U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: 'Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only...

Jurassic UndergroundBy: R. V. BaileyA desolate location in southeastern Wyoming, named Como Bluff, has a reputation as one of the best late Jurassic dinosaur fossil localities in the world. Late Jurassic is the time period from about 160 to 145 million years ago. The location was given the name Como Bluff in the 1800’s when the Union Pacific Railway was being built through the area.In about 1865, examples of huge fossilized bones were sent to certain eastern US unive...

Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose TremainThe effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subje...

If it’s time for a rhyme, or you need a satiric lyric, the Collins Rhyming Dictionary is the fastest and easiest way to refine your line.The most accessible way to find the rhyme you need. Other rhyming dictionaries are characterised by the use of obscure words for padding, subsections for disyllabic and trisyllabic rhymes, and reverse phonetic order – but we avoid such complications and, as a result, have the most practical rhyming book available.The most satisfactory rhym...

Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsThe New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied....

Love, angels, addiction and death; they're all here in My First Colouring Book, a collection of short stories from award-winning novelist Lloyd Jones. Themed on all the colours of the rainbow - and a few extra - these stories and essays paint a picture of criss-crossing lives. They are spoken by an unexpected variety of voices: a young girl has adventures in the night, a surgeion becomes a shepherd; a middle-aged man seeks love for the last time. And his travel essays, sent from the compas...

Building on previous themes and introducing some new techniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions—all tempered by the use of humor.

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEADThis book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision.MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poem...

Philip Larkin's second collection, The Less Deceived was published by The Marvell Press in 1955, and now appears for the first time in Faber covers.The eye can hardly pick them outFrom the cold shade they shelter in,Till wind distresses tail and mane;Then one crops grass, and moves about- The other seeming to look on -And stands anonymous again.from 'At Grass'

Magma poetry magazine’s summer 2014 issue, Magma 59, is on the theme of breaks.Editors Roberta James and Alex Price have selected over 65 new poems that reach in to bring a new look on a familiar scene, take us to places we have not been before, or show us new ways to be in our sometimes broken but beautiful world. After poems of great delicacy and eggshells came others of metal and grind. Poems which could make us stride forward, unshakeable and unbreakable are co...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light a...