Poetry

Yours Truly, by Isaiah Quinn is a love poetry collection written as a series of poems and letters dated, signed, and offered from the heart. Whether you are in love, a lover of love, or trying to find it again, this book offers words that feel personal, sincere, and timeless. Each page reads like a private note meant for someone...

Robin Kirkpatrick's superb translation of the most famous work of Italian literature, in a one-volume edition. The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and 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...

An epic journey of adventure, endurance, and the search for home In The Odyssey, Homer crafts one of the oldest and most influential adventure stories in Western literature. The poem follows Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca, as he battles gods, monsters, and temptation on his ten-year quest to return home after the Trojan War. Facing shipwrecks, the wrath of...

As heard on BBC Radio 4, the essential prescriptions from 'Dr' Sieghart's poetic dispensary Truly a marvellous collection ... There is balm for the soul, fire for the belly, a cooling compress for the fevered brow, solace for the wounded, an arm around the lonely shoulder - the whole collection is a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss -...

The whole performance is wonderfully intermediate - poised between the Bible and folk wisdom, between the Light Ages and the Dark Ages - and at the same time pulverisingly actual in its language. Heaney has caught the balance of these brilliantly; he has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece. Andrew Motion, Financial Times What characterises this Beowulf is its...

The best-selling Rumi book ever is now better than ever! This revised and expanded edition of the comprehensive one-volume edition of America’s most popular poet includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks, and 81 new poems never published before. The ecstatic, spiritual poetry of Rumi is more popular than ever, and The Essential Rumi continues to be far and away...

Gilgamesh is a born leader, but in an attempt to control his growing arrogance, the Gods create Enkidu, a wild man, his equal in strength and courage. Enkidu is trapped by a temple prostitute, civilised through sexual experience and brought to Gilgamesh. They become best friends and battle evil together. After Enkidu's death, the distraught Gilgamesh sets out on a...

Celebrate the genius, passion, and poetry of William Shakespeare with this beautifully bound deluxe edition, featuring his complete plays and poems in one timeless collector's volume. No writer has shaped the English language or the human imagination like William Shakespeare. From the unforgettable tragedies of Hamlet and Macbeth to the wit and romance of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much...

The Aeneid by Virgil stands as a monumental work in the annals of literature, a timeless epic that has profoundly influenced Western culture for over two millennia. This exquisite clothbound edition offers a beautiful presentation of Virgil's magnum opus, which not only celebrated the glory of ancient Rome but also explored deep human emotions and experiences. The story follows the...

AUP New Poets 12 brings together three careful observers of the everyday and the ineffable. Anuja Mitra, Loretta Riach and Zephyr Zhang tell of wandering through cities, ghostworking from office cubicles and sweating through heat waves and tax season; of grappling with questions of alienation, belonging, lust and grief. Though irreverence and a generational malaise might hover at the poems’...

Words About Birds by Mike Howell is a sequel to Fur to Feathers & Taniwha & Taonga. This illustrated guide blends native birds with Māori whakataukī, encouraging young (and old) readers to observe, question, and connect with Aotearoa's environment. By combining science, language, and creativity, it turns birdwatching into a rich learning experience. Over thousands of years through sunshine and...

Countless writers have been inspired by the beauty of birds - their colours, their easy flight, their lightness and softness, and the grace and whimsicality of their ways. Our literature, especially our poetry, is full of them. This annotated edition of Poems About Birds selects the very best from H. J. Massingham's original collection which was first published in 1922....

A stunning gift edition of the age-old tale of Odysseus and his journey. This epic poem by Homer, believed to have been written between the eighth and ninth centuries BC, continues to be essential reading for young and old alike. The Odyssey follows the Greek hero Odysseus on a ten-year journey back to his home in Ithaca after fighting in...

“The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes,” Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of...

What would Greek and Roman myth look like if women had written the stories? asks Tara Welch in her illuminating Introduction to this volume. Stanley Lombardo and Melina McClure's faithful translation of Ovid's famous letters, purportedly written by heroines of classical antiquity to their absent lovers, offers an inkling of one intriguing possibility. This compelling translation brings the voices of...

An entrancing, illustrated edition of one of the most celebrated poems of all time. With an introduction by Marina Warner The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge's celebrated poem, was written at the suggestion of William Wordsworth in the early days of their friendship and published for the first time in 1798. It is the story of a nightmare voyage...

An award-winning collection from one of America's most distinguished twentieth-century poets. Blessing the Boats draws together poems from across Lucille Clifton's career, showcasing the stunning simplicity and grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience—birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality, and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid...

This selection of poems covers the period 1972 to 2002. This beautifully elegant volume excludes the cartoon element, focusing on Leunig's brilliant texts, with all their absurdity, hilarity, poignancy, and joyfulness. Michael Leunig pokes fun at human folly and pretentiousness, deplores the idiocy of war, and revels in the redeeming power of love. Curly Verse: Selected Poems stands out as...

First Penguin volume Of best Japanese haiku Vivid translations Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running over three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact, the haiku is...

Bringing together 31 of his poems as a meditation on the work of the German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, New Zealand poet Bernard Cadogan recommends that you read one poem each day for a month, allowing yourself the time to engage with it. Each poem is a response either to reading a poem by Hölderlin, or to his situation. He uses...

An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Although prose briefly gained the high ground, poetry again became dominant with the 'Silver Age', which held...

The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning and consolation. Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalised by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It...

An important new selection of First World War poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter. This new selection brings together the poetry of three of the most distinctive and moving voices to emerge from the First World War. Here are the controlled passion and rich metaphors of Wilfred Owen's celebrated verses such as Anthem for Doomed Youth and Strange...

Published for the centenary of his birth, a gathering of lucid, intensely lyrical poetry from one of the twentieth century's pre-eminent literary voices. be courageous when reason fails you be courageous in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts Zbigniew Herbert was one of the best-known and most-translated poets of post-war Poland, opposed alike to Communism, Fascism,...

A new selection of John Donne's endlessly innovative and fascinating verse, from the witty conceit of 'The Flea' to the instense spirituality of his divine poems. Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in...

I write not to communicate or reveal but to mull and conceal, but I guess that’s a form of communication too, of connection, of little anchors, little hooks, little holes you can put your eye up to, your heart up to, and maybe you will see something you will recognise.In her new collection – a poetic collage-essay-memoir – Helen Rickerby...

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across...

Dracula in the Colonies by Tim Jones transports readers to Aotearoa, where Dracula finds himself on a stolen estate between a braided river and the Main Divide. Sophisticated and devious, Dracula positions himself at the centre of power, attempting to influence the future of a nation. Tim Jones arrives in Aotearoa by ship from Lincolnshire, encountering a land of treacherous...

Between can be the fertile space where one person ends and another begins, the anxiety after a wave lands on a beleaguered shore and before the next begins, the quiet after a neighbour’s machine finishes its clatter and beetles start to buzz. It can be a certain place as when a dear friend lies dying and an uncertain place when...

From actress Haley Lu Richardson—a raw, beautiful, and playful debut collection of poetry about the chaos of being a twenty-something girl in this world. i always wanted to be a pop star so i could catharize my woes, heartbreak and general experience of life in whatever vulnerable, valiant, or petty ways i wished unfortunately i’m tone deaf so instead, i...

In her full-length poetry debut, Overseas Experience, Nicola Andrews (Ngati Paoa, Pakeha) finds herself on two sides of the Pacific Ocean, writing to and from Tamaki Makaurau and San Francisco. From Overseas, billionaires, the digital world, Dr. Ropata, and a rogue pohutukawa collide. It's a world beyond the long white cloud, examined through its eccentricities and familiarities. The Experience is...

"If sometimes I think of thoughts as being behind the eyes, sometimes I think of them more as floating, in a kind of cloud around the outside of my head." Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as...

If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale. This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvellous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City...

From TikTok phenomenon Whitney Hanson, a revised edition of her bestselling Home, now with a new introduction and more than a dozen new poems "the bees aren't going to go away but they are going to change with you sometimes they will be chaotic sometimes they will rest sometimes they will give you sweet honey and sometimes they will remind...

And just like that, like a simpleneighbourhood event, a miracle istaking place. "If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger," Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver's love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described...

Francis Aschoff’s debut poetry collection is a time machine trip from the heights of first love to the yellow days of infancy, from crying in club bathrooms to a future not yet known. These poems are a magnifying glass, a tender eye and a flame thrower. They are love poems to the difficulties of love – love that is absent...

I Thought We’d Be Famous is a line in the sand. It's a look back on Dominic’s days pre chronic illness, and a new life of blood tests and cancer scares. It’s about the dreams that rusted in the backyard and the ones he ended up living. It's about the guilt in his blood after escaping a life of welfare and...

'The world is blood-hot and personal': in her moving and illuminating introduction, the poet Emily Berry remembers her own teenage encounters with Ariel and offers a personal way into this definitive collection. She shows us how Plath can crystallise our most volatile emotions, transforming them into images so potent and precise that they resonate with us all. Plath has been...

A stunning new edition with deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers, and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. The poetry of W.B. Yeats is among the most-loved literature of the twentieth century. At times dream-like, at others political, his verse has a rich sense of...

A petite, beautifully packaged collection of poems about motherhood, this is the perfect gift for mothers of all ages. This beautifully illustrated, empowering collection features more than 25 poignant poems about the incredible experience of being a mother. Filled with inspiring and moving poetry exploring motherhood in all its dimensions—from pregnancy and birth to the countless joys, struggles, and hilarious...

Life has a habit of tripping us up at times, usually when we least expect (or can cope) with it. In The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma (the Emergency Poet herself) presents a thoughtful and highly therapeutic selection of poems, designed to lift your mood, helping you relax and take stock. We've all experienced moments when life feels overwhelming, and it...

A lavish collector's edition of the complete poems of eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō—with a new index that contains the full Japanese text of the original poems. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English...

A wonderfully readable anthology of our greatest poetry, chosen by the author of A Little History of Poetry "Does anyone know more about poetry than John Carey? Almost certainly not."—The Times 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...

There isn't a timescale for how you should heal Your bad days are valid, your heartache is real But so is the day that your smile will return That fire within you continues to burn You will overcome this and continue to thrive You are here, you are loved, you are whole, you're alive. A formidable follow-up to her award-winning...

Writer, comedian, and content creator Elyse Myers gets real about life’s awkward moments in her bold, funny, and unfiltered debut book. Elyse Myers is known to her twelve million followers as “The Internet’s Best Friend,” sharing her relatable stories and comedic sketches and serving as an advocate for topics such as neurodivergence, impostor syndrome, body image, and more. Whether she’s...

The critically acclaimed exploration of mounting racial aggressions in 21st-century daily life and in the media. In this moving, critical, and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence—whether linguistic or physical—which has impacted the lives...

A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet Alicia Stallings. The ancient Greeks revered Hesiod, believing he had beaten Homer in a singing contest, and that after his dead body was thrown to sea it was brought back by dolphins. His Works and Days is one of the most important early works...

C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues, and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria's ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as Anna Comnena and You did not understand, while...

Fifty new books at €1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. 'I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided . . .' By turns comical, grouchy and exalted, and including his tragic masterpiece The Great Hunger, some of the key poems by the...

Member of Parliament, tutor to Oliver Cromwell's ward, satirist and friend of John Milton, Andrew Marvell was one of the most interesting and important poets of the seventeenth century. The Complete Poems demonstrates his unique skill and immense diversity to the full, and includes lyrical love-poetry, religious works and biting satire. From the passionately erotic To his Coy Mistress, to...

Michael Hamburger's distinguished translation of a selection of poems by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognised as one of Europe's supreme poets. He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of...

Part of a series of new editions of Lawrence's works From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets. This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some of his...

"Really, what other book would anyone ever need?" -Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Honeybee "Elegant and exquisite." -Deepak Chopra, author of Muhammad, Jesus, and Buddha The Big Red Book is a poetic masterpiece from Jalaluddin Rumi, the medieval Sufi mystic whom Time magazine calls "the most popular poet in America." Readers continue to be awed and inspired by Rumi's masterfully...

Selected and arranged by the author, How To Be Invisible presents the lyrics of Kate Bush in a beautiful new paperback edition featuring a new cover by illustrator Jim Kay. 'The greatest singer-songwriter of the past 40 years, whose work is complex, ethereal and filled with so many secrets that one can listen to the albums for decades and still...

A beautiful, skilfully crafted work of chivalric romance. Written by an unknown author in the twelfth century, this powerful tale of murder and revenge reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, transforming centuries-old legend into a masterpiece of chivalric drama. Siegfried, a great prince of the Netherlands, wins the hand of the beautiful princess Kriemhild of Burgundy by...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.’ One hot summer’s day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy...

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This volume brings together the poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counter-culture. The apocalyptic Howl became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, it shows why Ginsberg was one of...

Byron's exotic poem on the love life and adventures of Don Juan. Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave,...

Translated by renowned Rumi expert Nader Khalili, over 120 poems about love from the Persian mystic poet and Sufi master have been carefully collected and curated in this beautifully illustrated edition. For more than eight centuries, Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi Rumi—commonly referred to simply as Rumi—has enchanted and enthralled readers from every faith and background with his universal themes of love,...

The poems in this book, including many of her best known such as Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Fever 103, were all written between the publication in 1960 of Sylvia Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963. If the poems are despairing, vengeful, and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually...

The greatest classic of Vietnamese literature in a stunning new verse translation. "This manuscript is ancient, priceless, bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices. Sit comfortably by this good light, that you may learn the hard-won lesson that these characters contain." The Song of Kieu is the greatest classic of Vietnamese literature. It tells the story of the beautiful Vuong Thoy Kieu,...

Global sensation and internationally renowned author, Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey celebrates the challenges and triumphs facing the modern woman. In strikingly personal, yet widely relatable poems accompanied by original illustrations, Kaur challenges the idea that women should be quiet, gentle, and submissive and instead encourages women to be strong, powerful, and proud. Each of the four chapters (“the hurting,”...

The essential poems of Emily Dickinson selected and introduced by Joyce Carol Oates “Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . . Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but...

First time in Black Classics Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils, wrote Edward Lear (1812-88), and this collection demonstrates the wonderfully varied ways in which he pursued his philosophy of life. He created an extraordinary world filled with bizarre creatures - from the Dong with a luminous nose to the Pobble who has no toes - who misbehave with...

On Love and Barley by Matsuo Basho presents the work of one of the greatest Japanese poets, a master of haiku. Known not only for his literary genius, Basho was also a Buddhist monk and a lifelong traveller. His poems embody 'karumi', or lightness of touch, and embrace the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each verse beautifully evokes aspects...

One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each offers a new translation of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka...

A wonderful collection of Housman's much-loved poetry, new to Penguin Classics. A. E. Housman was one of the best-loved poets of his day, whose poems conjure up a potent and idyllic rural world imbued with a poignant sense of loss. They are expressed in simple rhythms, yet show a fine ear for the subtleties of metre and alliteration. His scope...

The Erotic Poems by Ovid explores the multifaceted nature of sexual desire through a collection of poems that range from passionate declarations of eternal love to light-hearted justifications for promiscuity. In the Amores, Ovid expresses his feelings through a series of elegies dedicated to Corinna, his captivating and elusive mistress. These early poems reveal an intimate and vulnerable side of...

In her introduction, Janet Gezari discusses issues of dating and authenticity that arise with Brontë's poems, and the ways in which the Gondal poems relate to the lost prose narratives on the same subject. The poems of Emily Jane Brontë are passionate and powerful works that convey the vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Only twenty-one...

A new edition of the finest poems by Tennyson Tennyson's poetry epitomises the Victorian age, for which he became a spokesman. His finest poems are often steeped in a sensuous melancholy, as in Maud, or are chivalric, heroic and allegorical, as in The Lady of Shalott and Morte d'Arthur.

With an introduction that discusses Blake's life and career, his reputation, and the major themes of his work, and explores the relationship between the poetry and the illustrations. Writer and religious rebel, William Blake (1757-1827) sowed the seeds for Romanticism in his innovative poems concerning faith and the visions that inspired him throughout his life. Whether describing his own spirituality,...

Positive and powerful, I Am Her Tribe is a collection of poetry drawing on the viral Instagram handle and online hashtag that serves to create moments of connection through empowerment and storytelling. Focusing on inspiration, Doby's poetry invites its reader to "Come as you are. Your tribe has arrived. Your breath can rest here." Both softand fiercecan coexist and still...

Beautifully illustrated feminist retellings of the great mythical goddesses. Empowering life lessons from myths and monsters. Wonder at Medusa's potent venom, Circe's fierce sorcery and Athena rising up over Olympus, as Nikita Gill majestically explores the untold stories of the life bringers, warriors, creators, survivors and destroyers that shook the world - the great Greek Goddesses. Vividly re-imagined and beautifully...

Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form. This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry. Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss,...

The witch: supernaturally powerful, inscrutably independent, and now—indestructible. These moving, relatable poems encourage resilience and embolden women to take control of their own stories. Enemies try to judge, oppress, and marginalise her, but the witch doesn’t burn in this one.

The Road Not Taken and Other Poems presents Robert Frost's most-beloved early poems, selected by award-winning poet David Orr. This collection serves as a companion to the centennial celebration of "The Road Not Taken." This Penguin Classics Deluxe edition includes Frost's early works, thoughtfully selected by David Orr, to mark the centennial of the iconic poem, "The Road Not Taken."...

William Shakespeare's sonnets are a beautiful expression of a range of human emotions—from love to grief, anger, jealousy, and lust. Including the instantly recognisable Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? as well as a range of other equally moving works, this compilation brings together the complete collection of all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Metamorphoses by Ovid is a deliciously clever and exuberant epic, presented in a gorgeous new clothbound edition. 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...