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The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story Of Homer's Iliad And The Trojan War
by Caroline AlexanderThe Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of it was lost. Various empires have admired it as a book that in telling the story of the siege of Troy also extols the warrior ethic, and teaches the young how to die well.Yet the figure at the heart of the epic, the consummate warrior Achilles, is a brooding, controversial hero. He is a fierce critic of those who have started this war and allowed it to drag on, consuming soldiers and civilians alike. Disconcertingly, The Iliad portrays war as a catastrophe that destroys cities, orphans children and wrecks whole societies.Caroline Alexander's extraordinary book is not about any of the traditional concerns that have occupied classicists for centuries. It is simpler and more radical than that. In her words, 'This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war.'
War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence
by C. KrockelThis is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war upon their lives and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation.
Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East
by Hugh KennedyPart of the rich legacy of the Middle East is a poetic record stretching back five millennia. This unparalleled repository of knowledge - across different languages, cultures and religions - allows us to examine continuity and change in human expression from the beginnings of writing to the present day. In Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East leading scholars draw upon this legacy to explore the ways in which poets, from the third millennium bc to the present day, have responded to effects of war.The contributors deal with material in a wide variety of languages - including Sumerian, Hittite, Akkadian, biblical and modern Hebrew, and classical and contemporary Arabic - and range from the Sumerian lament on the destruction of Ur and the Assyrian conquest of Jerusalem to the al-R?miyy?t of the poet and warrior prince Ab? Fir?s al-?amd?n?, the popular Arabic epics and romances that form the siyar, to the contemporary poetry of Hamas and Hezbollah. Some of the poems are heroic in tone celebrating victory and the prowess of warriors and soldiers; others reflect keenly on the pity and destruction of warfare, on the grief and suffering that war causes. The result is a work that provides a unique reflection upon the ways in which this most violent and pervasive of human activities has been reflected in different cultures.The history of war begins in the Middle East - the earliest reported conflict in human history was fought between the neighbouring city states of Lagash and Umma in ancient Iraq. At a time when the Middle East seems to be permanently at war and wracked by violence, it is salutary to look back at the ancient roots of modern attitudes and to see that in the past, as in the present, these attitudes are much more varied, and the emotions more subtle, than often realised.
Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge Studies In Eighteenth-century English Literature And Thought Ser. #4)
by Dianne DugawThis interdisciplinary study uncovers a fascination with women cross dressers in the popular literature of early modern Britain, in a wide range of texts from popular ballads and chapbook life histories to the comedies and tragedies of aristocratic literature. Dugaw demonstrates the extent to which gender and sexuality are enacted as constructs of history.
The Waste Land
by T. S. EliotOne of the greatest poems in the English language. The Waste Land is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, a beautiful examination of themes of decay and despair. Like many of his works, it alludes frequently to famous pieces of literature and legend, in this case most prominently to the legends of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King. Several images and lines from The Waste Land have become lodged in the popular consciousness, including "April is the cruellest month" and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.
The Waste Land and Other Poems
by T S EliotApril is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain . . . Published in 1922, The Waste Land was the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating vision of modern civilisation which has lost none of its power as we enter a new century.
The Waste Land and Other Poems: Including The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (Barnes And Noble Classics Ser.)
by T. S. EliotApril is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain . . .Published in 1922, The Waste Land was the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating vision of modern civilisation which has lost none of its power as we enter a new century.
The Waste Land And Other Poems (PDF)
by T S EliotApril is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain . . . Published in 1922, The Waste Land was the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating vision of modern civilisation which has lost none of its power as we enter a new century.
Watch (Phoenix Poets)
by Greg MillerStrasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock, The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s share Of time—aspire I’d say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled, “My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze. In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real. Praise for Iron Wheel “Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, Poetry
Watch (Phoenix Poets)
by Greg MillerStrasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock, The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s share Of time—aspire I’d say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled, “My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze. In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real. Praise for Iron Wheel “Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, Poetry
Water / Music (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by Peter FilkinsA diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."
Water Sessions
by James LasdunJames Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.
The Water Stealer
by Maurice RiordanThese poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are tributes to the departed and the living, the befriended and the estranged; there are also conversations with poets, in memory and in translation, from the Spanish and from the Irish. The collection concludes with 'The Pilgrim' - that hovers eerily 'in patrol of the edges', wherever they may be located. But just as these poems can be sage, they are also mischievous, fun-loving, gregarious creatures who like nothing better than to sing or to joke at your ear. The Water Stealer is a book full of invention and delight, whose hypnotic stories remind us of the variousness and the enchantment of the world.
Waterloo Express (A List)
by Paulette JilesThe remarkable debut poetry collection from renowned bestselling novelist and Award–winning poet Paulette Jiles, reissued in a handsome A List edition.Originally published in 1973, Paulette Jiles’s first collection amazed audiences with its rare depth of texture and verbal dexterity. Her work moves through landscapes that range from Africa to Mexico to Toronto with the ease of a travelling magician. Her swift, intricate metaphors leave the reader breathless, but her work also manages to be straight, earthy, vernacular, and disturbingly perceptive.
The Way Down
by John Burt"For the sake of contraption (like Frost) and of character (like Robinson), John Burt will do a great deal, and his scope and scansion require a great deal, for his theme is nothing less than the reinvention of heroism (King Mark, Mary of Nazareth, St. Francis, Paolo and Francesca, Ariadne) and the invention of a new heroics (Woodrow Wilson, Willard Gibbs). As attentive to ekphrasis as to the sonnet's narrow room, Burt feels what he knows, and he knows that we can learn from the past only by repeating it. A grand achievement!"--Richard Howard.Almost all these poems are narrative, telling stories that turn on some small but crucial shift of sensibility. One hears in them a speaking rather than a singing voice, a voice which, for all its formality and gravity, remains oral and sociable, a voice which tells things rather than spins charms. Their predominant mood is lucid asperity, sometimes breaking out into the angry Calvinism they always barely keep down, sometimes striving to achieve a humane skepticism that always just eludes them.The book consists of two sections, one concerned with the cruxes and contradictions of private feeling, the other with the unraveling of the public world. Each section centers on a long narrative poem that culminates the building tensions of the poems that precede it and makes possible the resolutions that follow them.Sonnet I from "St. Francis and the Wolf" Saved at last, not at the last of me, I knelt two-legged, made of guttural air A little yelp to sound like human prayer. The saints were cautious, understandably.I took the cup, and managed not to drool, But dreamed the wine was blood, as I'd been taught, And vainly curbed the vain bent of my thought. I knew myself an angel, felt a fool.Could God have erred in making teeth and maw? Then for his glory I will bite the lamb Whose terror he transmogrifies to awe That I may do his service as I am,Till as I am I leap the mortal gulf To rage in heaven, a perfected wolf.Originally published in 1988.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.
The Way Things Go
by Louis BuryThe Way Things Go contains a mix of poetry, art writing, and life writing about anticipatory grief, or mourning someone or something before it’s gone. Each successive chapter in the book decreases in length by exactly one sentence, from a 71-sentence-long opening chapter, to a 70-sentence-long second chapter, to 69 sentences, 68 sentences, and so on down to 1 (a book-length Oulipian “melting snowball”). This shrinking form enacts the book’s concerns with loss, climate change, and the passage of time. At the level of its content, however, The Way Things Go is not fatalistic. Its title comes from a cult classic 1987 Fischli and Weiss film, in which objects such as bags of trash, car tires, and oil drums knock into one another in a Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction. Moving through both personal history (his sister’s lupus and heroin addiction, his grandmother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor) and more global concerns (the Sixth Mass Extinction, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine), Bury considers the disruptions that occur as “things go,” as well as the continuity that remains. The book suggests that recent negotiations between optimism and pessimism with respect to the future reflect people’s feelings of vulnerability, particularly people who are used to taking their life’s stability for granted, in a world that seems increasingly precarious.
We Are All From Somewhere Else: Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose
by Ruth Padel'A prodigy, a book of wonders. Wonder, pity and terror, the searing section of voices in transit coercing compassion – and beyond that, empathy’ IndependentHome is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration - from the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts to Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, braving a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.
We Are Not Fond of Rat: Band 02b/Red B (PDF)
by Emma Chichester Clark Collins Big CatPoor Rat! No one wants to be his friend. But when the other animals see how sad he is, they all try to make him feel better. This gentle rhyming story is written and illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark.
We are Starved (Mountain West Poetry Series)
by Joshua Kryah"Joshua Kryah is redefining what it means to write spiritual poetry. This is not another book about longings for the spiritual; this is a book of offerings to the spiritual. These poems answer the plea of Yeats's spirits ('We are starved') and give them what they crave, depicting the particulars of human appetite and the way each 'peculiar and appalling hunger' unfolds. The scope of these poems is dizzying; they echo and glitter and sear as they, against all odds, give us a'world [that] is/suddener than any idea about the world.' We Are Starved is unabashed and unflinching, and it is deeply, exquisitely satisfying." -Mary Szybist, author of Granted Mountain West Poetry Series Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
We British: An Epic In Poetry
by Andrew Marr‘This book includes some of the greatest of our poetry. I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now.’
We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Corde, Anzaldua, and the Poetry of Witness
by C. SteeleThrough an examination of the poetry of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, We Heal From Memory paints a vivid picture of how our culture carries a history of traumatic violence - child sexual abuse, the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality under slavery, the transmission of violence through generations, and the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories through colonization. According to Cassie Premo Steele, the poetry of Sexton, Lorde, and Anzaldúa allows us to witness and to heal from such disparate traumatic events.
We Remain Traditional (Mountain West Poetry Series)
by Sylvia ChanIn We Remain Traditional, Sylvia Chan juxtaposes the elegy, the conflict, and the brashness of a relationship that summons wild musicality in its love and frustration. Through the speaker and Adam, the beloveds offer thirty-two consolations for the gendered history of Chinese American women—a break and affirmation of their traditions. What saves these two characters is their music—a peace treaty for the book’s form or “fractured paradise,” a language that protects and protests their bodies in Oakland, California. Marked by vulnerability and intimacy, Chan interrogates a young woman’s childhood sexual abuse. In the vein of Stacy Doris and Paul Celan, Chan asks, because she is a child of violent tradition, what is her visceral grief? This is a speaker who aspires to create universal experiences for her listeners, to transform jazz into narrative. This is a wild, beautiful, and ambitious first book: Chan refuses to apologize for the terror in her conviction and compassion. To choose a man who is behind her sexual, psychological, and political exploitation is to forgive his narcissism, aggression, and addiction. To love, simply, is to live unafraid of pushing boundaries and being happy.
We Sang Across The Sea: The Empire Windrush And Me
by Benjamin Zephaniah Onyinye IwuA powerfully moving and beautiful picture book about the voyage of HMT Empire Windrush from national treasure, Benjamin Zephaniah.