Secondhand Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2947

Secondhand Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2947

From a young Heaney stepping into the dark to Larkin at the absolute height of his powers, from Slessor's lighthouse to Bruce Dawe's suburban Australia, this box spans the English-speaking poetic tradition with unerring taste. Twenty-one collections and anthologies — and every one of them rewards a second reading.

1. The Penguin Book of Australian Verse — edited by Harry Heseltine — The essential anthology: the full sweep of Australian poetry from the colonial period to the twentieth century, selected with the rigour and generosity that only a great editor brings.
2. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? — Kenneth Koch — Koch takes great poems — Blake, Donne, Shakespeare, Herrick — into schools and discovers that children respond to them with stunning directness; a joyful and genuinely inspiring argument for what poetry can actually do.
3. The Golden Apples of the Sun — Chris Wallace-Crabbe — A major Australian poet selects and contextualises twentieth-century Australian verse with the authority of someone who has lived inside the tradition; essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where Australian poetry came from.
4. Poetry of the Thirties — edited by Robin Skelton — The decade that produced Auden, MacNeice, Spender, and Day-Lewis, all writing with an urgency born of impending catastrophe; this Penguin anthology captures a moment when poetry felt it had something vital to say.
5. Door into the Dark — Seamus Heaney — Heaney's second collection, and the one in which his mature voice fully arrives: the bog, the craft, the fathers and grandfathers, the whole weight of making something. These poems know exactly what they're doing.
6. Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice — edited by W.H. Auden — Auden selects from his friend and fellow traveller with extraordinary sympathy; MacNeice's wry, musical, politically alert poetry has never been better served.
7. One Hundred Great Books in Haiku — David Bader — Tolstoy in seventeen syllables. Proust in three lines. Moby Dick in a breath. Bader's deadpan condensations are funnier and more accurate than they have any right to be.
8. High Windows — Philip Larkin — Larkin's final collection, containing both his bleakest poem and his most transcendent; the full, unguarded Larkin writing about death and desire and England with devastating compression.
9. W.B. Yeats — selected by Seamus Heaney — Two of the greatest Irish poets in one volume: the man who made modern poetry possible and the man who most fully inherited the burden. Heaney's selection is illuminating in itself.
10. Poetry — edited by Ivor Indyk & Elizabeth Webby — The Imprint series at its most ambitious: an anthology of Australian poetry selected with an eye for quality over period, making the case for the range and seriousness of the local tradition.
11. Selected Poems — Kenneth Slessor — The poems that made Australian literature modern: Five Bells, Beach Burial, Five Visions of Captain Cook; Slessor remains the most formally accomplished Australian poet of the early twentieth century, and this selection is the essential introduction.
12. Ecstasies and Elegies — Paul Carter — Poetry that moves between the lyric and the meditative with quiet assurance; Carter is a precise and unpredictable presence in Australian poetry.
13. The Truth About Unicorns — Doris Brett — Brett writes about psychology, myth, and the inner life with an intelligence that never becomes clinical; these are poems that know the mind from inside.
14. Selected Poems 1946-1968 — R.S. Thomas — Hard, spare, God-haunted poems set on the Welsh hillside, addressed to a deity Thomas could neither believe in nor relinquish. One of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century poetry.
15. Sometimes Gladness — Bruce Dawe — The collected poems of Australia's best-loved contemporary poet: suburban, larrikin, Catholic, antiwar, possessed of an ear for the Australian vernacular that has never been matched. This is Australian poetry's people's book.
16. The Whitsun Weddings — Philip Larkin — The greatest English poetry collection of the postwar period, arguably. The title poem alone justifies this box. Larkin writes about England with a precision that looks like pessimism and turns out to be grief.
17. Knots — R.D. Laing — The antipsychiatrist at his most experimental: interlocking paradoxes about how people trap each other with language, identity, and impossible demands. Disturbing, funny, and impossible to categorise.
18. The Pastoral Poems — Virgil, translated by E.V. Rieu — The Eclogues in Rieu's enduring Penguin translation: shepherds, gods, and the looming shadow of Rome, rendered with the ease of a master. The poems where Virgil invents Western pastoral literature.
19. Seventeenth-Century English Minor Poets — selected by Richard Wilbur — The poets who flourished in the shadow of Donne and Jonson: Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Crashaw, Traherne; Wilbur's selection restores their music and their strangeness to contemporary readers.
20. Collected Poems 1934-1953 — Dylan Thomas — The definitive edition: Fern Hill, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Do Not Go Gentle; Thomas at the full, intoxicating height of his powers, edited with the scrupulousness the work demands.
21. In Fealty to Apollo — edited by Ian Maxwell & A.A. Phillips — A distinguished Australian anthology assembled by two of the country's leading literary critics; a mid-century time capsule that rewards rediscovery.