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Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.

Conversation Pieces

There are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking Back

Poems Of Friendship

John Milton

John Milton (1608-74) was celebrated in his time as a public servant of the Cromwellian regime and as the author of brilliant polemical pamphlets about education religion and freedom of speech, but his posthumous reputation rests principally on his work as a poet, noteably in PARADISE LOST. This poem, written after the poet was driven out of public life by the Restoration, and begun when he was already blind, is a worthy successor to the epics of Homer and Virgil. In majestic blank verse it describes Lucifer's fall from heaven, the creation of mankind, Eve's temptation, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. After the Bible, this is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Christian literature. The present volume contains extensive selections from PARADISE LOST, chosen to illustrate its author's genius for high drama, vivid description and savage irony. In addition, there are substantial extracts from COMUS and SAMSON AGONISTES, and many of Milton's sonnets and shorter poems, including the famous LYCIDAS.

Milton Poems

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind's nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea-pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis-have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed. 
This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson's seductive sea-fairies next to Poe's beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge's darkly brooding "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five." And here is Masefield's "I must go down to the seas again" alongside Cavafy's "Ithaka" and Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." In the wide variety of lyrics collected here-sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers-we feel the encompassing power of our planet's restless

Poems Of The Sea

Thomas Hardy

Distringuished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose and then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.

Hardy Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke

Though as yet little known in English-speaking countries, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the finest German poet of this century and one of the greatest lyrical writers in the history of Western literature. A major figure in the modernist movement, with some affinities to Yeats, Rilke had a profound influence on other 20th century poets such as Pasternak and Akhmatova. He is a master of vivid and breathtakingly original imagery in which difficult ideas are made directly apprehensible to the reader and new worlds of experience are opened up. This selection includes poems from all stages of his career, beginning with the delicate works of his early years, through the extraordinary poems he wrote in French (which he used like a first language) and concluding with his mature masterpieces: the SONNETS TO ORPHEUS and the DUINO ELEGIES. Also included are Rilke's prose LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET in which he counsels a younger colleague and expounds his own literary ideal. This is by far the most comprehensive selection from this poet in English and forms an ideal introduction to this work.

Rilke Poems

Alfred Lord Tennyson

This collection includes, of course, such celebrated poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade." There are extracts from all the major masterpieces-"Idylls of the King," "The Princess," "In Memoriam"-and several complete long poems, such as "Ulysses" and "Demeter and Persephone," that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as "Come into the Garden, Maud" and "Break, Break, Break," for which he is justly celebrated.

Tennyson Poems

William Wordsworth

In the long history of English literature William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the writer who achieved the most dramatic transformations of the poetic scene almost singlehanded. A leading figure among the Romantic generation which included Coleridge and Scott, he created out of his personal communion with nature a new poetic which had a profound moral and spiritual influence on the entire nineteenth century. The present selection includes all his famous lyrics and substantial extracts from narrative poems including The Prelude.

Wordsworth Poems

Arthur Rimbaud

Burnt-out at twenty-three, Rimbaud has become a model for the poet as wayward genius. Nevertheless, he wrote a substantial amount of lyric and dramatic verse in his few years of activity. This volume contains all his mature output, together with several short prose works, including A SEASON IN HELL, and relevant passages from the poet's letters.

Arthur Rimbaud Selected Poems

From ancient Greece and Rome (Sappho, Marcellus Empiricus) to the current Covid 19 crisis (Eavan Boland's 'Quarantine'), poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing is a small treasury of their words, illuminating many different experiences of illness, injury and convalescence, from John Donne's 'Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse' to Thom Gunn's 'The Man with Night Sweats'; from Anne Finch's 'Spleen' to Jane Kenyon's 'Prognosis'; from Emily Dickinson's 'The Soul has Bandaged moments' to Seamus Heaney's 'Miracle'. Here are poems from around the world, by Baudelaire, Hugo, Rudaki and Cavafy; by Masaoka Shiki, Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert. Shakespeare and Milton; Tennyson and Emily Bronte; Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Tony Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy are all present at the sickbed. Messages of hope in the midst of pain - in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World', Wislawa Szymborska's 'The End and the Beginning' and Stevie Smith's 'Away, Melancholy' - make this a perfect gift for anyone on the road to healing.

Poems of Healing

Lord George Gordon Byron

Byron's poetry took Europe by storm in the early nineteenth century and the poems which made him a star are here represented by a selection of the early lyrics, including still popular pieces such as 'She walks in beauty' and 'We'll go a no more a-roving'. But Byron's real talent was for comedy. He is the greatest comic poet of the Romantic movement and his comic verse is here represented by BEPPO, A VISION OF JUDGEMENT and selections from his greatest masterpiece, DON JUAN, which satirizes the very reputation for amourous adventures which helped to make Byron himself famous.

Byron Poems

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Browning Barrett

Celebrated in their time and still popular over a century after their deaths, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had a unique relationship which is reflected in their work. Both were distinguished as poets before they met, and they learnt from one another without ever sacrificing their individuality. If Elizabeth recognized that Robert’s talent was the greater of the two, Robert understood that his wife’s voice was unique. All the great themes they shared are represented in this collection of their shorter poems – love, marriage, poetry, religion, England and Italy, the natural world – and the poems are accompanied by a selection from the marvellous letters they wrote to one another, especially in the years of their courtship. Among the items included are extracts from Aurora Leigh and Pauline, and the whole of Sonnets from the Portuguese, together with many lyrics and narrative poems by both poets.

Robert And Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems

George Herbert

Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems," the shape of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet who admonished his readers to "dare to be true." An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from "The Collar" and "Jordan" to "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.

Herbert Poems

The appreciation of Zen philosophy and art has become universal, and Zen poetry, with its simple expression of direct, intuitive insight and sudden enlightenment, appeals to lovers of poetry, spirituality, and beauty everywhere. This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan and Korea includes the work of Zen practioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travellers and recluses, and covers fifteen centuries of Oriental literature with poets ranging from Xie Lingyun (5th century) through Wang Wei and Hanshan (8th century) and Yang Wan-li (12th century) to Shinkei (15th) Basho (17th) and Ryokan (19th).

Zen Poems

The feline has inspired poetic adoration since the days of the pharaohs, and the poems collected here cover an astonishing range of periods, cultures, and styles. Poets across the continents and centuries have described the feline family-from kittens to old toms, pussycats to panthers-doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves. Here are Yeats's Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart's Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, T. S. Eliot's Rum Tum Tugger, William Blake's tyger and Rilke's panther. Here are tributes from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan, from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr. Seuss. 
 
The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace, and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

The Great Cat

Hanshan

The best of Hanshan's treasured poems—among the earliest of Zen Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated by Peter Harris and organised thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poet hardcover. Long ranking among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were written at least twelve centuries ago on trees, rocks, and walls by a semi-mythical Buddhist monk living in the mountains of south-eastern China.

Hanshan: Cold Mountain Poems

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS. Assembled in this beautifully created pocket gift hardback is a wide range of erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.

Erotic Poems

Selected Poems

China has a strong and ancient tradition of erotic poetry by both men and women, and this unique collection includes poems from three thousand years ago to the present day, ranging from the highly literary to the sexually explicit - many of them appearing in English for the first time. While literary poets such as Zi Ye ('Lady Midnight') and Emperor Li Yu of the Tang Dynasty are already known in the West, popular Chinese verse has been largely ignored by translators. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping mine a richly erotic vein, uncovering ancient Chinese Daoist sex manuals, erotic novels and plays (which contain poems at moment of sexual epiphany); the tradition of erotic prints, which were often accompanied by poems; folksongs and bawdy jokes. The contrast between the discretion and subtlety of classical Chinese erotic poetry and the earthy comedy of its popular counterpart makes for a fascinating and entertaining anthology.

Chinese Erotic Poems

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. 
Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere, commanding their love, earning their veneration. For Emily Dickinson they are frigates that 'take us Lands away'; for Wordsworth they are 'a substantial world, both pure and good'; Alberto Rios calls them 'the deli offerings of civilization itself'. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: libraries where one can best hear "a choir of authors murmuring inside their books," as Billy Collins has it; bookshops, especially second-hand ones, 'too small for the worlds they hold, where words that sing you to sleep, stories that stalk your dreams, open like windows in a wall' (Gillian Clarke). 
 The poets collected here include Catullus, Horace, T'ao Ch'ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Marvell, Blake, Pope and Keats; more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.

Books and Libraries

Poems

Andrew Marvell

He is known chiefly for his brilliant lyric poems, including "The Garden," "The Definition of Love," "Bermudas," "To His Coy Mistress," and the "Horatian Ode" to Cromwell. Marvell's work is marked by extraordinary variety, ranging from incomparable lyric explorations of the inner life to satiric poems on the famous men and important issues of his time-one of the most politically volatile epochs in England's history. From the lover's famous admonition, "Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime," to the image of the solitary poet "Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade," Marvell's poetry has earned a permanent place in the canon and in the hearts of poetry lovers.

Marvell Poems

Emily Brontë

* In size, price, and elegant packaging, these books will make ideal gifts * Beautiful 3-colour jacket designed to give a uniform look * Unique and highly distinctive black-and-white pattern on each spine * Full-cloth, flexible covers * Sewn bindings * Silk ribbon markers and headbands * Gold stamping on front and spine * Decorative patterned endpapers * Newly designed typographic settings in classic typefaces * Portable format-size 6 1/4 x 4 ins (15. 75 x 10. 25 cm) * Cream wove acid free paper * 256pp each volume

Brontë Poems

Dip into this inspired assortment of concise masterpieces, and draw out - a fragment of Sappho from ancient Greece, a perfect haiku from Japan; a brief nature poem by John Clare, Robert Frost, Ted Hughes or Boris Pasternak; a compact love poem by Alexander Pushkin or Anne Bradstreet, Robert Herrick or Carol Ann Duffy; a miniature story by Hardy, Rumi or Roethke; a pithy meditation by Wang Wei, Emily Dickinson, Tennyson or Lorca. Dip again, and discover the compressed wit of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash; contemporary poets Simon Armitage and Moniza Alvi at their most succinct; short poems in very odd shapes from Apollinaire and Vaclav Havel ... So few lines, so much variety: epitaphs and epigrams; couplets and quatrains; lyrics, limericks and lullabies - go on, dip again.

Little Poems

Given that insects vastly outnumber us (there are approximately 200 million insects for every human) it is no surprise that there is a rich body of verse on the creeping, scuttling, flitting, stinging things with which we share our planet. 
 
Many cultures have centuries-old traditions of insect poetry. In China,where noblewomen of the Tang dynasty kept crickets in gold cages-countless songs were written in praise of these 'insect musicians'. The haiku masters of Japan were similarly inspired, though spread their net wider to include less prepossessing bugs such as houseflies, fleas and mosquitoes. In the West, poems about insects date back to the ancient Greeks, and insects feature frequently in European literature from the 16th century onwards. 
 
The poets collected here range from Donne, Marvell, Keats and Wordsworth; Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti, to Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald. In translation there is verse by - amongst others - Meleager and Tu Fu, Ivan Turgenev, Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry, Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado and Xi Chuan. 
 
Bees, butterflies and beetles, cockroaches and caterpillars, fireflies and dragonflies, ladybirds and glowworms--the miniature creatures that adorn these pages are as varied as the poetic talents that celebrate them.

Buzz Words

Poems About Insects

The Uyghur people of Central Asia have a long and distinguished tradition of poetry - indeed, their first oral epic was circulating as early as the 2nd century BCE. In the medieval period Sufi poetry flourished, embracing Persian forms such as the ghazal, which spoke eloquently of beauty, love, loss and separation. A major poet, Alshir Navayi (1441­-1501) fully established classical Turkic or Chagatai as a perfect vehicle for poetic expression. Some contemporary poets continue to find inspiration within the traditional forms, while others experiment with a freer style of verse. 
Uyghur poetry reflects the magnificent natural landscapes where the Uyghurs have lived for two millennia - endless steppes, soaring mountain ranges and mysterious deserts, crossed by the historic Silk Road. It is also shaped by their turbulent past, caught between warring empires or marauding warlords - and their deeply troubled present. 
The Uyghurs form a minority in China, where the government is now making a systematic attempt to erase their language and culture. Many intellectuals have been imprisoned, and many poets are now writing from exile, including the editor and translator of this volume, Aziz Isa Elkun, who lives in London. Uyghur Poems is not only a celebration of an ancient and vibrant poetic tradition, but also a vital witness to a culture under threat.

Uyghur Poems

Carmela Ciuraru

If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.

Dog Poems

‘‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument,’’ said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets. The sonnets in this collection – whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair or celebration – reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines. Here are classics such as Milton’s ‘‘On His Blindness’’, Yeats’s ‘‘Leda and the Swan’’ and Frost’s ‘‘The Oven Bird’’, juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke’s ‘‘Sonnet Reversed’’, the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn’s ‘‘Caring for Surfaces’’ and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin’s ‘‘To Failure’’. 
 
From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring. This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

Sonnets

From Dante to the Present

William Blake

Blake's explosive lyrical genius is here represented by the full text of 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience', plus a wide range of marvellous short poems unpublished in his lifetime. In addition there is a selection from the Prophetic Books in which the poet develops his own story of creation - alternately crazy and magnificent and from his dramatic and didactic poems and prose writings which reveal Blake as a major poet of the Romantic movement.

Blake Poems

A collection of poems which capture the experience of solitude- by day or night, in the city or in the country, in waking or in dreams. There are contented reveries, expressions of loneliness and despair, reflections on mind and soul, and meditations recorded in the stillness of the night. Poets can be said to be the custodians of the interior life, and from Sappho's "Tonight I've watched" to Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and from Yeats's communion with 'the deep heart's core' in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" to Bei Dao's veneration of "Ordinary Days", some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet's art. And for readers who either seek or escape from solitude,all of the poets in this anthology - from Sappho and Callimachus to Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur - offer words to console and inspire. They remind us that in cultivating solitude we explore the limits of our imaginations and realize our mostprofound feelings and needs.

Solitude

Poets of all times, places and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. They have commemorated the Battles of Thermopylae, Agincourt and Shilph, and London in an air raid. They have announced the Charge of the Light Brigade; witnessed Break of Day in the Trenches; handed down through oral tradition, the Blackfoot Indian Song for a Fallen Warrior; sent a Newsreel from Vietnam. From Horace and Virgl to Steveie Smith, from the anonymous bards of ancient China to Adam Mickiewicz and Primo Levi, these poets have encompassed the entire spectrum of feeling - pride, compassion, courage anger fear excitement, anguish, even laughter. Here. in this anthology, are more than one hundred of their most memorable poems.

War Poems

Rumi

Rumi: Unseen Poems – the second volume of Rumi in the Everyman Pocket Poet series – is a treasury of poems which have never been translated before, researched and translated by Rumi biographer Brad Gooch and the Iranian writer Maryam Mortaz. 
The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi was trained in Sufism, a mystic tradition within Islam. He founded the Mevlevi Order, often known as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. His poetry combines the sacred and the sensual, expressing both rapturous divine love, and aching human love for his companion and teacher, Shams of Tabriz. It has long been popular in the West, never more so than in the last twenty-five years, when a new wave of free translations introduced him to an ever-widening audience. 
However, some of these recent translations have been more in the nature of interpretations by writers who are not Persian speakers. Cultural and Islamic references central to an understanding of Rumi's poetry have been toned down or omitted. And so vast was Rumi's output that earlier scholarly translators were obliged to be selective, leaving a rich vein of verse still unmined. From this Gooch and Mortaz have made a selection of ghazals (short lyric poems) and rubaiyat (quatrains), aiming in their own translations to achieve fidelity to the originals while preserving all Rumi's lyric exuberance. 
This book makes a perfect companion to the first Everyman volume of Rumi, which presents the very best of the twentieth-century translations.

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