English Poetry

Wizzy’s Words is a book of modern nursery rhymes, providing a well-researched resource for parents, carers, family, and educational practitioners, to share with children from birth. We all love the nursery rhymes we grew up with, and learning to recite them continues to be fun. However, traditional nursery rhymes contain the vocabulary from their times.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

A Financial Times Music Book of the Year 2023 'Key to understanding black British history' - Sunday Times 'Sharp and still relevant' - Zadie Smith Recognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic...

A Choir of Honest Killers, Buddy Wakefield's 2019 release of prose and poetry, is a staggeringly honest account of life alone on the road, the prolonged agony of a failed relationship in the midst of public shame, and frequent specific serendipity.

A special live recording at London's Soho Theatre - plus two exclusive bonus tracks. Since forming in 2008, Mark Grist and MC Mixy have been challenging the preconceptions of poetry and hiphop across the country. This audio was recorded at the Soho Theatre in London in 2012, during their third national tour, titled 'Anywhere and Everywhere'. During the tour the pair performed in schools, pubs, nightclubs, office blocks, market places, theatres, parks, taxi cabs, sitting rooms and universities across the country.

World Tales of Wisdom and Wonder is a collection of folktales told in a weave of poetry, prose, original melody, and guitar. Drawn from cultures around the globe, these colorful tales offer a leap into fantasy and some homespun wisdom passed down through the oral tradition.

In her first book, poet Havva Ramadan explores the pain of grief, the struggle of mental health, and the journey we all must take to collect our pieces and rebuild ourselves once again.

Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare's three Henry plays. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom examines Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal.

“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.

The power and the beauty of The Iliad resound again across 2,700 years in Stephen Mitchell's exciting new translation, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flowed in every word. And we are there with them amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shed light on the entrenched injustices plaguing her field, while at the same time sharing with her audience her abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos from a Black feminist perspective. Now, in The Edge of Space-Time, she leans into that wonder, taking listeners on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time and about ourselves.

Beloved by her fans, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet’s relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Learn more about haiku, which are short poems, written in a style created in Japan more than 400 years ago.

Robert Speaight, Anthony Quayle, and others read a selection of poetry by William Blake, Rudyard Kipling, John Gay, and D. H. Lawrence.

As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain, too; not only life's ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn't always feel good or comfortable or even "spiritual", for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears, and deepest longings - those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed "negative" and unworthy of our love.

Down in the big construction site, tough trucks work with all their might. But now it's time to say goodnight! Little truck drivers will drift off to sleep to this soothing good-bye to the day.

Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater’s compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the “holy writ of beauty.” It was Pater’s cry of “art for art’s sake” that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater’s essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

Wherever your home is, it’s probably not as tough as Gary, Indiana. Gary has been called a lot of things. The Armpit of Chicago. The Land of Robbing Hoods. Hell. For the children of Gary, living often boils down to surviving. Maybe these kids get caught up in games of gin rummy. Maybe they spin tops as a way to scratch something fun out of their desperation. Maybe they stand by helplessly as their tenement buildings go up in flames. Or maybe they get held up at gunpoint by somebody who wants more money than he could steal from his church collection box.