This groundbreaking study of the facts, fantasies, and taboos surrounding menstruation was published in 1978 and helped bring about a profound shift in attitudes toward a natural phenomenon that had been reviled and denigrated over the centuries.Thoroughly researched yet highly readable, combining psychology, anthropology, and poetry, Shuttle and Redgrove illustrate their theories using examples ranging from the Bible to such modern-day pop horrors as vampire movies and the cult fi...

Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me. You've no id...

The work of the poet Peter Redgrove is one of the great unexplored treasures of late twentieth century literature. His prolific output presents an intriguing variety of personae: magician, scientist, lover, psychologist, joker, madman. It is only now, with the publication of his Collected Poems and this biography, that we can see how and why these personae developed - and discover the full depth and range of this visionary writer.Born into an apparently conventional middle...

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes.By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn...

The case of Jack the Ripper and his savage serial killing and horrendous mutilation of five women in the East End of Victorian London is the greatest of all unsolved murder mysteries. For over 100 years the long line of candidates for the bloodstained laurels of Jack the Ripper has been paraded before us. Policemen and Ripperologists have tried in vain to put a name to the faceless silent killer. Richard Whittington-Egan, one of the founding fathers of the search, published, in 1975, his C...

Jack the Ripper is the ultimate whodunit. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 remain unsolved and hundreds of theories have been suggested as to the killer's identity. However, many of the suggestions naming the infamous Ripper remain ill informed and, quite frankly, ludicrous – until now! The authors of this book are all members of The Whitechapel Society, the world's largest organisation for the study of Jack the Ripper. Each has spent many years researching a particular sus...

From the Irish Nobel laureate: Essential poems selected by the author from throughout his career, plus several previously unselected works and his Nobel lecture."[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." —Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book ReviewOpened Ground includes the essential poems from Seamus Heaney's twelve previous vo...

With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. • "[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows." --Joyce Carol Oates,The New York TimesIn such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skele...

A new edition of the Collected Poems of Judith Wright, one of Australia's best-loved poetsThis definitive collection represents the impressive poetic achievement of one of Australia's best loved and most highly respected poets.Judith Wright's Collected Poems comprises her work from 1942 to 1985 and is a fitting tribute to an outstanding poet. Demonstrating a deep love of the Australian landscape, coupled with an awareness of white history and an intense concern for Aboriginal right...

A new edition of later selected works of the Nobel Prize winner, "arguably the finest poet now writing in English" (James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review ).Includes Heaney's final poem, "In Time"Often considered to be "the greatest poet of our age" ( The Guardian), Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which...

COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017Winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award.To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore's tenth and ...

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers, students and any lover of literature will find the essential guide to the major works of Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch's themes, genre and narrative techniques are put under scrutiny and the emphasis is on providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Amongst many other features you'll find inspirational reading plans and contextual material, suggested complementary and comparative reading and an indispensable...