Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Poetry

It's easy to feel at home in Mitford. In these high, green hills, the air is pure, the village is charming, and the people are generally lovable. Yet Father Tim, the bachelor rector, wants something more. Enter a dog the size of a sofa who moves in and won't go away. Add an attractive neighbor who begins wearing a path through the hedge. Now, stir in a lovable but unloved boy, a mystifying jewel theft, and a secret that's 60 years old.

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy.

Dating to the ninth century BC, Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb Introduction that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it coexists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide, his ascent of Mount Purgatory and his encounter with his dead love Beatrice, and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. This major translation is published here for the first time in a single volume.

In this exquisite poetry collection, Whitney Hanson chronicles the loss of a loved one, tracing the progression of grief and healing through the lens of music. We each begin with a simple note, but as life progresses, we’re led to the next note, and the next—all of which combine to form the melody of a song and a life. As life becomes more complicated and complex, we find that loss, grief, and heartache can muffle our music, making the world go silent.

The publication of a new translation by Fagles is a literary event. His translations of both the Iliad and Odyssey have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and have become the standard translations of our era. Now, with this stunning modern verse translation, Fagles has reintroduced Virgil's Aeneid to a whole new generation, and completed the classical triptych at the heart of Western civilization.

In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This audiobook presents the most essential poems in his dispensary: those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness or an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the fall of man....

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

From Tiktok phenomenon Whitney Hanson comes a revised edition of her bestselling Home, now with a new introduction and more than a dozen new poems. Resonant, raw, and vibrant, Home is a lyrical map to navigating heartbreak. Tracing the stages of healing—from the despair that comes with the end of a relationship to the eventual light and liberation that comes with time—the poems in Home provide comfort and solace, while revitalizing your soul—and helping you make peace with your bees.

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.

With lyrical prose and striking verse, beloved poet Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales, Wild Embers) uses the history of Ancient Greece and beyond to explore and share the stories of the mothers, warriors, creators, survivors, and destroyers who shook the world. In pieces that burn with empathy and admiration for these women, Gill unearths the power and glory of the very foundations of mythology and culture that have been too-often ignored or pushed aside. Gill's poetry and stories weave old and forgotten tales of might and love into an empowering collection.

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by number one New York Times best-selling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.

Yrsa Daley-Ward's words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of people - through her books of poetry and memoir, bone and The Terrible; through her writing for Beyoncé on Black Is King; and through her always illuminating Instagram posts. Now, in The How, Yrsa encourages listeners to begin, as she puts it, the great work of meeting ourselves.

Beowulf is the greatest surviving work of literature in Old English, unparalleled in its epic grandeur and scope. It tells the story of the heroic Beowulf and of his battles, first with the monster Grendel, who has laid waste to the great hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, then with Grendel's avenging mother and finally with a dragon that threatens to devastate his homeland.

On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special audiobook. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.

Homer's Iliad is the famous epic poem set among the tales of Troy. Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles and its consequences for the warring Greeks and Trojans. Unlike other books on the Iliad, this one combines the detailed expertise of a historian with the sensitivity of a teacher of it as poetry. Lane Fox goes on to consider hallmarks of the poem, its values, implicit and explicit, its characters, its women, its gods and even its horses. He argues repeatedly for its beautiful observation and addresses its parallel use of what is, to us, the natural world.

Taliesin's is one of the most important names in all Welsh literature - and one of its greatest mysteries. He has fascinated and inspired some of our greatest poets, including Tennyson and Robert Graves. He is a poet; a shape-shifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the fifth- and sixth-century British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; and a figure whose literary legend culminated with the compilation in 13th-century North Wales of The Book of Taliesin.

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, it draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges's first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986.