Download or read book The Penguin Book of Elegy written by Stephen Regan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A tremendous sentimental education of a book ... a literary adventure ... chosen with a scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair ... fascinating and unignorable' Kate Kellaway, Observer (Poetry Book of the Month) 'If you have any weakness at all for poetry, this book will draw you in, then devastate you' Susie Goldsbrough. The Times Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized 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 gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Denise Riley. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse written by Stephen Coote and published by Puffin. This book was released on 1986 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems by and about homosexuals includes authors, such as Sappho, Walter Whitman, W.H. Auden, and Allen Ginsberg
Download or read book Poetry of Mourning written by Jahan Ramazani and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-05-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, this book covers a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. It is grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry written by Gerald Moore and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a selection of African poetry arranged by country
Download or read book Dear Hong Kong written by Xu Xi and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xu Xi’s body of work witnesses her turbulent love affair with her home-city of Hong Kong. In this probing memoir, she unravels her recently finalised decision to leave the city for good. She critiques a Hong Kong that has, in her eyes, lost its way. And yet, it is only out of the city’s enduring presence in her life, both in the form of memory and periodic homecomings, that she has carved out a personal and literary identity. Dear Hong Kong is a profound reflection on the life of Hong Kong, personified and interrogated by one of its most lucid writers.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of the Sonnet written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique anthology celebrating that most vigorous of literary forms--the sonnet The sonnet is one of the oldest and most enduring literary forms of the post-classical world, a meeting place of image and voice, passion and reason, elegy and ode. It is a form that both challenges and liberates the poet. For this anthology, poet and scholar Phillis Levin has gathered more than 600 sonnets to tell the full story of the sonnet tradition in the English language. She begins with its Italian origins; takes the reader through its multifaceted development from the Elizabethan era to the Romantic and Victorian; demonstrates its popularity as a vehicle of protest among writers of the Harlem Renaissance and poets who served in the First World War; and explores its revival among modern and contemporary poets. In her vibrant introduction, Levin traces this history, discussing characteristic structures and shifting themes and providing illuminating readings of individual sonnets. She includes an appendix on structure, biographical notes, and valuable explanatory notes and indexes. And, through her narrative and wide-ranging selection of sonnets and sonnet sequences, she portrays not only the evolution of the form over half a millennium but also its dynamic possibilities.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse written by Stephen Gray and published by Puffin Books. This book was released on 1989 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers poems by writers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Namibia, and Zambia.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories written by Jhumpa Lahiri and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.
Download or read book Elegy for Iris written by John Bayley and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved for her incandescent novels. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley attempts to uncover the real Iris, whose mysterious world took on darker shades as she descended into Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and aging, and a celebration of a brilliant life and an undying love.
Download or read book Elegy for Mary Turner written by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical and haunting depiction of American racial violence and lynching, evoked through stunning full-color artwork In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten Black men and one Black woman—Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time—were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives—and their mourning—matter. Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on Black women’s bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching’s terror in American history.
Download or read book Beneath a Meth Moon written by Jacqueline Woodson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hurricane Katrina took her mother and granmother. And even though Laurel Daneau has moves on to a new life--one that includes a new best friend, a spot on the cheerleading squad, and dating the co-captain of the football team--she can't get past the pain of that loss. Then her new boyfriend introduces her to meth, and Laurel is instantly seduced by its spell, the way it erases, even if only temporarily, her memories. Soon Laurel is completely hooked, a shell of her former self, desperate to be whole again, but lacking the strength to break free. But with the help of a new friend--and the loyalty of an old one--she is able to rewrite her own story and move on with her own life. Dreamlike in quality and weaving flashbacks to the hurricane in with Laurel's present-day struggles, this is a stunning novel that readers won't want to miss.
Download or read book The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta written by Giovanni Boccaccio and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-11-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A milestone in feminist literature, this marvelous European romance, narrated by a woman, is considered the first psychological novel in a modern language and a precursor of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio between 1343 and 1345, The Elegy has never before been available in a complete or accurate English translation. Lady Fiammetta, the first-person narrator and protagonist, recounts how, although a married woman, she falls in love with a handsome young foreigner named Panfilo and, driven by irresistible passion, becomes his lover. Panfilo subsequently abandons Fiammetta and returns to his native land, where his elderly father is said to be dying. When he fails to keep his promise to return, Fiammetta, in what is the heart of the narrative, describes her longings, her anguish, and her despair. A host of contradictory sentiments drive her to desperation and to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. After a time, Fiammetta resumes her futile wait for Panfilo. She finally resolves to seek him out in his native land. Disguising her true intent from her husband, she secures his promise to help her in this undertaking. Addressing an exclusively female audience, Fiammetta warns them about the vicious ways of men. Her whole narrative, in fact, adds up to an indictment of men as both readers and lovers. Eliciting a remarkably wide range of responses from readers and critics, Fiammetta has been variously described as a pathetic victim of male cruelty; an irresponsible fool of a girl; a sophisticated, cunning, and wholly disingenuous female; and, finally, a genuinely modern woman. Whatever judgment we make of her, Fiammetta stands out among medieval women as an ardent and outspoken feminist.
Download or read book Elegy for Kosovo written by Ismail Kadare and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2011-12-03 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: June 28, 1389: Six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, there took place, on the Field of the Blackbirds, a battle shrouded in legend. A coalition of Serbs, Albanian Catholics, Bosnians, and Romanians confronted and were defeated by the invading Ottoman army of the Sultan Murad. This battle established the Muslim foothold in Europe and became the centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars that the world witnessed with horror at the end of the past century. In this eloquent and timely reflection on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples, Ismail Kadare explores in fiction the legend and the consequences of that defeat. Elegy for Kosovo is a heartfelt yet clear-eyed lament for a land riven by hatreds as old as the Homeric epics and as young as the latest news broadcast.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Elegy written by Andrew Motion and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2025-03-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning, and consolation through poetry A Penguin Classic Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practiced by the Romans, revitalized 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 gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes and Alice Oswald. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honor the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.
Download or read book Unexpected Elegies written by Thomas Hardy and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Hardy’s famous sequence of love poems, published as a book for the first time. When Emma Hardy died in 1912, her husband, the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, began to write “Poems of 1912–13,” a series of elegies that are among the most moving in the English language. Although the couple had been estranged for years, after her death Hardy fell under Emma’s spell again and was enthralled by her as he hadn’t been in decades. He transformed his hopelessly revived love into poetry, pouring out his yearning and passionate attachment to a love forever lost. “Poems of 1912–13” and the other elegies about Emma included in this volume have been read and discussed by poets and scholars for almost a century but never collected in their own book. Their accessibility, emotional power, and focus on the mysterious complexities of marriage make them of interest to a broad public. Readers will cherish this beautifully produced, illustrated volume of poetical testaments to enduring love.
Download or read book Stranger by Night written by Edward Hirsch and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his seventieth year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him. Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn't yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late midcentury Midwest. As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is "stranger by night," but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse written by Christopher Childers and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 1006 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Inspired and enlightening ... here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading ... an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical literature' A. E. Stallings, Telegraph 'An extraordinary feat ... Over and over, I was impressed both by Childers's technical abilities and his vivid way of evoking the multiple voices in this rich tradition' Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad 'Where does the lyric begin? One answer – a capacious and generous one – is given by Christopher Childers's anthology, in which translations of both Greek and Latin lyric poetry are offered in large servings, with extensive and ambitious commentary ... bold and worthwhile ... readable and learned' Peter McDonald, TLS 'An extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill' Richard Jenkyns, author of Classical Literature The poems in this lively, wide-ranging and richly enjoyable anthology are the work of priestesses and warriors; of philosophers and statesmen; of teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; of drunkards and brawlers; of grumpy old men, and chic young things. Their authors write – or sing – about hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago. The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literature and book-culture emerged from an oral society in which memory and learning were transmitted through song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as understood by the greatest ancient poets – Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus – mingles and interacts with our expansive modern vision of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare. Anyone looking for a picture of what ancient poets were up to when they were simply singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times can find it here. It is a volume full of fire and life: an undertaking of astonishing reach, and an accomplishment magisterial in its scope.