Funeral service and insurance provider AVBOB, through its sponsorship of the AVBOB Poetry Project, gave South Africa the gentlest, most inclusive act of bereavement support in the form of an online poetry competition in all 11 official languages.

Poets submitted words of loss and consolation in all 11 mother tongues. Editors in all languages were carefully selected to curate the collection of poems entered, and they too were transformed by the process.

This is a poetry portal for all South Africans – a cathartic space where amateur and accomplished poets can use their craft to comfort others.

"Riku Lätti se poësie-debuut is meer as net nog ’n oulike digbundeltjie in Afrikaans; ek sien dit as ’n monumentale en omvattende deurgronding van alle fasette van die moderne mens se soeke na betekenis en — hier kom die grootste verrassing — selfs ons opvattings oor die teologie." – Koos Kombuis

"Aangrypende meditasies oor die heiligheid van onsekerheid. ’n Boek waarna ek telkens sal terugkeer om naby die aarde en werklikheid te bly om nie te gryp na die warm lug van dogma en onwetenskaplike verduidelikings van bestaan nie. – Dana Snyman

The John Donne volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a wholly new edition of Donne's verse and prose. It consists of a selection of the compositions that circulated in manuscript or in print form during Donne's lifetime. In keeping with the approach of the series, the texts are presented in chronological order and the text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the first published version. Each text is paired with a generous complement of historical and textual annotation, which enables the present day reader to access the excitement with which Donne's contemporaries, his first readers, discovered his famous and incomparable originality, audacity, ingenuity, and wit. The edition incorporates new directions and emphases in scholarly editing that are foregrounded in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, such as the history of readership and the history of texts as material objects.

This enthralling new translation of Dante's Inferno 'immediately joins ranks with the very best' (Richard Lansing). One of the world's transcendent literary masterpieces, the Inferno tells the timeless story of Dante's journey through the nine circles of hell, guided by the poet Virgil, when in midlife he strays from his path in a dark wood. In this vivid verse translation into contemporary English, Peter Thornton makes the classic work fresh again for a new generation of readers. Recognizing that the Inferno was, for Dante and his peers, not simply an allegory but the most realistic work of fiction to date, he points out that hell was a lot like Italy of Dante's time. Thornton's translation captures the individuals represented, landscapes, and psychological immediacy of the dialogues as well as Dante's poetic effects. The product of decades of passionate dedication and research, his translation has been hailed by the leading Dante scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as exceptional in its accuracy, spontaneity, and vividness. Those qualities and its detailed notes explaining Dante's world and references make it both accessible for individual readers and perfect for class adoption.

In vloei/stof ontgin Gilbert Gibson temas soos die liefde/verhoudings, kinderherinneringe, geskiedkundige gegewens, geweld/oorlog, die belewenis van landskap, en die verloop van tyd/die dood op vernuftige wyse.

Soos in sy vorige bundels, bewys hy dat hy ’n meester is van die hermetiese digkuns – gedigte wat deur ’n spel met taal en vorm vervreemding teweegbring. Die leser word uitgedaag om die betekenis van die gedigte te ontsluit.

Die digter en literêre kritikus Louis Esterhuizen beskryf die bundel as volg: “Inderdaad digverweefde gedigte wat net soveel verhul as wat dit probeer onthul; verbrokkelde verse wat voortstu met verskuiwende betekenisvlakke en versplinterde (wan)begrip waartydens die leser genoodsaak word om ’n aktiewe rol te speel in die (re-)konstruksie van die teks.”

The Wordsworth volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the most comprehensive selection currently available of the poetry and prose of one of the finest poets in the English language. The familiar poems from Wordsworth's 'Great Decade' are all included, but they are complemented by a more than usually generous selection of the best poems from his later years. The extracts from the Guide to the Lakes will be a revelation to many readers, as will the political prose of the Convention of Cintra. All of the material is presented in chronological sequence, so that the reader can see how Wordsworth's changing concerns were expressed in prose as well as poetry. Work which Wordsworth published is separated from that which he did not reveal, which will enable the reader to trace through successive published volumes the development of Wordsworth's public poetic self, while also being able to follow the growth of the body of poetry which, for whatever reason, Wordsworth did not choose to make public when it was written - The Prelude being the greatest and most obvious example.

A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator.

This Afterlife: Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. The Underworld and the Afterlife, ancient history and the archaeology of the here and now, all slant rhyme with one another. Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself. Fulfilling the promise of the energy and sprezzatura of Stallings’s earliest collection, her later technical accomplishments rise to meet the richness of lived experience: of marriage and motherhood, of a life lived in another language and country, of aging and mortality. Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems.

Expert at traditional received forms, Stallings is also a poet of restless experiment, in cat’s-cradle rhyme schemes, nonce stanzas, supple free verse, thematic variation, and metaphysical conceits. The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion.

Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, its duties, and its ultimate destiny. His songs also contain thinly veiled references to esoteric yogic practices (sadhana), including body-centered Hathayogic techniques that are related to those found in Buddhist, Kaula, Natha, and Sufi medieval tantric literature. Dr. Salomon's translation of the work is the first dedicated English translation of Lalan's songs to closely follow the Bangla text, with all of its dialectical variations, and is here produced alongside the original text. Although her untimely death left her work unpublished, the editors have worked diligently to reconstruct her translations from her surviving printed and handwritten manuscripts. The result is a finished product that can finally share her groundbreaking scholarship on Baul traditions with the world.

Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Agee's nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment. Already renowned as a poet of emotional delicacy and singular stylistic vision, Agee's hallmark gifts of writerly intimacy and ethical resolve are here expanded and reconfigured on a panoramic canvas - moving from a pared-back opening section to the accelerating pace and barrage-like linguistic assaults of the latter addenda. But for all its freewheeling furies, shifting emotional registers and Kubrick-like black humour, it remains a remarkably formal work, moored to the relentlessly dangerous drumbeat of Donald J. Trump. The result is a combination of long-form radicalism and eclectic satire, startingly unique in its blend of aphorism, acuity and epic cultural imagining. Composed chronologically for nearly four years (from early 2017 until Election Day 2020), Trump Rant is a triumph of artistic witness and denunciation; an urgent retort to a global culture of imperilled legal standards and depleted literary response; and an incisive model of enlightenment and outrage in a "post-truth" world being visibly darkened by its criminal shadows.

In setting the poets side by side, this volume also highlights the two main faith traditions of the West: Deane with his Roman Catholic background, rooted in the landscape of Mayo; and Harpur with his Protestant (Church of Ireland and Quaker) heritage, influenced by myth, medieval history and mystics. Their two approaches to everyday life and ultimate reality - including nature, saints and mystics, music, art, prayer, and issues of faith and doubt - combine to make a single volume full of lyrical beauty and powerful witness. In addition, an afterword consisting of an informal dialogue between the two poets complements in prose the themes their poems explore. This is a book to challenge, console, delight and make its readers think again about their own journeys through this "vale of soul-making".