Whisky - the water of life, perhaps Scotland's best known contribution to the world. Muse - goddess of creative endeavour. The Whisky Muse - the spark of inspiration to many of Scotland's great poets and songwriters.

Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history.
In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.

This definitive collection of Lawrence’s poems, with appendices containing juvenilia, variants, and early drafts, and Lawrence’s own critical introductions to his poems, also includes full textual and explanatory notes, glossary, and index for the work of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

Now in paperback, this is the definitive collection of America′s bestselling poet Rumi′s finest poems of love and lovers. In Coleman Barks′ delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.

′There are lovers content with longing.

I′m not one of them.′

Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds - erotic, divine, friendship -and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging from the ′wholeness′ one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover′s loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship - these poems cover all ′the magnificent regions of the heart′.

This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled "Squarings", shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "to credit marvels". The title poem, "Seeing Things", is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives. Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself. From the author of "The Haw Lantern", "Wintering Out", "Station Island" and "North".

Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle. This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.

In this generous anthology, Joel Conarroe has assembled the work of eight poets who have shaped--and to some extent defined--American verse since 1940: Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. The 164 selections in Eight American Poets include widely anthologized works like Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," several of Berryman's "Dream Songs," and Anne Sexton's "Ringing the Bells," as well as poems that are less familiar but just as haunting. Prefaced with a discerning introduction and individual biographical essays.

Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

Described by Robert Hass as "unquestionably one of the great living European poets" and by Charles Simic as "one of the finest poets living today," Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts. This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting-the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year. 'To read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.' Seamus Heaney 'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' Andrew Motion

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature. Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet.

For poetry lovers and students of literature and literary criticism, a National Book Award-winning poet brings his prowess as a translator and critic to bear on the work of one of the major German poets of the century.

"Mad Love" has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now.

"There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine," writes Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. "Mad Love" is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust." Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

This collection of Ernesto Cardenal's poems expresses the strength and vitality of a nation still struggling to survive in the face of a bitter fight against the US-backed Contras.

This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

Poems: 1987-1992

This collection, 39 poems written between 1987 and 1992, is the final volume by "a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives," in the words of Adrienne Rich.

"This welcome collection, spanning the last half-decade of Lorde's life, shows the poet connecting the personal and the political with a fluent, conversational voice that holds the reader like great oratory."—Booklist

"In these last poems we recognize the same vibrant, brave and generous soul we knew before. A wonder in itself."—Alice Walker

"This volume resonated with some of the finest poems Audre Lorde ever wrote: sinewy, lyrical, celebratory even in the face of death, and always political in the best sense. Now the poet is gone—but the work lives, and sings."—Robin Morgan

Billy Collins is one of America's best loved poets. From a poem about the relentless barking of next door's dog - "Another Reason Why I don't Keep a Gun in the House" - to an elegy to "The Best Cigarette".

A book to celebrate the theme of 'food', as part of the Poetry Society's annual 'National Poetry Day' festivities. Perfectly appropriate for the armchair or the kitchen, "Poetry on a Plate" contains mouth-watering recipes by chefs and food writers, including Tony Singh, Frances Bissell, Mary Berry and Anton Edelmann, combined with a delicious assortment of poems. This unique feast features chefs talking about poetry and poets talking about food, garnished with poems selected by the Poetry Society which relate to the ingredients or composition of each recipe. Poets include some of the UK's top contemporary poets as well as their predecessors - Keats and others.

The publication of inward moon, outward sun signals a welcome end to Shabbir Banoobhai's self-imposed silence that lasted well over a decade. In the body of South African writing, his is a rare voice with the courage and the artistic skill to articulate a contemporary spirituality convincingly. The utmost simplicity of expression is used to conceal and reveal, at one and the same time, ideas of intense profundity. The poems are often meditative songs of love, longing and loss in a mystical world but they remain rooted in the social and political struggles of this world.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) fue un poeta de vocacion infatigable. Mantuvo estrecha relacion con los artistas expatriados de la llamada Generacion Perdida y con escritores franceses de su tiempo. Escribio tambien novela, teatro y ensayo. Williams pertenece a una generacion de ilustres poetas que intentan encontrar vias alternativas a la tradicion poetica inglesa, todavia vigente a principios del siglo XX, y que convirtieron la poesia norteamericana de ese siglo en una epoca dorada. Paterson es un poema-libro dividido en cinco partes, con una estructura organica.