Showing results by narrator "Ghizela Rowe" in All Categories

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22nd May 1859. His literary career burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis, Moriarty.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. Amongst F. Scott Fitzgerald's many short story gems is ‘The Four Fists’. It follows a life, from boyhood to maturity, and how an occasional brush with physical force influences and changes that life.

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865. Yeats is perhaps best described as Ireland’s national poet in addition to being one of the major twentieth-century literary figures of the English tongue. He represents the ‘Romantic poet of modernism,’ with an extraordinary style created from the outward emphasis on the expression of emotions and the extensive use of symbolism, imagery and allusions.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Aphra Behn was a prolific and well-established poet and playwright but facts about her life remain scant and difficult to confirm. What can safely be said is that Aphra Behn is regarded as a key English playwright and a major figure in Restoration theatre. Her poetry is now far more appreciated and seen as a breakthrough for women of the 17th Century and beyond. Her first play, ‘The Forc’d Marriage’, was staged in 1670, and thereafter many followed, including her later comic works, which were more commercially successful.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4th July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a town synonymous with the earlier Salem Witch Trials. It was instrumental in Hawthorne’s later use of American Gothic and dark romanticism in his writing. ‘Rapaccinni’s Daughter’ is a classic piece of literature from his pen. Set in Italy, it is an unsettling story of romance destroyed by science.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.

Aleksander Głowacki, who wrote under the nom de plume Boleslaw Prus, was born on 20th August 1847 at Hrubieszów in the Kingdom of Poland, at that time, controlled by the Russian Empire. It seems he had doubts as to the scale of his talents and early on adopted the name ‘Boleslaw Prus’, for both his journalistic and literary offerings. His work as a short-story writer met with much acclaim. He wrote several dozen of them, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length from micro-story to novella. His keen observation of everyday life and sense of humor are evident in them.

Pearl Zane Grey was born on 31st January 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. From an early age, he was intrigued by history, fishing, baseball, and writing. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories, consuming dime store novels by the dozen. His first magazine article, about one of his fishing expeditions, was published in 1902. It was not until 1910 that he wrote his first Western, ‘The Heritage of the Desert’. It was a breakthrough title and quickly became a bestseller.

Here we journey with our classic poets from Christina Georgina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy to Frances W. Harper and Kipling, not only the ways, the wonders and the women who take on the responsibility to raise children no matter the problems or dangers to themselves, but also the difficulties and sometimes desperate tragedies that motherhood can involve. We hope these poems inspire every generation to reach out and better themselves and those around. This is our tribute to mothers everywhere.

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was born on 9th February 1863 in Clapton, London. He was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford. Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister and was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. Despite what was thought to be a promising legal career, he had literary ambitions and wrote in his spare time. His early works appeared in various periodicals of the day but for his first book, ‘A Man of Mark’ (1890), with no publisher interested, he published with his own resources.

Do men need poems? Is the gender of brawn and ‘can-do’ really a candidate for honeyed verse? Obviously yes. Through the centuries men seem to dominate the writing of poetry. From books of epics to quatrains of love poetry it seemed to be a man’s world. His domain. A volume purely for men, to show other facets of their personalities and characters seems to be an obvious choice. One verse fits all is, in fact, far removed from the truth. Men needs words. They need support, understanding as well as goals, ambition and structure. They need purpose, desire; the need to love and be loved.

John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876, in San Francisco. In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing. During the late 1890s Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full-blown novels.

Richard Harris Barham was born in Canterbury, England, on 6th December 1788. His father died when he was seven, leaving him a small estate, including the manor of Tappington of Denton in Kent. In 1826 Barham first contributed to Blackwood's Magazine; and in 1837 he began to write, for the recently founded magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, a series of tales and poems known as ‘The Ingoldsby Legends’. These became very popular and were later published in book form.

Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget on 4th October 1856 in Boulogne, France, to intellectual expatriate British parents. In common with several other very talented literary women of the day she felt it necessary to publish under a masculine pseudonym in order for her writing to be taken seriously. Her literary talents were extensive and she wrote a number of novels and plays. Perhaps her best remembered works are her haunting and powerful short stories exploring the supernatural. Lee has often received accolades for these and glowingly compared to other authors such as M R James.

Katherine was born on the 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand, the middle child of five. At 19 Katherine left for England, where she met and befriended the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, amongst others. She then travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand. There she began to write the short stories that she would later become so famous for. But there was another less-heralded side to Katherine’s writings; that of poetry. Her verse certainly reflects much of the themes of her life and interests.

Edward Everett Hale was born on April 3rd, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a prodigy, gifted with extraordinary literary skills. At only 13 he graduated from Boston Latin School and enrolled at Harvard College. There, he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes and was elected Class Poet. He graduated in 1839. His literary career started quite late. It wasn’t until 1859 that he was first published in the Atlantic with his short story "My Double and How He Undid Me." In 1863 the Atlantic published perhaps his best-known work "The Man Without a Country."

Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson was born on 22nd September 1847 in Barnes, London. In 1876 she married Wilfred Meynell, the newspaper publisher and editor, and together they set up and published a number of magazines as well as publishing the initial works of several poets including Francis Thompson. As the new century dawned, she along with many other artists began to question the colonial needs of Empire with its segregation and oppression. In particular she sought and gained a role in the Women’s Suffrage movement as it attempted to obtain greater equality for women.