Recommendations based on "Melancholy"

Sylvia Plath was one of the defining voices of twentieth-century poetry, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry. Though she published just one collection in her lifetime, The Colossus, and a novel, The Bell Jar, it was following her death in 1963 that her work began to garner the wider audience that it deserved. The manuscript that she left behind, Ariel, was published in 1965 under the editorship of her former husband, Ted Hughes, as were two later volumes, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, which helped to make Sylvia Plath a household name. Hughes's careful curation of Plath's work extended to a Collected Poems and a Selected Poems in the 1980s, which remain in print today and stand testimony to the 'profound respect' that Frieda Hughes said her father had for her mother's work. It was not until the publication of a 'restored' Ariel in 2004 that readers were able to appraise Plath's own selection and arrangement of her work. This edition of the poems, chosen by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, offers a fresh selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry to stand in parallel to the existing editions. Introduced with an inviting preface, the book is essential reading for those new to and already familiar with the work of this most extraordinary poet.

From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963. 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the Observer This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series with five other cherished poets, including Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight' SCOTSMAN'One of the best poets we have' MATT HAIG'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPESTThe bestselling collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told MeFrom Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.'The inimitable words of poet/goddess Hollie McNish once again hold up honest, damn funny and refreshing takes on the everydayness of our lives . . . Never have we needed her more' STYLIST'Hollie always articulates exactly how I feel' CHARLY COX'A tribute to life itself' RED

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

A dazzling collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle).A collection by the much praised poet whose second book The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition."True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance,” wrote Alexander Pope. “The dance,” in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet’s ear and a poet’s grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work—and enables readers, as only she can, to “enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure.”With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATUREA remarkable, graceful collection from one of Europe’s most prominent and celebrated poets.In these 100 poems, Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes."

Winner of the 2025 New England Book Award for PoetryA major poet and literary critic leads an aesthetic adventure through poems about queer experience, by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, nonbinary, gender fluid, and more.A groundbreaking anthology edited by acclaimed poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems brings together fifty-one works encompassing the wide range of queer and trans verse after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since that galvanizing moment, poetry has served as both a vehicle for queer liberation and a witness to its sometimes fragile, sometimes ebullient flourishing, across the world.The poems in this anthology represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture’s recent evolutions. Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise—poets widely known and poets who deserve to be—share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves.Each piece is paired with a concise, eye-opening essay in Burt’s trademark style, with verve and an inimitable literary ear. A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.