(Part 2) Best british & irish poetry books according to redditors
We found 121 Reddit comments discussing the best british & irish poetry books. We ranked the 49 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Grouping them in threes is intriguing and I think you're on to something.
I've always included all of their albums and grouped them in pairs, with the latter album serving as a sort of companion piece or further exploration of the more original material on the former. I've always looked at it that way based primarily on the changes that coincided with their live tours, but I've had to make a couple of exceptions.
Bear with me: Boy/October is an obvious pairing right from the start. Under a Blood Red Sky also obviously the live album from the War tour. Then came Unforgettable Fire and Wide Awake In America. The Rattle and Hum film and album is an obvious extrapolation of The Joshua Tree album and tour. They "dreamed it all up again" and reinvented their music (and tour) with Achtung Baby, then recorded Zooropa while still on tour and merely expanded the whole ZooTV concept. So far so good.
Pop is where things get a little tricky and my whole "Albums In Pairs" theory needs an exception, though I often think Pop and its reception are something of an exception in U2's oeuvre anyway. Influenced by a lot of the club mixes from the Achtung/Zooropa days (which they liked), and with some songs leftover from the Zooropa recording sessions, they decided to take ZooTV and make it even bigger with PopMart. They were ultimately unhappy with the result and reaction was mixed, so there was never a companion piece or further exploration of what they were trying to do with Pop. I suppose you could throw in the fact that this is where they decided to release their Best of: 1980-1990 album and remind fans they hadn't completely lost their freaking minds as a kind of follow-up (and for the record I still dig Pop, but I'm glad they remixed and properly finished some of the songs like Gone.)
ATYCLB and HTDAAB can and should be grouped together largely based on the similarities of both tours, as well as the sonic and lyrical themes that run through both albums. But then I have to make another exception with No Line On The Horizon because it has no follow-up or companion album, and the 360 Tour was a behemoth that hearkened back to PopMart but was never expanded with material from a second album.
Which brings us to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and with titles obviously inspired by William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I think we can assume that there will not be a third album with a similar title, or an expansion of the I+E Tour. Therefore, if my theory holds up, the next album and tour will be completely different. Unless they do Songs of Ascent, in which case your groupings in threes might start to make a lot more sense.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, NLOTH and the 360 Tour could be considered a follow up to Pop and an expansion of the PopMart tour, they just leapfrogged ATYCLB/HTDAAB to get to it. That's if you want to stretch my theory a little to avoid making exceptions.
For a start:
It's the Winter Solstice, so that's probably why your searching isn't turning up anything. You are so thoughtful to do this for her! What to get her obviously depends on her personality and interests, so if you could tell us a little bit more about her in general that would probably help.
Not knowing what kind of things she already has does make it difficult to recommend things, but I'm going to link you some books that are of general interest but not the kind of thing that most folks already have in a basic library, if that makes sense.
The Return of the Light and In the Light of the Moon are two charming little books full of stories from around the world about the Winter Solstice and the full moon, respectively.
The Charge of the Goddess - The Poetry of Doreen Valiente is a small volume of poetry by one of the most influential women in Wicca.
The Circle Within is a thoughtful, down-to-earth guide for better incorporating Wicca into one's daily life. Very helpful.
The Earth Path is perfect for the ecologically-minded. It shows witches how to really get out in nature and experience it.
A Book of Pagan Prayer is a plain little book packed with a huge variety of prayers and information on creating them.
On the subject of writers block -
I thinks it's reading that cures it. I go through periods of writing loads; on the bus, on the train, at work, just after sex, on the toilet, in bed, in the kitchen, everywhere, all the time. I'll hit a point and my output will slow to a drizzle, then I read.
I've just started buying new books and getting into different poets that i've not read before, and it's great. I'll read a bunch of stuff, a lot of it will be interesting, but without impact - then, i'll found something that'll click and make me think 'I want to do something like that!', and the writing period will start again.
I guess this also crosses over into inspiration.
the other thing that's really spurred this all on, is that i've started running an open mic poetry night. Each time i'll read a couple of my own, as well as a couple of poems that I've enjoyed recently. 'Her anxiety' by W.B.Yeats, 'The applicant' by Sylvia Plath & 'Meditation on the A30' by John Betjeman are all poems that i've really enjoyed reading recently. It's that I have to come up with new content every month, to keep it fresh, that helps me to keep my mind active. I try and remember as many as I can off the top of my head, but my head is usally filled with all sorts of other things than I need to remember, like what the point of all this rambling was ...
AH YES! Read more poetry, read shit, read things you've never read before and all that kinda stuff. Read 'Crow' by Ted hughes, you can find some not-too-expensive paperbacks on that shit-heap, Amazon. 'Crow' is portrayed as some kind of trickster death god, that's been influencing the world from the beginning - well worded violence and insanity, as to be expected from Ted, with good humour thrown in their too.
Plus, I read a great one from Toby Martinez de las rivas the other day. It was all about meeting eyes with your lover, whilst they're having a pee.
Harper Collins has been coming out with Deluxe Editions of all of Tolkien's books, in a matched set with individual slipcases. I have two of the set and they are fantastic. The binding and paper quality are impeccable and they look great. In my opinion, they're the best versions of his books out there.
Lord of The Rings
The Hobbit
The Silmarillion
The Children of Hurin
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
Tales from the Perilous Relm
[Unfinished Tales](http://www.tolkien.co.uk/product/9780007542925/Unfinished+Tales+(Deluxe+Slipcase+Edition)
Re your edit, centuries of political verse backs you up. OP might have been living under a rock.
See: Faber Book of Political Verse.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0571136672/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_SRxuzbM4V3C5E
You need to do research on your time period if you want to do that. Start with sources like wikipedia and just figure out what century you're interested in. As another commenter has pointed out, the period is called "medieval" and Shakespeare came later.
In fact, during the Medieval period, people spoke Middle English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English
There are some works in Middle English that still exist and are relatively easy to find. Works by Chaucer will probably be the easiest to find. There are abridged versions, but if you want to know what Middle English actually sounded like, don't buy one. The Book of the Duchess isn't too long.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Duchess-Geoffrey-Chaucer/dp/1517564433
I'm not suggesting you spell things as Chaucer does, but at least give it a read to get a sense for what's accurate to your time period.
How about this guy? http://www.amazon.com/Poems-Iain-Banks/dp/1408705877
Hi cruxclaire, I used Amazon's createspace publishing services to self-publish my work. I intend on releasing a new book soon, but this is my first I published about a month ago: https://www.amazon.com/Introspection-Brenden-M-Norwood/dp/1541222660
It's free to use, and even though the royalties kinda suck it's more the experience of having something you've written in your own hands that makes it all worth it. I recommend if you do decide to self-publish that you format your collection the size of the book you want (I recommend the Statement option which I believe is 5.5"by 8.5" or the other way around) so you don't have to reformat at the end.
Even though I know I'll never really be famous or anything, self-publishing has really improved my self confidence as a writer :D And I feel that if the opportunity to get seriously published ever presented itself, I'd at least have a few collections of my work to show. All in all, createspace's process is easy, free, and well worth your time. Would recommend starting there!
It's not quite what I thought it would be.
Most of his poems are available in some form online, but I highly recommend this volume: https://smile.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Fragments-Volumes-II/dp/0701188413
The editor has gone back to the manuscripts, as well as letters from Owen to his mother, siblings, and other poets (notably Siegfried Sassoon) and given a comprehensive two-volume set containing every known poem and fragment, as well as drafts, in chronological order. You can actually viscerally feel Owen's resolve steeling as he matures as a poet, reading this alongside "Collected Letters" - I don't understand why Owen isn't really taught at all here in the USA...
It's not really about King Arthur although it does cover a knight from the Round Table. I'm not sure about ME + modern translation texts, but a quick look on Amazon has a few.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Whymenfightameth00russuoft.djvu/145
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Men-Fight-Abolishing-International/dp/1440036594/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347402049&sr=8-1&keywords=why+men+fight+a+method
The entire entry is a cut and paste, found the book myself.
If you want contemporary Catholic poetry, check out this book, The Walled Garden. I read it last week and it's amazing.
Glad you enjoyed it! yeah, Carol Ann Duffy is a great poet. She's been Britain's Poet Laureate for the last decade! The first Scott and the first woman to do so! You'll likely enjoy a collection of her poems in The World's Wife, which retells many classic stories with a tragi-comedic, feminist flair. She's recently stepped down from the laureateship, but not before her publishing her latest collection Sincerity. In it, she goes hard on recent political issues.
thepoeticunderground by Erin Hanson
I don't know if it's exactly similar, but her poems are good.
Love love this!!!
Who is e.h.??
Edit: answered my own question.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1326060805/ref=sr_isbn_r?keywords=9781326060800
A collection of Samual Beckett Shorts anyone want it?
I love Wendy Cope and she has some good collections - Family Values and Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis ae two of my favourites
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Pocket Edition
by Lord Byron
US $ 5.99
AUS $14.65
This paperback edition is made to fit most pockets and formatted for a smaller page. Makes a great traveling companion.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a classic narrative poem in four parts. It describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.
Byron, through Childe Harold, regrets his wasted early youth and so re-designs himself on this pilgrimage, which takes him through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811. Many of the events are said to be auto-biographical, with Byron himself initially hesitating to publish the first two cantos of the poem as he felt it revealed too much of himself.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1717753922
https://www.bookdepository.com/Childe-Harolds-Pilgrimage-George-Gordon-Byron/9780995352049