Hoping It Might Be So brings together all of Kit Wright's previous collections for adults as well as three dozen new poems. The collection, first published in 2000, was described by Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times as 'funny and profoundly humane' and by Sophie Hannah in the PN Review as 'full of verve and energy, with a strong musical quality that makes you want to read on and hear more'.Sean O'Brien in the Times Literary Supplement described Kit Wright as 'a masterly yet mo...

A brilliantly funny collection of poems involving everyone's favourite anti-hero Dave Dirt, the extraordinary afternoon of a prawn and the mysterious tale of Zoe's earrings.Witty, touching and clever - this is a classic collection from the irreverent Kit Wright.

Few English poets have quite Kit Wright's range. From heart-felt lyricism to blistering satire, from the ribald to the grief-stricken, his poems cover almost everything life can throw at anyone, quite literally from the sublime to the ridiculous. Entertaining and engaging, writing with wit, panache and dazzling virtuosity, Kit Wright is both a seriously funny poet and a poignant chronicler of our times. His latest collection, published on his 70th birthday, shows him young at heart and wri...

The thrilling tale of a poor miller, his beautiful daughter and the terrible consequences that come from spinning lies...This story is a magic bean. It may not look much like a bean, but I can promise you that it is. For if you plant it in a young mind, it will grow into a love of story and reading. These beans are favourite fairytales and legends that will delight, thrill and thoroughly entertain. Each story has been brilliantly crafted by one of the best-loved writers fo...

Magic beans. Sow them. Plant them. Watch children grow.'If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!' - Shel Silverstein, PoetEach and every one of the stories in this anthology is a magic bean: a wondrous tale that will capture your imagination. Prepare to be dazzled by Rapunzel's golden tresses. Prepare ...

In The Spirit Level, as ever with Seamus Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts 'in an age of bare hands and cast iron' and ends 'as the automatic lock / clunks shut' in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentieth-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight silence' of cattle out in rain - are coloured ...

When Mrs Hunter chooses William she thinks she has found the perfect prey . . . but has she met her match?http://www.youtube.com/user/PenguinKidsTV?feature=watch

Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.

Set in Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Ottawa, Ontario, the stories in The Museum at the End of the World span the life of writer Robert Ford and his wife Sheila. Playing with various forms of comedy throughout, author John Metcalf paints a portrait of 20th century literary life with levity, satire, and unsuspecting moments of emotional depth.

This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O’Brien’s work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O’Brien’s hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, train...

Anne Stevenson is a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. "Poems 1955-2005" is a remaking...