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...

Many of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, "the most gentle"—whereby he meant faery—"place in the whole of County Sligo." Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheer...

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.

A small collection of some of the poetry and haiku that Ashley Paddon has written over the past few years, proving once and for all, that although fatigue may not be good for you, it can provide some interesting results...

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&...

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...