In this selection of poems, the poet explores how every room has its own silences, its own memories and secrets. She speaks of the quiet, gnawing loneliness of hotel rooms in 'Sleeping in hotels', of the ache of longing and how sometimes 'love is in the going away'. She also does not steer away from what is not said, from the silences between words, and how anger can spark 'the taste of blood never too far ... eyes watchful / heavy as bruises'. It is an eloquent, tender collection of poetry, affirming Baderoon as one of the most exciting new voices in South African writing.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller. 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers' Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness. Tennessee Williams's steamy and shocking landmark drama, recreated as the immortal film starring Marlon Brando, is one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed A Streetcar Named Desire, you might like The Glass Menagerie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny' Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather 'One of the greatest American plays' Observer

Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, Dixon's fifth poetry collection gestures towards D.H. Lawrence's iconic Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Dixon's gaze takes in Syrian roses, an abundance of apricots in Santa Fe, the memory of a dancing friend; bats, bees, tortoises, snakes, the generous body of a whale. Threaded throughout is the beautiful complexity and vulnerability of the planet, and the joy and difficulty of making art, as each poem becomes its own vivid testament to the natural world.

Eloquent and elegant voices come together in the many dialects of the human heart. They succinctly describe, sculpt and expose the layers of everyday existence. We find love, beauty, reverie and simplicity running alongside pathos and sorrow, expressed on rural, urban, domestic and wild settings. Seen as a whole, the anthology exposes the amazing life-scaffolding that poetry offers us.

A rich anthology that illustrates the enduring narrative of war in Africa. Military strategists, commanders, warriors, conscripts and seasoned fighters come together from diverse battle landscapes to voice the horror & pathos of war. Around them chorus the haunting laments of war-widows, survivors & those who bury the dead.

This new anthology of Afrikaans poems accompanied by their English translations is an extended and revised edition of Afrikaans Poems with English Translations, edited by A.P. Grové and C.J.D. Harvey and originally published in 1962. Grové and Harvey's anthology gained a certain prominence in its time on which this anthology aims to build. It will also be a continuation of a specific tradition in Afrikaans literature, namely to collate the best and at the same time the most representative poems in an anthology. The aim with this edition was to produce a concise and compact anthology of a hundred of the best poems in Afrikaans; as a result of the near impossibility of such a task the editors ended up including a hundred and thirteen poems.
This selection will provide the reader with a window on Afrikaans poetry and give some impression of the vibrancy of Afrikaans literature as a whole: it is a literature thematically and structurally grounded in Africa, but at the same time in a variety of international literatures and poetic traditions.

Alexa, what is there to know about love? is a wonderful collection of poems about love in all its forms, covering everything from romantic love to familial love, to long-distance love, and even love on the internet. The collection also features poems about the true passions for many booklovers, reading and literature, and the odd one about the subject causing many of us heartbreak: politics. With titles like 'Hold My Hand While We Jump Off This Cliff' and 'Remembrance of Things Pasta', there's something for even the most jaded romantic within these pages. The perfect, witty gift for Valentine's and beyond.

**Shortlisted for the 2022 Felix Dennis Prize**
Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyonce's Lemonade and Black Is King. With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Each reader will come away changed.

The taboos within the tidal moods of the menopause are described with an anger and a verbal intensity that are uniquely Krog's. Close relationships are searingly explored, occasionally in a confrontational way, more often searching for resolution. In the final meditative section, Table Mountain, a looming, symbolic and androgynous godhead is contemplated as an abiding presence and witness to the transience of human life. These dramatic, even reckless poems, reaffirm Antjie Krog's status and bring an altogether new and unique energy to South African English-language poetry. Antjie Krog's iconic status as one of South Africa s most popular and critically acclaimed poets began when she was eighteen, with her first collection, Dogter van Jefta (1970). Almost four decades later, this very different collection will confirm her reputation with poems that blur and ravage the boundaries between the lyrical and confessional, the private and public.

Set on the Swartkops madflats, just outside Port Elizabeth, the play deals with two squatters. They are on a journey with all their worldly possessions after their shack was bulldozed.

Including 'The Hill We Climb,' the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, this luminous poetry collection by Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these seventy poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you might like Williams's The Glass Menagerie, also published in Penguin Modern Classics.
'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself ... he is, quite simply, indispensable' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

The Roman poet CATULLUS (84-54 BCE) ranks among the great lyric poets, one whose writing has echoed down the centuries and remains as relevant and interesting today as it was in its own time. His poems are fashioned out of intense feeling that still thrills, moves, shocks, entertains and delights. This selection of poems from his small extant body of work aims to show how - whether he composes a tender love lyric to his mistress or a boyfriend, an abusive attack on a politician or literary rival, an address to an intimate friend, a vitriolic or obscene satire, or an occasional piece on some small incident of social life - Catullus is deeply engaged with his subject, a writer passionate about his craft, and fully in touch with the centuries of Greek and Roman poetry that came before him.

A poem can . . .
Comfort · Challenge · Be a friend
Stretch your vocabulary
Help you sleep · Break the ice
Find you a lover · Be utter nonsense
Console · Make you laugh - or cry
For every moment in your life there is a poem.
In Dancing by the Light of the Moon we have a remarkable collection of over 250 best-loved poems in the English-speaking world.
Allow Gyles Brandreth to be your guide to not only the wonders of poetry - and there are many - but also its practical uses in everyday life.
Whether seeking some words to reflect your mood, wanting to celebrate or mark an occasion or simply looking for lines of comfort and joy in difficult times, this collection has everything for readers of poetry both young and old, novices and old hands alike, will love and return to again and again.