Chris Emery (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Chris Emery was born in Manchester in 1963 and studied painting and printmaking in Leeds. He is Publishing Director of Salt in Cambridge, England. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Age, Jacket, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, PN Review and The Rialto. A first full-length collection, Dr. Mephisto (Arc Publications, 2002), his latest collection is Radio Nostalgia (Arc Publications, 2006). He is also the author or a bestselling writer's guide, 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell (Salt Publishing, 2006). He lives in Great Wilbraham with his wife, three children and various other animals.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714544
ISBN:  9781844714544
Author:  Chris Emery
Title:  Poets in View
Series:  Anthologies
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  YABC4
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-08
Extent:  112pp
Height:  246 mm
Width:  189 mm
Thickness:  13 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future, sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees
                     —William Blake

This unique full-colour anthology gathers together for the first time significant portraits of fifty major British and Irish poets from four centuries along with a classic poem by each writer. It ranges chronologically from Sir Thomas Wyatt born in 1503 to Rudyard Kipling born in 1865, and every poem (like every portrait) has been chosen for its insight, importance and beauty, they can all be repeatedly read, perhaps memorized and certainly treasured.

Each poet gathered here offers you an intimate view from their time, dealing with love, loss, grief, hope and mortality, which will find echoes and reverberations in your own. This is the power of poetry, the only art which allows us to look into the heart of the past whilst trying to understand the present and imagining our possible futures.

From out of our shared literary and visual history, the history of the British Isles and Ireland, our poetry transcends the generations to offer us the guidance of art and the written and visual life of our island nations.

Table of contents:
Introduction
Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503-42)
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99)
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
John Donne (1572-1631)
William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649)
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Sir William Davenant (1606-68)
John Milton (1608-74)
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-74)
John Dryden (1631-1700)
Aphra Behn (1640-89)
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80)
Anne Wharton (1659-85)
William Congreve (1670-1729)
John Gay (1685-1732)
Alexander Pope and his dog, Bounce (1688-1744)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
Thomas Gray (1716-71)
Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74)
William Cowper (1731-1800)
William Blake (1757-1827)
Robert Burns (1759-96)
Mary Ann Lamb (1764-1867)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Mary Robinson (1783-84)
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Clare (1793-1864)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)
Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
Robert Browning (1812-89)
Emily Bronte (1818-48)
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
George Meredith (1828-1909)
Christina Rossetti (1830-94)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Introduction

Poetry is an art of navigation, of intersection and collision, where writers may set their minds against the age and celebrate or analyse love, landscape and mortality. The language of poetry is often encoded, ambiguous and loaded, it gives us all access to the constraints of the imagination in an age, yet allows us to liberate the poem from its time. Every encounter offers up new discoveries.

It is also a visionary art, a tense combination of words, their music, and our minds in seeing the world for what it is, making it from silence.

This introductory anthology gives you fifty classic poems which can be repeatedly read, memorized and treasured. Each poet offers you a view from their time and place which will find echoes and reverberations your own. This is the power of poetry, the only art I know which allows you to look into the heart of the past whilst watching the present and imagining our possible future. In a sense, from out of that profound and immeasurable silence, poetry, the breath of art, transcends time to become the visible life of the mind. Without it, we would never understand what it is to be human.

In addition, this anthology offers, for the first time, accompanying paintings, photographs and engravings of the very poets themselves?—?each of them significant artistic works in their own right?—?so that you can actually see who wrote each piece?—?whose words you are reading right here in these pages.

It strikes me, that looking at poets in this way, seeing their expressions, their attire and posture captured, is deeply revealing and even mesmerizing?—?so this is also a book to stare at and wonder.

My chronological selection ranges from Sir Thomas Wyatt through to Rudyard Kipling, or, if you prefer, from the early sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, and the reader will find thoughts common to us all. It never ceases to surprise me how humanity remains consistent in its fears and dreams. However, poetry allows us to transcend and transform our sensibility and, indeed, to transcend the confines of a single life. It quite literally multiplies the mind.

I hope you enjoy your encounters here, enough to seek out more work by these writers and their contemporaries?—?enough to let these writers become part of your own experience, your own navigation system, more intimate and personal than any technology, and ultimately more useful to you, too. With poets you gain access to the geography of your mind?;?there’s no limit to that landsape.
Chris Emery
Great Wilbraham