the short stories, as well as the major novels. 'Spirit of place' was always important for Lawrence, and Foster's study investigates how Lawrence's concept of place informed his fiction, poetry and travel books.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, and illustrations   140pp.  ISBN 1861711476   £15.00 / $30.00
 

The things one cares about are all inside, like seeds in the ground in winter. But one has to attend to the things one only half cares about. And so life passes away. I expect it is always so, in the winter of our discontent, when the outside is mostly rather horrid and out of connection with the something that struggles inside. Luckily the inside thing corresponds with the inside thing in just a few people.

(D.H. Lawrence, letter, March, 1928)

A selection of the odes, hymns and pæans of England's breathless, angelic, anarchic poet. Famous poems, such as 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'The Cloud', are set beside extracts from Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion.
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711808    108pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep skyís commotion,
Loose clouds like earthís decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 'Ode to the Wild West Wind')

This book gathers the most potent passages from Keats together, including the famous 'Odes', the sonnets, the luxuriously sensuous 'Eve of St Agnes', the mysterious and atmospheric 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', and extracts from 'Lamia', Endymion and Hyperion.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711751   104pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 
 
 

O, for some sunny spell
To dissipate the shadows of this hell!
Say they are gone, - with the new dawning light
Steps forth my lady bright!

(John Keats, from 'Lines to Fanny')
 
 
 

selected and introduced by A.H. Ninham

A cluster of the very best of Henry Vaughan's Metaphysical poems, which are filled with a 'deep, but dazzling darkness'. Lesser known Vaughan works, including some love poems, are collected here beside the famous pieces such as 'The Morning Watch', 'The World' and 'The Night'.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711409  104pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
    All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
    Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
    And all her train were hurled;
 

(Henry Vaughan, from 'The World')

The best of John Donne's sacred and secular poems, including many of the Songs and Sonnets, the Divine Poems and others. Donne's lyrical, Metaphysical fusion of love and religion is explored in this choice of poems, and in Ninham's introduction.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711255    104pp     £10.00 / $20.00

 
Go and catch a falling star,
     Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
     Or who cleft the devilís foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
     Or to keep off envyís stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

(John Donne, 'Go and Catch a Falling Star')

A selection of the songs, pæans, epithalamions and lyrics of the great Cavalier poet. Herrick's three beloved subjects (love, nature and religion) are eulogized in beautifully-crafted verses.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 186171145X   104pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 

 
I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.
I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,
Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse
By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.
I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece
Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-gris.
I sing of Times trans-shifting; and I write
How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White.
I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing
The Court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King.
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

(Robert Herrick, 'The Argument of His Book')
 

        To read more of Robert Herrick's poetry, click here
 
 

selected and introduced by Teresa Page

Opulent Elizabethan verse, including many of Spenser's love poems (the Amoretti), the celebratory Epithalamion, extracts from Astrophel and The Shepheardes Calendar, and of course, The Faerie Queene.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711425   104pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 

More then most faire, full of the living fire,
 kindled above unto the maker neare:
 no eyes but joyes, in which all powers conspire,
 that to the world naught else be counted deare.

(Edmund Spenser, from the Amoretti, no. 8)

Edited by Teresa Page

One of the great Elizabethan cycles of love poetry, the Amoretti are printed here in full. .
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes    ISBN 1861711530   124pp     £10.00 / $20.00
 
 

The very best of the Sonnets, and the richest moments from the plays (King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, etc). Familiar anthology pieces are counterbalanced with lesser known passages from the plays.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  64pp  ISBN 1-898283-10-9  £5.99 / $9.00
 
 

        To read a selection of William Shakespeare's poetry, click here
 
 

The Sonnets represent the highpoint of love poetry in English: they continue to astonish and delight with the abundance of their word play and the intensity of the erotic feelings they depict. This book prints all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and provides a commentary on this narrative of rivalry in love.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  180pp  ISBN 1861710437   £10.00 / $20.00
 

Sonnet no. 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments: love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worthís unknown although his height be taken.
Loveís not Timeís fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickleís compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me províd,
     I never writ, nor no man ever lovíd.

This book includes all of Shakespeare's poetry, including the Sonnets, Venus and Adonies, The Rape of Lucrece and The Passionate Pilgrim.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  360pp  ISBN 1861711948   £10.00 / $20.00
 

A refreshing look at the cultural phenomenon that is 'Shakespeare', focussing on the discourses of sexuality, theatre, culture, tragedy, magic, politics and feminism. The Sonnets create much controversy, but Barnacle studies them as poetry first, and uses the Sonnets as a key to all of Shakespeare's texts. The book concludes with an in-depth survey of feminist literary criticism, and how it applies to the central icon of Western literature.

B.D. Barnacle taught English in Paris until 1980. He now teaches in Oxford. His books include John Donne (1978), The Victorian Novel: Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy (1984), Shakespeare (Crescent Moon, 1992) and Rilke (Crescent Moon, 1993).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  145pp  ISBN 1-871846-81-1  £14.99 / $23.50
 

A survey of contemporary feminism, and its relation to literature's 'god'. The author employs up-to-date research in gay, lesbian and feminist approaches to the Renaissance world and literary texts.
 
 

With extended notes 30pp  ISBN 1-898283-01-X  £3.99 / $6.00

This is a collection of Wyatt's Petrarchan sonnets, songs, ballads, epigrams and rondeaux. The poems, in meticulously wrought stanzas, are mainly about love: love lost, won, and desired. Wyatt was the first of the great English Renaissance love poets. Wyatt's poetry is too often neglected, beside towering talents such as Spenser, Shakespeare and Marlowe. Poems attributed to Wyatt are also here.
 
 
 

British Poets Series Bibliography, notes  ISBN 1861711247   112pp    £10.00 / $20.00
 
 

My heart I gave thee, not to do it pain;
But to preserve, it was to thee taken.
I served thee, not to be forsaken,
But that I should be rewarded again.

(Sir Thomas Wyatt, 'My heart I gave thee')
 
 

For more of Sir Thomas Wyatt's classic love poetry, click here

An anthology of great nature poems, including the Elizabethan pastorals of Spenser, Shakespeare, Raleigh and Drayton, and classics of nature mysticism by Chaucer, Langland, Thomson, Blake and Wordsworth, among others. Famous anthology pieces nestle amongst lesser known poems, including some neglected women poets, and American poets such as Lowell and Dickinson.

Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  96pp  ISBN 1-86171-054-2  £7.99 / $12.50
 

Now welcome, somer, with thy sunne softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake
And driven away the longe nightes blake!

Saint Valentin, that art ful hy o-lofte,
Thus singen amale fowles for thy sake:
 ënow welcome, somer, with thy sunne softe,
 that hast thes wintres wedres overshake!í

(Geoffrey Chaucer)
 
 

 For more nature poetry, click here
 
 

The great love poets collected here include Emily Brontë, Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Herrick, Jonson, Skelton, Marlowe, Campion, Sidney, Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Donne, Spenser, Wyatt, Anne Bradsheet, John Clare, Emily Dickinson and Queen Elizabeth I.
 
 

Bibliography, notes  112pp  ISBN 1-871846-97-8  £7.99 / $12.50
 
 
 

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem 'a cuckoo-song,' as thou dost treat it.
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt's pain
Cry... 'Speak once more... thou lovest!' Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll, -
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou love me, love me, love me - toll
The silver iterance! - only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnets From the Portuguese, XXI)
 
 

 For more love poetry, click here

Mystical poets featured here include Blake, Whitman, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Crashaw, Shelley, Emerson, Herbert, Longfellow, Hopkins, Traherne, Shakespeare, Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Lawrence and anonymous mediæval works,  such as The Cloud of Unknowing.
 
 

British Poets Series Bibliography, notes  96pp  ISBN 1-86171-055-0   £7.99 / $12.50
 

Behind me- dips Eternity -
Before Me - Immortality -
Myself - the Term between -
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin -
 

(Emily Dickinson, 'Behind Me - dips Eternity')
 
 

The ' 'classic' poems of the Metaphysical poets are here - by Herbert, Vaughan, Herrick, Crashaw, Traherne, Donne - and many by lesser known poets.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  85pp  ISBN 1-898283-38-9  £7.99 / $12.50
 
 
 

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight;
    For thou must die.

(George Herbert, 'Virtue')
 
 

Marlowe, Spenser, Drayton, Sidney, Campion, Raleigh, Daniel, Shakespeare and others
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  84pp  ISBN 1-898283-37-0  £7.99 / $12.50     NEW
 

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:
There never was a better bargain drive.

(Sir Philip Sidney, from The Countess of Pembrokeís Arcadia)

The great Romantics poets - Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Bronte, Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clare - as well as many lesser known women poets
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  89pp  ISBN 1-898283-39-7  £7.99 / $12.50  NEW
 
 

Pathway of light! o'er thy empurpled zone
With lavish charms perennial summer strays;
Soft ímidst thy spicy groves the zephyr plays,
While far around the rich perfumes are thrown...

(Helen Maria Williams, 'Sonnet: To the Torrid Zone')
 

To read more Romantic poetry, click here
 
 

A guide to traditional forms of verse, such as the sonnet, ode, elegy and quatrain, as well as some lesser known poetic forms used in mediæval and Renaissance Europe, as found in Petrarch, Scève, Tasso, Dante and the troubadours (eg the canso and dizain).

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
 
 

Bibliography  30pp  ISBN 1-871846-75-7  £3.99 / $6.00
 

A new collection of poetry.

Robinson's poetry is certainly jammed with ideas, and I find it very interesting for that reason.' (Colin Wilson)
 
 

75pp  ISBN 1-871846-08-0  £5.99 / $9.00
 

'Radiance has a spectacularly clear originality of being.'  (David Castleman, Dusty Dog Reviews)
 

56pp  ISBN 1-871846-46-3  £5.99 / $9.00

The Best of Peter Redgrove's Poetry: The Book of Wonders

Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall: A Flood of Poems

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

Brigitte's Blue Heart

Claudia Schiffer's Red Shoes

By-Blows: Uncollected Poems

Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, Between East and West

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

Emily Bronte: Poems

Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

D.H. Lawrence: Selected Poems

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Shelley: Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats: Selected Poems

Henry Vaughan: Poems

John Donne: Poems

Robert Herrick: Selected Poems

Edmund Spenser: Poems

Edmund Spenser: Amoretti

William Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets & Verse

William Shakespeare: The Sonnets

Shakespeare: Love, Poetry and Magic in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Feminism and Shakespeare

Sir Thomas Wyatt: Poems

The Crescent Moon Book of Nature Poetry From Langland to Lawrence

The Crescent Moon Book of Love Poetry

he Crescent Moon Book of Mystical Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Metaphysical Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Elizabethan Love Poetry

The Crescent Moon Book of Romantic Poetry

Poetic Forms: A Handbook of Stanza-forms from the History of Poetry

Gorgeous Little Orpheus

Radiance: New Poems

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