Secondhand Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2856

Secondhand Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2856

Twenty-four poetry books spanning three thousand years of verse — from Catullus and the great Penguin anthologies of English, Elizabethan, Romantic, Scottish, and satirical poetry through to Heaney, Larkin, Lowell, and Bruce Dawe. A serious collection for the reader who lives with poetry.

1. The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse — ed. Edward Lucie-Smith — Lucie-Smith's selection from the great age of English lyric poetry, gathering the songs, sonnets, and elegies of a period that produced Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe alongside dozens of lesser-known but equally vivid voices.
2. The Penguin Book of English Verse — ed. John Hayward — A comprehensive Penguin anthology spanning the breadth of the English poetic tradition, from medieval verse to the modern era — one of the best single-volume introductions to the whole sweep of English poetry.
3. The Poems of Catullus — Penguin Classics — The complete surviving poems of Rome's most passionate lyric poet, whose love poems to Lesbia and savage epigrams established a standard of personal lyric intensity that has never been surpassed.
4. The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse — ed. David Wright — Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron and their contemporaries — capturing the full range of a period that transformed what English poetry was allowed to feel and say.
5. The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse — ed. Edward Lucie-Smith — A wide-ranging anthology from Dryden and Pope through to the twentieth century, revealing just how much of the English poetic tradition has been driven by wit, anger, and the desire to expose human folly.
6. The Common Muse — ed. V. de Sola Pinto and A.E. Rodway — A celebrated anthology of popular and traditional English verse, gathering the ballads, street songs, and vernacular poetry that flourished outside the literary mainstream — an invaluable counterpoint to the canonical anthologies.
7. The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse — ed. Tom Scott — A rich selection from the distinct tradition of Scottish poetry, from the medieval makars through Burns and Hogg to the twentieth century, presenting Scots and Gaelic voices alongside those who wrote in English.
8. John Donne — The Penguin Poets — The essential Donne selection — love lyrics, holy sonnets, elegies — bringing together the full range of the most intellectually electrifying poet of the English Renaissance.
9. Gerard Manley Hopkins — Selected and edited by W.H. Gardner — W.H. Gardner's authoritative selection from Hopkins's small but extraordinary body of work, gathering the poems that pioneered sprung rhythm and made him one of the most influential voices in modern poetry.
10. Death of a Naturalist — Seamus Heaney — Heaney's debut collection, published in 1966, which announced one of the great poetic voices of the century — rooted in the County Derry landscape and the sensory life of childhood, intense and exact and utterly original.
11. Rilke: Selected Poems — Penguin Modern European Poets — A selection from Rainer Maria Rilke, the supreme lyric poet of the German language, whose Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus transformed twentieth-century poetry across Europe and beyond.
12. Versus — Ogden Nash — A generous selection from America's master of comic verse, whose deceptively simple rhymes and outrageous metres concealed a sharp eye for the absurdities of modern life.
13. Robert Lowell: Selected Poems — A selection from one of the dominant voices in twentieth-century American poetry — the confessional intensity of Life Studies, the political engagement of For the Union Dead, the formal range of everything in between.
14. High Windows — Philip Larkin — Larkin's final full collection, published in 1974, containing some of his most celebrated poems — This Be The Verse, Aubade, The Building — darker and more despairing than his earlier work, but no less perfectly made.
15. Selected Poems 1965-1975 — Seamus Heaney — The definitive early Heaney selection, drawing from Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North — essential reading for anyone encountering his work for the first time.
16. Poetry Introduction 2 — Faber — The second volume of Faber's celebrated series introducing new poets, featuring eight voices including the young Paul Muldoon alongside Clive Wilmer, Pete Morgan, and Richard Ryan — a valuable snapshot of British and Irish poetry in the mid-1970s.
17. Poetry Introduction 1 — Faber — The first volume in Faber's series, gathering poets including Douglas Dunn, Elaine Feinstein, Ian Hamilton, and David Harsent — an important document of where British poetry was heading in the early 1970s.
18. Selected Poems — Wallace Stevens — A Faber selection from the great American modernist whose meditations on imagination and reality remain among the most challenging and rewarding poems in the language.
19. What Sweeter Music: Poems on Music — Everyman's Poetry — An anthology gathering verse responses to music across the ages, from poems about specific composers and pieces to broader meditations on what music does to the human soul.
20. Poems of Anne Bradstreet — The poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet in colonial America — intimate, religiously inflected, and remarkable for their personal voice in an era that barely acknowledged women's writing.
21. Poems in Focus — ed. Christopher Martin (Oxford) — A teaching anthology that presents poems with commentary and context, designed to develop close reading skills while introducing a wide range of voices and forms.
22. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems — Everyman's Poetry — The complete surviving poems of the Elizabethan playwright — Hero and Leander, the Ovidian Amores, the Passionate Shepherd — essential for anyone who loves the period.
23. Field Work — Seamus Heaney — Heaney's 1979 collection, which turned towards love, friendship, and elegy without losing its political weight — containing some of the most beautiful individual poems of his career.
24. Condolences of the Season: Selected Poems — Bruce Dawe — A selection from Australia's most widely read and deeply loved poet, whose plainspoken, compassionate verse about ordinary suburban and working-class life gave it a permanent place in the national literature.