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Sacred Place: Poetry as Seen and Unseen (Wordcatcher Modern Poetry)

by Sue Lochead-Lane

The more I write the more I see that what I want to reveal in my poetry is not all that is visible but what comes from the invisible. I try to describe the invisible. What is a Sacred Place and does it really exist? Does anyone really know or have the same answer? Nature does her best to show us the secrets of life and the universe, to act as a mirror’s reflection to what we can’t see inside ourselves. To help us understand life’s seemingly constant flow of change and contradiction. We seek peace, rest and understanding, and in my poetry I seek to grasp, if only for a fleeting moment, an answer and then it is gone again. I talk and explore the notion of love, with its melting warmth and thirsty pain. It protects and feeds us and can then destroy us. I explore the emotions of anger and doubt and sorrow. I see these reflected in nature. In the flowers, the trees, the sea, the rivers and the breeze. I observe the creatures of the earth who roam without the need to relate to or interact with us. They are independent of self-reflection. They are free of self-examination. They don’t need self-awareness to survive. We do. I have found comfort and answers for myself in the sacred images of the Black Madonnas and the Virgin Mary, who for some represent the Divine Feminine, and these poems I wish to share with those for whom that resonance also feeds their searching souls. I explore art and the art of living. Memories that dig deep into the past and return again. The everyday can reflect mysteries that are never known but somehow explain the unexplainable.

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror

by Jan-Melissa Schramm Alex Houen

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. However, this volume shows that literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence, as with the 'martyrdom operations' of jihadis fighting against the 'war on terror'. Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict and the contributions explore major war writers including Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as lesser known authors such as Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, and Nadeem Aslam. The volume covers multiple genres including novels, poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), memoirs, and some films. The contributions address a rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, 'bare life', atonement, and redemption.

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror


Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. However, this volume shows that literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence, as with the 'martyrdom operations' of jihadis fighting against the 'war on terror'. Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict and the contributions explore major war writers including Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as lesser known authors such as Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, and Nadeem Aslam. The volume covers multiple genres including novels, poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), memoirs, and some films. The contributions address a rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, 'bare life', atonement, and redemption.

Sacrifice as a Narrative Strategy in May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and H. D.

by Sanna Melin Schyllert

This book explores sacrifice as a narrative theme and a stylistic strategy in works by May Sinclair, Mary Butts and H. D. It argues that the modernist experiment with pronoun use informs the treatment of acts of sacrifice in the texts, understood both as acts of self-renunciation and as ritual performance. It also suggests that sacrifice, if the conditions are right, can serve as the structure upon which a cohesive community might be built. The book offers in-depth analyses of the three authors and their works, deftly dissecting the modernist narrative experiment to show that it was by no means limited — it was a means by which to approach a wide range of stories and materials.

Sa'di in Love: The Lyrical Verses of Persia's Master Poet (International Library of Iranian Studies)

by Homa Katouzian

With poetry which speaks across the ages, Sa'di (1210–81) is a vital classical poet and a towering figure of the medieval Persian canon. Comparable in skill and stature to other Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Hafez, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Sa'di's verses – best known through his 'Bustan' and 'Golestan' – address universal themes of passion, love and the human condition in works which are both psychologically perceptive and beautifully crafted. His mystical writings, contemporaneous with Rumi, reveal a degree of depth, wisdom and insight which have placed Sa'di in the pantheon of world literature. In this essential new translation of Sa'di's work, leading expert on Iranian studies Homa Katouzian seeks to bring the poet's lyrics to a new readership. The book provides the Persian text and Katouzian's English translation side-by-side, creating an indispensible tool for students and enthusiasts of Iranian history, literature and culture.

Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky

by Robert Pinsky

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happensTakes over, and what you were goes away.They learn it in sardonic softComments of the weather, when it sharpensThe hard surfaces of daylight: lightWinds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokesAll over a wrecked house,The nude wallpaper and the bruteIntelligence of the torn pipes.Therefore when you marry or buildPray to be untrue to the plainDominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when notA soul is there, and how it impliesAlways that separate, coldSplendidness, uncouth and unkind--On chilly, unclouded mornings,Torrential sunlight and moist air,Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets #160)

by Robert Pinsky

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happensTakes over, and what you were goes away.They learn it in sardonic softComments of the weather, when it sharpensThe hard surfaces of daylight: lightWinds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokesAll over a wrecked house,The nude wallpaper and the bruteIntelligence of the torn pipes.Therefore when you marry or buildPray to be untrue to the plainDominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when notA soul is there, and how it impliesAlways that separate, coldSplendidness, uncouth and unkind--On chilly, unclouded mornings,Torrential sunlight and moist air,Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets #160)

by Robert Pinsky

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happensTakes over, and what you were goes away.They learn it in sardonic softComments of the weather, when it sharpensThe hard surfaces of daylight: lightWinds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokesAll over a wrecked house,The nude wallpaper and the bruteIntelligence of the torn pipes.Therefore when you marry or buildPray to be untrue to the plainDominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when notA soul is there, and how it impliesAlways that separate, coldSplendidness, uncouth and unkind--On chilly, unclouded mornings,Torrential sunlight and moist air,Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Safest

by Michael Donaghy

The tragic death of Michael Donaghy last year at the age of 50 left English-language poetry incalculably the poorer. Donaghy was one of our very finest poets, and his metaphysically dense yet emotionally direct verse had won him admirers all over the world. No one demonstrated more eloquently how poetry could engage the whole being: he believed that a poem should both communicate directly and work at the highest intellectual level. At the time of his death, Donaghy was at work on a new collection, and Safest gathers together all the poems he had decided were worthy of inclusion in that book. It will be no surprise that Donaghy's early death and almost impossibly exacting standards have produced a lean volume; but judged in depth and quality, it's one many times its apparent size. Safest contains work as rich and insightful as anything Donaghy had previously published, although, in its several meditations on being, death and finality it often reads, inescapably, like the work of a man who knew he was writing his last collection. These are poems of great sophistication; fearful, combative and witty -- and in the end, deeply affirmative in their unillusioned wisdom. As the poet/critic Sean O'Brien remarked, Donaghy will come to be seen as one of the representative poets of the age, and Safest will do nothing but affirm that judgment.

Safety in Numbers

by Roger McGough

This is not the time for adultery.Your lover will fail to be impressed,not so much by the face maskand stale musk of sanitizing gel,but your flouting of the rules.At once funny and moving, Safety in Numbers is the new collection from the nation's favourite poet. Traversing new yet timeless terrain with his signature wit and intimacy, Roger McGough brings to life the very strangeness of our timesFrom lost tongues and violins to rising oceans, from adulterers in lockdown to ghosts in line, we may live in dark times and yet find ourselves laughing. From surprising angles and with unexpected voices, McGough, 'a trickster you can trust', reveals the telling moments of our lives._______________PRAISE FOR ROGER MCGOUGH'A witty and ingenious chronicler of British life with a deftness and agility that is hard to beat' Poetry Society'The patron saint of poetry' Carol Ann Duffy 'McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings' Time Out

The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic Of Sigurd The Dragon Slayer (Penguin Classics Series)

by Jesse L. Byock

Part of a new series Legends from the Ancient North, Beowulf is one of the classic books that influenced JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings'So the company of men led a careless life,All was well with them: until One beganTo encompass evil, an enemy from hell.Grendel they called this cruel spirit...'J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He was hugely influential for his advocacy of Beowulf as a great work of literature and, even if he had never written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, would be recognised today as a significant figure in the rediscovery of these extraordinary tales.Legends from the Ancient North brings together from Penguin Classics five of the key works behind Tolkien's fiction.They are startling, brutal, strange pieces of writing, with an elemental power brilliantly preserved in these translations.They plunge the reader into a world of treachery, quests, chivalry, trials of strength.They are the most ancient narratives that exist from northern Europe and bring us as near as we will ever get to the origins of the magical landscape of Middle-earth (Midgard) which Tolkien remade in the 20th century.

Sahir: A Literary Portrait

by Surinder Deol

Sahir Ludhianvi (1921–1980), a remarkable film lyricist, was also an iconic literary poet. Surinder Deol paints a sensitive portrait that reveals an artist who was aware of the depth of his poetic message as well as of his ability to present it in words that captured the reader’s imagination. Sahir looked outward at the world to find beauty in nature for inspiration while at the same time raising his voice against poverty, deprivation, and the denial of social justice. The book contains free verse translation of over ninety of Sahir’s literary creations, including poems, ghazals, bhajans, and a long peace poem called Parchhaaiyaan (The Shadows). The author strives to bring together four distinct elements of Sahir’s work that make him one of the most loved poets of our generation: his deep-rooted love of nature, his snug romanticism, his sensitivity to human suffering, and his unceasing optimism for a better tomorrow.

Said And Done

by Roger McGough

Roger McGough is one of Britain's best-loved poets, and something of a national institution. His name is ubiquitous with matter-of-fact Scouse humour, easy-going charm, and perfect observations of the idiosyncrasies of everyday life, whether you know him from his poetry, or from his regular broadcasts on television or radio. Roger first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the pop group The Scaffold, who had two number one hits - Thank U Very Much and Lily The Pink. He began his poetry career performing with The Grimms, alongside fellow Liverpool poets Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, with whom he went on to publish The Mersey Sound, which remains the biggest-selling British poetry book ever.This is his autobiography - and like the best of his poetry it is packed full of hilarious observations, unbelievable stories, nostalgic reminiscences and bittersweet tales of love, life and loss. From his memories of growing up in Liverpool, playing in bombed out houses as a young boy, to the skiffle-crazed days of his adolescence, through to his time at university - and his meetings there with Larkin. He explores his sudden, almost overnight fame and success with Mike McCartney et all in The Scaffold, as well as his time working with George Martin, and co-writing the Yellow Submarine film script for the Beatles, through his international touring days, to the present. He certainly has many a story to tell about meeting some fascinating characters: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Alan Ginsberg, Pete McCarthy and Salman Rushdie all appear amongst others, but it's his sheer story-telling nous, and his gift for observing the minutia of everyday life, and to completely capture a moment in time which sets this apart from other books. His life story is one that will be universally identifiable to those who grew up with him - who embraced the verve and irreverence of the sixties, only to end up as slightly embittered romantic cynics. This is done here in the most funny, poignant, bittersweet, and melancholic autobiography you will read this year - a man whose hugely popular take on it all resonates with honesty and humour.

Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems

by Robin Robertson

Sailing the Forest, Robin Robertson's Selected Poems, is the definitive guide to one of the most important poetic voices to have emerged from the UK in the last twenty-five years. Robertson's lyrical, brooding, dark and often ravishingly beautiful verse has seen him win almost every major poetry award; readers on both sides of the Atlantic have delighted in his preternaturally accurate ear and eye, and his utterly distinctive way with everything from the love poem to the macabre narrative. This book is both an ideal introduction to a necessary poet, and a fine summary of the great range and depth of Robertson's work to date.

Salad Anniversary (Pushkin Collection)

by Machi Tawara

An exquisite collection of Japanese poetryThis internationally bestselling book took the world by storm on its publication. Covering the discovery of new love, first heartache and the end of an affair, these poems mix the ancient grace and musicality of the tanka form with a modern insight and wit. With a light, fresh touch and a cool eye, Machi Tawara celebrates the small events in a life fully lived and one that is wonderfully touched by humour and beauty. This book will stay with you through the day, and long after you have finished it.

Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau

by Robert Marteau Anne Winters

These translations are a book length selection in English of the poetry of Robert Marteau, a distinguished contemporary French poet, novelist, and art critic. His poems have been admired in France for their richness of language and imagery, and for their densely particular rendering of the actual world. Reflecting M. Marteau's deep preoccupation with the French countryside, the poems often touch on his native Poitou and Charente, a region of woods and salt marshes, small farming villages and Romanesque churches.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Salt (Faber Poetry Ser.)

by David Harsent

Salt is a distinctive new assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in brief utterances. One extends sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. 'The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. 'They belong to each other in mood, in tone, by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, spine-tingling, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like a set of shared notes or little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.

Salt Water

by Sir Andrew Motion

Salt Water is Andrew Motion's most ambitious collection, yet also his most accessible. The first part refines the narrative and lyric skills for which he is well-known, combining intense personal concerns with themes which are more expansive and social. Family and loved ones appear in the company of historical and legendary figures; private dramas raise large general issues. But there is concentration as well as diversity. From the Orford Merman of the title poem, to an elegy written for a friend who died on the Marchioness, to the vivid prose meditation of the second part, written when Andrew Motion retraced the voyage that John Keats made by sea from London to Naples in the autumn of 1820, the book insistently and brilliantly elaborates images of water. It is the element which facilitates a rich interweaving of past and present, of re-enacted experience and the poignant suspension of the lived-in moment.

Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Language, Discourse, Society)

by W. Maley

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

The Same Inside: Poems About Empathy And Friendship

by Roger Stevens Liz Brownlee Matt Goodfellow

The Same Inside is a sweet and thoughtful collection of poems about friendship, empathy and respect by three of the nation's best-loved poets, Liz Brownlee, Matt Goodfellow and Roger Stevens. These fifty poems deal sensitively with feelings, empathy, respect, courtesy, bullying, disability and responsibility. They are the perfect springboard to start conversations.

Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)

by A.D. Cousins, Daniel Derrin, and Dani Napton

This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.

Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)


This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

by W. Christie

The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Faber Poetry Ser.)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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 literature.In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.-- Kubla Khan

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