C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer...

When C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation ('fishing in other men's waters' he calls it), prose essays and fiction. In the 1960s his poems began to appear. The London Zoo - his first major book - was published in 1961 when the poet was 47. Since that time his place has grown secure: he is one of the few direct English he...

When C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation, prose essays, and fiction. One of the few direct English heirs of the great Modernists, Sisson is a poet who grounds the enormous energies of that movement in English landscapes—especially those of Somerset—and reconciles the legacies of Eliot and Pound on the one hand and of H...

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of James...

The Four Ancient Books of Walesby William F. SkeneThe only available translation of the complete corpus of Welsh Bardic poetry."This is William Skene's anthology of dark-age Welsh Bardic poetry. Often cited, but difficult to obtain, this book contains every remaining piece of Bardic poetry known. The poems are translated from four manuscripts: the Black Book of Caermarthen, the Red Book of Hergest (which is also the source of the Mabinogion), the Book of Taliessin an...

First published in London in 1962, this collection of Sitwell's later poetry contains "several pieces which show that the lyrical impulse of her early days was still alive to make new discoveries of great freshness and tenderness" - Dictionary of National Biography"Her mastery of the long line, the pause, of contrasting fullness and ghostliness of sound is as striking as ever. So is her high simplicity of spirit." -The Times Literary Supplement

Don Juan is a long, digressive satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Don Juan has a humorous, satirical bent. Modern critics generally consider it to be Byron's masterpiece. Byron utilized a variety of narrative perspectives to comment on a wide range of concerns, including liberty, tyranny, war, love, sexuality, hypocrisy, and the mores o...

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was perhaps the most intellectually adventurous of the great Romantic poets. A classicist, a headlong visionary, a social radical, and a poet of serene artistry with a lyric touch second to none, Shelley personified the richly various—and contradictory—energies of his time. This compact yet comprehensive collection showcases all the extraordinary facets of Shelley’s art. From his most famous lyrical poems (“Ozymandias,” “The Cloud”) to his political and phi...

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem written by Lord Byron. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a can...

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner’s later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney’s early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light ...

A collection of poems of different lengths and styles – some with a hint of humour, others of a more serious nature – about animals, nature, magic, emotions, and the world around us.

A blacksmith creates a girl from fire. A hedgehog conquers a kingdom. How do you ride a Camargue horse through time? How do circus people live, when the glitterball has stopped turning? In these poem-stories David Morley reinvents the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel and making. Opening with a celebration of friendship, the poems tell the world into being. In myths of origin and the natural world, the terrible chronicles of history and the saving power of folk wisdom, th...