Books with title Selected Poems

The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath's poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers.

And all men kill the thing they loveBy all let it be heard,Some do it with a bitter look.Some with a flattering word.The coward does it with a kiss.The brave man with a sword! --from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"Although best known for his sparkling and witty plays, Oscar Wilde also distinguished himself as a prolific poet. From "Ravenna," a prize-winning poem he wrote in college, to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," penned during his time in prison for homosexual acts, Wilde created a fascinating body of verse. More than 35 of his works appear in this excellent collection, and they reveal the scope and brilliance of his writing. Many were inspired by his time in Italy, including "Sonnet: On hearing the Dies Irae sung in the Sistine Chapel." Other brief pieces, called Impressions, capture the feeling of a moment: "Le Jardin" evokes a garden as winter descends. Still more honor his fellow poets, including "On the Sale of Keats' Love Letters." An enlightening anthology that Wilde lovers will treasure.

E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Allan Ahlberg's five poetry books, written over a period of twenty-five years – Please Mrs Butler, Heard it in the Playground, Friendly Matches, The Mighty Slide and The Mysteries of Zigomar – have delighted generations of children and received many accolades and prizes. Allan has sifted through them and chosen a collection to delight and entrance a new generation of readers and their parents. Here are all the trials and tribulations of childhood, embracing school, quarrels, friendships, football and storytelling from a much-loved author and poet.Charlotte Voake's black-and-white illustrations enchance the charm of this handsome and definitive collection.

KAY BOYLE has long been known to serious readers of modern poetry, and this collection, representing the best of her poems, will be a welcome event. Admirers who know her prose will discover a new dimension of her singular talent, for she is a writer with an instinctive ear for the music of language and a penetrating eye that sees with a poet's vision. This volume includes seventeen new poems, in which Miss Boyle's lyric voice shows its increasing power; a selection of moving, evocative poems written in the twenties and thirties; as well as an excerpt from her long wartime poem "American Citizen." In Collected Poems is to be found the intensity of experience which only poetry can capture and which has always fired Miss Boyle's creative imagination, providing her with a means of revealing herself and of tapping, in new and different ways, her rich subconscious.