Showing results for "University" in Poetry

How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least 30 years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture.

The dreaming spires of Oxford may be one of the great educational establishments of the Centuries. But it is also a place where the Nation’s young learn much more. Within its walls, courtyards and cloisters these 10 Poets mused and illuminated on the beauty of poetry with eager yet tender words.

Soon I felt something alive moving along my leg and up my body to my face, and when I looked down, I saw a very small human being, only 15 centimetres tall . . . I was so surprised that I gave a great shout. ’But that is only the first of many surprises which Gulliver has on his travels. He visits a land of giants and a flying island, meets ghosts from the past and horses which talk. An Oxford Bookworms Library reader for learners of English, adapted from the Jonathan Swift original by Clare West.

Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant.

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity—people and movements—in poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century. Celebrated Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail structures his Quintets to echo the Comedy. Where Dante had a tripartite structure, O’Siadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline—the arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology.

Los poemas de este libro están escritos la ciudad de Nueva York en el año 1929-1930, curso académico durante el cual Federico vivió como estudiante en Columbia University. Después de la lectura de cada poema, se hace un comentario sobre el mismo para facilitar al oyente la comprensión del mensaje que Federico García Lorca nos quiso comunicar con sus surrealistas visiones.

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a celebrated poet and performer from Aotearoa New Zealand. Professor and poet laureate, a Pasifika woman who has performed for queens and presidents, Selina says "poetry is a way to tell our stories and make the invisible visible."

In a hole under the floorboards Silas Marner the linen-weaver keeps his gold. Every day he works hard at his weaving, and every night he takes the gold out and holds the bright coins lovingly, feeling them and counting them again and again. The villagers are afraid of him and he has no family, no friends. Only the gold is his friend, his delight, his reason for living. But what if a thief should come in the night and take his gold away?

For students of Middle English, Andrew and Waldron's The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been the key edition of the four Pearl poems for over 30 years. With the changing needs of today's students in mind, the editors produced a complete prose translation of the four poems - the best known of which is "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". The near-literal translations are intended to facilitate understanding of the four poems - to lead readers to, rather than away from, the original texts.

"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor.

In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child.

Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time, implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. Performed by the poet, the book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism.

When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino?

Inside this debut collection, girlhood’s dangers echo, transmuted, in the poet’s fears for her son. A body just discovering the vastness of “want’s new acreage” is humbled by chronic illness. Epithalamion turns elegy. But this world that so often seems capricious in its cruelty also shelters apple orchards, glass museums, schoolchildren, century-old sharks; “there’s no accounting for / all we want to save, no names.” Oliver’s polyphonic gathering of speakers includes lovers and saints, painters and dead poets, a hawk and a mother.

From the endangered Canadian boreal forest to the environmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, Jenna Butler takes us on a sea voyage that connects continents and traces the impacts of climate change on northern lands. With a conservationist, female gaze, she questions explorer narratives and the mythic draw of the polar North. Blending travelogue and poetic meditation on place, Jenna Butler draws listeners to the beauty and power of threatened landscapes, asking why some stories in recorded history are privileged....

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar.

All they could hear was the wind, and the waves crashing on to the rocks. All they could see was the night. They could not see the ship, broken in two. They could not see the people holding on to the dark wet rock, slowly dying of cold. And they could not hear the cries for help - only the wind. How could they save the people on the rock? Was their wooden boat stronger than the iron ship?

The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a nonbinary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a “Master”. R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer non-reproductivity, chronic illness and disability, and the healing that can be found in the liminal spaces between.

When a handsome young man begins to court Catherine Sloper, she feels she is very lucky. She is a quiet, gentle girl, but neither beautiful nor clever; no one had ever admired her before, or come to the front parlour of her home in Washington Square to whisper soft words of love to her. But in New York in the 1840s young ladies are not free to marry where they please. Catherine must have her father’s permission, and Dr Sloper is a rich man.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is perhaps the best-known Arthurian romance in the English language. Its story is well-known: New Year celebrations at Camelot are disrupted by the fearsome and strange appearance of the Green Knight who challenges Arthur's court to a game consisting of an exchange of blows; the Green Knight's survival of the beheading that ensues locks Sir Gawain into a commitment to receive a return blow a year later, bound by his honor to fulfill the terms of the game.