Poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Throughout human history, poetry has provided stories about what people observe in the sky. Stars, planets, comets, the moon, and space travel are used as metaphors for our feelings of love, loneliness, adventurousness, and awe. This anthology includes poets, astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today, from all around the world. Sappho, Du Fu, Hafez, and Shakespeare are joined by Gwyneth Lewis's space requiem, Tracy K. Smith on the Hubble telescope, and Charles Simic, whose poem accompanied a NASA mission. Astronomers Tycho Brahe and Edmund Halley accompany modern scientists including Rebecca Elson, Alice Gorman on the first woman in space, and Yun Wang's space journal on travel to Andromeda. This collection reaches across time and cultures to illuminate how we think about outer space, and ourselves.

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.

The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document establishing the beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the book travels through—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José, California—we see that racism, objectification, and sexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.

This book provides a sustained exploration of creativity. Philip Gross provides a poem, 'Cave diver in the deep reach', and an extended commentary on how the poem was written. These are followed by contributions from typographer Jeremy Tankard, whose unique 'Redisturbed' typeface is used throughout this book, and artist Rika Newcombe, who provides the cover image. Caves of making offers the textual equivalent of a creative festival - a festival on the page. It brings together the work of three remarkable creatives and offers, in their own words, insights into their creative process. Philip Gross is a writer of many parts - spanning poetry, thought-provoking fiction for young people, schools opera libretti, radio short stories and plays. Collaboration with the visual arts, dance, music and other art forms has been one of the sources of energy in his writing life. Jeremy Tankard has built a worldwide reputation for the high quality and unique designs of his typefaces. In the development of the Redisturbed typeface chosen for Caves of making, he wanted to take the idea of a unicase alphabet much further than previous experiments and treat it as a conventional text type.Rika Newcombe's paintings have an uncanny sympathy with the world of creative writing. Images from her work grace the covers of all books in the Creative Writing Studies series.

The fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries. For hundreds of years, anthologies have shaped the way we encounter literature. Eighteenth-century children and young women were introduced to the 'safe' bits of Shakespeare or Milton through censored collections; Victorian working-class men and women enrolled at adult learning institutions to be taught from The Golden Treasury; First World War soldiers nursed copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse in the trenches; pop-loving teenagers growing up in the 1960s got their first taste of the counterculture from the bestselling The Mersey Sound. But anthologies aren't just part of literary history. Over the centuries, they have influenced the course of British social change, redrawing the map of 'high' and 'low' culture, generating conversations around politics, morality, class, gender and belief. The Treasuries, by the literary scholar and journalist Clare Bucknell, reveals the extraordinary amount we can learn about our history from the anthologies that brought readers together and changed the way they thought.

With a variety of works available by a single author, interested readers can see how Plath's prose relates to her poetry. A combination of talent, daring and drama guarantees Plath's poems an aura that will keep them on stage for a long time. "The Unabridged Journals", where Sylvia practiced her craft, will always stand tall without the poems, and remain a model for young would-be writers to see what it takes to succeed. "The Bell Jar" and the short stories are the result of the practice that went into the "Journals", illustrating stages in Sylvia's career as well as aspects of herself.

This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a bonus the complete version of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values. Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters. Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals, and are uniquely accompanied with the complete text of Tolkien's acclaimed 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture that he delivered on Sir Gawain.

The First Crusade was arguably one of the most significant events of the Middle Ages. It was the only event to generate its own epic cycle, the Old French Crusade Cycle. The central trilogy at the heart of the Cycle describes the Crusade from its beginnings to the climactic battle of Ascalon, comprising the Chanson d'Antioche, the Chanson des Chetifs and the Chanson de Jerusalem. This translation of the Chetifs and the Jerusalem accompanies and completes the translation of the Antioche and makes the trilogy available to English readers in its entirety for the first time. The value of the trilogy lies above all in the insight it gives us to medieval perceptions of the Crusade. The events are portrayed as part of a divine plan where even outcasts and captives can achieve salvation through Crusade. This in turn underlies the value of the Cycle as a recruiting and propaganda tool. The trilogy gives a window onto the chivalric preoccupations of thirteenth-century France, exploring concerns about status, heroism and defeat. It portrays the material realities of the era in vivid detail: the minutiae of combat, smoke-filled halls, feasts, prisons and more. And the two newly translated poems are highly entertaining as well, featuring a lubricious Saracen lady not in the first flush of youth, a dragon inhabited by a devil, marauding monkeys, miracles and much more. The historian will find little new about the Crusade itself, but abundant material on how it was perceived, portrayed and performed. The translation is accompanied by an introduction examining the origins of the two poems and their wider place in the cycle. It is supported by extensive footnotes, a comprehensive index of names and places and translations of the main variants.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was." Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice - in all senses.

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798-1803) and as the sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life. Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brother's success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness, this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from her brother's shadow and back into her own life story.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The English poet John Gower (ca. 1340-1408) wrote important Latin poems witnessing the two crucial political events of his day: the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and in 1399 the deposition of Richard II, in the Visio Anglie (A Vision of England) and Cronica tripertita (A Chronicle in Three Parts), respectively. Both poems, usually transmitted with Gower's major Latin work, Vox clamantis, are key primary sources for the historical record, as well as marking culminating points in the development of English literature. The earlier Visio Anglie is verbally derivative of numerous, varied sources, by way of its literary allusions, but is also highly original in its invention and disposition. On the other hand, the Cronica tripertita's organization, even in details, is highly derivative, and from a single source, but its verbal texture is all invented. This volume includes Latin texts of these poems of Gower, newly established from the manuscripts, with commentary on Gower's relation with the rest of the contemporary historical record and with his literary forebears and contemporaries, including Ovid, Virgil, Peter Riga, Nigel Witeker, and Godfrey of Viterbo. This volume also includes Modern English verse translations of the two poems, which are at once critically accurate and enjoyably accessible.

The twenty-first edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Key Features: - each entry provides full career history and publication details - appendices section lists international prizes, organizations and poetry publications, lists of Poets Laureate.

-- 15 original woodcut illustrations

-- 18 photographs of ancient artifacts

This edition aims to reanimate the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu for modern readers. The poetic rendition brings words to life through indelible images. A learned and lucid historical and cultural introduction fills in background for the narrative. An interpretative essay reviews the themes of Gilgamesh and their echoes in other literature. The total is a new edition that delights, informs, and stimulates readers to a new appreciation of this age-old tale.

'The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day ...' Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to avoid pirated copies being sold without the young poet's permission. Praised by Samuel Johnson, reprinted over and over again in Gray's lifetime and recited by generations of school children, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language. This edition reproduces the exquisite wood engravings made by Agnes Miller Parker in 1938. Parker visited the churchyard at St Giles, Stoke Poges, where the poem is set, in order to make her sketches, and all thirty-two stanzas of the poem are accompanied by detailed full-page illustrations. Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the poet's death, this edition will not only bring new readers to the 'Elegy' but will also appeal to those already familiar with its riches.

"At once erudite and colloquial" (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingenues and cognoscenti alike.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to using and creating poetry for conducting and reporting social research. It includes examples of poetry, interviews of poets, and practical exercises that will enhance the discussion of poetry writing as a method. When used as a teaching guide this book will encourage students to consider the importance of form and function in poetry for qualitative methods. It also answers the question of how to teach the creation and evaluation of poetry, it combats the perception that poetry is too difficult or mysterious to use as research and that only poets should be concerned with poetic craft.

His contemporaries recognised John Donne (1572-1631) as a completely new kind of poet. He was, wrote one enthusiast, 'Copernicus in Poetrie'. But in the winter of 1614-15 Donne abandoned part-time versification for full-time priestly ministry, quickly becoming one of the most popular preachers of his time. While his verse has never been short of modern admirers, his sermons have recently begun to receive their full share of serious attention. Yet there exists almost no theologically-informed criticism to assist readers with navigating, let alone appreciating, the intricacies of Donne's religious thinking. The need for such criticism is especially urgent since many readers approach his writing today with little previous knowledge of Christian doctrine or history. This book supplies that deficiency. Starting from the assumption that theology is inevitably the product of the human imagination, a perception that is traced back to major early Christian writers (and something that Donne implicitly acknowledged), it probes the complex amalgam that constituted his ever-shifting vision of the deity. It examines his theological choices and their impact on his preaching, analysing the latter with reference to its sometimes strained relationship with Christian orthodoxy and the implications of this for any attempt to determine how far Donne may legitimately be viewed as a mouthpiece for the Jacobean and Caroline Church of England. The book argues that the unconventionality that characterises his verse is also on display in his sermons. As a result it presents Donne as a far more creative and risk-taking religious thinker than has previously been recognised, especially by those determined to see him as a paragon of conventional Christian orthodoxy.