Poetry

Renowned critic and poet Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. 'Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain...I had spent all this time - the greater part of a lifetime - preparing my instruments'. The Divine... read more

Believing, as Ezra Pound did, that real emotion is all that endures, Robert Gray has avoided 'magic realism', whismy, irony and mannered tone in his poetry. Instead, his style is classically direct, clear and concrete, demonstrating an Augustan preference for substantial content. The poems of "Nameless Earth" are richly textu... read more

Leonard Cohen made his name as a poet before he came to worldwide attention as a singer and songwriter. Book of Longing was twenty years in the making and written in Montreal, Mumbai and during his retreat in Mt Baldy. These poems show the full range of one of the most influential and enigmatic writers of his generation.

In The Best Australian Poems 2012, the illustrious poet John Tranter selects the most exceptional Australian poetry of the past year. Tranter casts a discerning eye over the "fragments of dream-work" that reside in poems to create a collection of exquisite beauty and wonder, featuring renowned poets alongside new voices. Prev... read more

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Fire Diary is the first book of poems by Mark Tredinnick, author of The Blue Plateau and The Little Red Writing Book. Fire Diary amounts to a spiritual geography of the poet, an everyday ecology of the "beautiful struggle, the ordinary trouble" he finds himself - we all find ourselves - in.

A collection of poems that is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. It creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

Sylvia Plath was one of the defining voices of twentieth-century poetry, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry. Though she published just one collection in her lifetime, "The Colossus", and a novel, "The Bell Jar", it was following her death in 1963 that her work began to... read more

First published in the 1920's, The Prophet, Gibran's hugely popular guide to living, has sold millions of copies worldwide and is the most famous work of religious fiction of the twentieth century. The Prophet became the bible of 1960s culture and was credited with founding the New Age movement, yet it still continues to insp... read more

A collection of poems from Australia's leading poet.

The culminating achievement of Eliot's poetic career. The four parts: "Burnt Norton","East Coker", "The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding" present a rigorous meditation upon those spiritual, philosophical and personal themes that preoccupied the author.

Explores issues of sublimity and beauty, contemplates the aesthetic and the transcendent, examines nature and the artificial. John Kinsella is one of Australia's most internationally respected poets.

This is a superb introduction to poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. With insight and insider knowledge, poet Geoff Page emphasises the contribution made by the notable generation of Australian poets who emerged during and just after World War II. It includes several contemporary poems which are likely to becom... read more

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our lit... read more

Matthew Arnold praised the "Iliad" for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her accoun... read more

Poets have been fascinated and challenged by the sonnet ever since it was imported from Italy to England in the sixteenth century. With its fourteen lines, inexhaustibly variable, it has met particular needs of almost every major poet from Thomas Wyatt to Paul Muldoon. Don Paterson, himself an adept of the form, has devised a... read more

"Short and Sweet" is an inspiring anthology arranged to show how the short poem, defined here as no longer than thirteen lines - and sometimes a lot shorter than that - can tell a story, present a complex argument, and be packed with as much passion, wisdom and music as any more extended piece of writing. In his witty and ins... read more

Tennyson's poetry epitomizes the Victorian age, for which he became a spokesman. His finest poems are often steeped in a sensuous melancholy, as in Maud, or are chivaric, heroic and allegorical, as in "The Lady of Shalot" and "Morte d'Arthur".

This anthology's range extends from the foot of the blue mountains through the suburban heartlands to the works and days of the harbour and the beach.