Challenging oppression with objectivity and prejudice with passion, feminist activist and poet Steph Pike confronts the politics of social, economic and gender inequality with a viscerally charged and indisputable truth.Steph Pike is a feminist socialist activist and a committee member of Manchester People's Assembly, part of the national movement against cuts and austerity. She performs regularly throughout the UK, including at many left-wing and feminist demos and rallies, and or...

Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all.- Emily DickensonFrom time immemorial, poetry has provided its readers with a source of comfort and encouragement in times of need. In this superb anthology can be found the best of the English-speaking world's inspirational and reassuring verse, including such classics as Rudyard Kipling's 'If' and W.H. Davies' 'L...

One of the best known prose collections of Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats takes a look at the long connection between the people of Ireland and the mystical creatures known as Fairies.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.-- from 'Digging'With its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.

This comprehensive eBook presents significant works of this famous and brilliant writer in one ebook - easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate: • The Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan • The Gondoliers • The Grand Duke • H.M.S. Pinafore • Iolanthe • The Mikado • The Pirates of Penzance • Princess Ida • Ruddigore • The Sorcerer • Thespis • Trial by Jury • Utopia Limited • The Yeomen of the Guard • Patience • etc.

James I's The Kingis Quair is a hidden gem of medieval poetry, written in 1424 by a Scottish king held prisoner in England from the age of eleven until almost thirty years old. The poem narrates his capture and imprisonment, and how he fell in love one beautiful spring morning with an English noblewoman, Joan Beaufort. In a dream vision, we find out what King James learned about good and bad fortune from the goddess Minerva and from Fortune herself, and how he discovered the nature of true...

A John Latham poem is a like a precipitation: images coalesce around a single memory the way ice crystallises around the smallest particle to form a snowflake; the strange logic that constructs them is unique each time. Passionate, satirical, mysterious, the poems in his sixth collection capture the vibrancy of a childhood that still bewitches him half a century later, alongside the cruel betrayals of old age, and the fresh possibilities bound up in each new encounter. Latham’s training as...

Nocturnal Sunrise is a collection of dark sombre verse reflecting the thoughts and memories of the author. Its deep and often menacing content reveals life as seen through her eyes. Each verse concentrates on the heart rendering pain explored within relationships, trying to capture the torment, pain and suffering that is felt when betrayed. Each poem tries to explore our deepest turmoil. Emotions we often refuse to recognise, demonising such thoughts as though they dont exist. By ignoring ...

Describing how I began to write poetry involves my relationship with my Father, he wrote poetry too. After his death the family decided to collect all his poems, which were scattered far and wide, and give them to my Mother in the form of a book.That process is what started me writing, the shock for me was that I wrote anything at all. In the Preface I write 'I'm not the sort to write poetry, people like me aren't poets, I'm a mans' man, not given to sentimentallity, gushy flowery ...

All the Wasted Beauty of the World, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, extols the beautiful as readily as it expounds on the blemished. The reasoned commingles with the rambunctious, as in the case of the speaker who declares that “our lives span diaper to diaper,/ and in between we piss on anyone/ we can.” Little escapes notice in these poems of gutsy realism and formal deftness, which freely highlight the fringes of society-the speaker in “Bellefontaine Cemetery” exhorts teens...

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron’s notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen “from Kentish town to Pisa.” From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in...

William Shakespeare is widely considered the greatest writer in the history of the English language, so renowned and respected that the time period in which he lived is often known as the Age of Shakespeare. Indeed, his genius is questioned only by those who doubt the authenticity of his authorship of timeless classics like Romeo and Juliet. As Ben Jonson once put it, "He was not of an age, but for all time. No other writer, in English or in any other language, can rival the appeal that Shake...