Poésie

A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems.
 
Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction to the very best that poetry can offer. Familiar favorites are nestled alongside marvelous new discoveries―all woven together with Carey’s expert commentary. Particular attention is given to the works of female poets, like Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew. This is a personal guide to the poetry that shines brightest through the ages. Within its pages, readers will find treasured poems that remain with you for life.

Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home. "For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm,' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear,' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters "Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert Wrigley

In this light-hearted book, poet and gardener James Fenton describes a hundred plants he would choose to grow from seed. 'It seemed a simple and interesting idea: what plants would you choose if starting a garden from scratch?'Includes chapters on flowers for colour, size, or exotic interest; herbs and meadow flowers; climbing vines and tropical species; the micro-meadow; raising plants from seed; and a wealth of personal tips and advice. As Fenton writes, 'the emphasis is on childish simplicity of approach, and economy of outlay.'Here is a happy, stylish, thought-provoking exercise in good principles, which exudes that rare thing: common-or-garden sense about gardens.

200 χρόνια και πλέον μετά τον θάνατό του, η ποίηση του Τζων Κητς έχει τη δύναμη να γοητεύει και να συγκινεί, αφήνοντας τον αναγνώστη με την αίσθηση μιας ασυνήθιστης, πολύ δυνατής συνάντησης. Η παρούσα μετάφραση μερικών από τα πιο αντιπροσωπευτικά ποιήματά του, από τα πρώτα σονέτα ώς τα έργα της ωριμότητάς του, τις μεγάλες ωδές, επιχειρεί να μας συστήσει εκ νέου τον μεγάλο δημιουργό, να μεταφέρει στη γλώσσα μας το άρωμα της ποίησής του – μιας ποίησης γήινης αλλά και αιθέριας, μιας ποίησης των αισθήσεων και των αντιθέσεων. Δοκιμάζοντας τις δυνάμεις του στα πιο διαφορετικά ποιητικά είδη, ο Κητς αποδεικνύεται ένας ευφυής πειραματιστής και ένας μοναδικός τεχνίτης του λόγου. Σε πορεία παράλληλη με την ποίησή του, οι επιστολές του (γράμματα σε φίλους, στα αδέρφια του, στους εκδότες του, στην αγαπημένη του Φάννυ) ανοίγουν ένα παράθυρο στην καθημερινή ζωή και σκέψη του ποιητή. Φωτίζουν τις αγωνίες μιας ψυχής που βάδιζε μέσα σε «αβεβαιότητες και μυστήρια» αναζητώντας την ομορφιά σε κάθε της έκφανση. Τα γράμματα του Κητς (κατά τον Έλιοτ, «τα σημαντικότερα που γράφτηκαν ποτέ από Άγγλο ποιητή») οδηγούν κατευθείαν στον πυρήνα της δημιουργικής διαδικασίας και τη φωτίζουν με τον πιο ουσιαστικό τρόπο.

"Ο δρόμος για το καλοκαίρι " του Άγγελου Κούρου είναι μια περιπλανώμενη ποιητική
αφήγηση του καλοκαιριού στα ελληνικά νησιά του Αιγαίου, σαν ένα απαλό μελτεμάκι… 
Αθήνα, λιμάνι του Πειραιά και μετά ξεκινά κανονικά το ταξίδι, Σαντορίνη,
Αμοργός, Ρόδος, Μήλος... και το ποιητικό ταξίδι στα νησιά συνεχίζεται! Προορισμοί που
διατηρούνται ανέπαφα στις αναμνήσεις μας για μια μελλοντική επιστροφή ...
Αλλά τι συμβαίνει εκεί; Ο λυρισμός του δεν είναι άκρατος, υπερβολικός, είναι ελεγχόμενος,  είναι γλυκός, δεν έχει χαρακτήρα καρτ ποστάλ και επίσης έχει και χιούμορ. Αυτό είναι πολύ σημαντικό, καθώς είναι σπάνιο στην ποίησή μας να βρούμε χιούμορ, να βλέπουμε τον αναγνώστη να χαμογελά με ένα διακριτικό αλλά και ανακουφιστικό τρόπο.
Και πάνω από αυτό το χαμόγελο, πάνω από το ελληνικό καλοκαίρι, ο Κούρος χτίζει τον δικό του κόσμο
όπου ζει η αυθεντική ποίηση. Είναι ένας κόσμος που έχει το ιδανικό μέγεθος των ονείρων μας.
Ποιήματα που διαβάζεις και χαίρεσαι γιατί νιώθεις το θεϊκό φως του καλοκαιριού να σε λυτρώνει.
Ο Κούρος περιγράφει το καλοκαίρι ως έναν ερωτικό τροφοδότη λογαριασμό που μας κάνει πλουσιότερους και πλουσιότερους ...

 «Διασκεδαστικός (τολμώ να πω) ο Κούρος, όχι υπό μία έννοια φθηνής ψυχαγωγίας, αλλά σε μια σφριγηλή και δροσάτη εκτύλιξη ενός καλοκαιριού κάτω από το άγρυπνο βλέμμα ενός ουσιώδους συμβολισμού, μιας ειρωνείας λεπτής κι ενός διάχυτου συναισθηματισμού. Η αφήγηση είναι σε όλο το μήκος της απολαυστική». Περιοδικό Ποιείν.

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives.

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 of our literature. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian emigre mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When "Howl and Other Poems" was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His "Collected Poems: 1947-1997" appeared in 2006.

A love song between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London from Man Booker shortlisted LevyShe is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. She attempts to fly him away from his habits and fears, while he holds on tight to all he knows.

Man Booker Prize shortlisted Deborah Levy whips up a storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912.

Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.