Poetry

The poems of Ancient Sunlight range in theme and space from the inner East End of London – where the poet has lived for over thirty years – with its complex richnesses of cultures and the often brutal pains of its regeneration, to great European cities such as Prague and the Italian mountains of his family origins. It is a poetry that marries personal acuity with deep communal awareness, reflecting his work as a poet in schools, hospitals, galleries, drop-in centres, urban and moorland fastnesses, and the wilder places of the human heart. This is a generous, passionate poetry of...

Pearl is one of the greatest English Medieval poems, a dream vision that is both a profoundly personal elegy for the dreamer’s lost daughter and a subtle theological debate about the most difficult existential questions. In this parallel text edition the original poem is printed opposite a modernised version which retains all the formal features of the original – its elaborate musical schemes of alliteration and rhyme, and its rich vocabulary. Words unfamiliar to the contemporary reader are glossed alongside the modernisation so that the poem can easily be read by anybody not familiar with its idiom. In her introduction...

Supplication: Selected Poems This book gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. It includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners.   SUPPLICATION O poetry, visit this house often, imbue my life with success, leave me not alone, give me a wife and home. Take this curse off of early death and drugs, make me a friend among peers, lend me love, and timeliness. Return me to the men who teach and above all, cure the hurts of wanting the...