The Sonnets And Other Love Poems

The greatest sonnets ever written, by the greatest poet and playwright in the English language

'James Anthony has done something I would have confidently stated to be impossible. He has "translated" Shakespeare’s sonnets and he has done so with an insolent, loveable charm ... A dazzling success’ – Stephen Fry Rediscover the greatest love poetry ever written Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? You’re more delightful, always shining strong; High winds blow hard on flowering buds in May, And summer never seems to last that long... Shakespeare’s sonnets are some of the nation’s favourite lines of verse, but the Elizabethan language can make it difficult to really understand them. Many guides offer to clarify the meaning, but lose the magic of the words by explaining them away. James Anthony has done something boldly different. He has rewritten the whole series of poems as sonnets using modern language, while retaining the rhythm and rhyme patterns that gives them such power. In doing so he breathes new life into the original poems and opens them up for a modern readership, demystifying Shakespeare’s eternal poetry with provocative new translations and delightful new lines. Presented as an attractive book with the original sonnets facing their new translations, this is a stunning collection of beautiful love poems, made new.

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

A collection of poems draws on everything from nursery rhymes to the classics to reveal the poetry hidden within ordinary speech.

“Hailed as the Prince of Poets of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard composed a rich body of love poetry that has captivated audiences and challenged scholars for many centuries through its undulating, liquid forms and powerful metamorphic imagination. Blending oneiric fantasy and mythological profusion . . . this poetry appeals to readers steeped in the classical tradition and receptive to an esthetic of vitality and abundance rather than the brooding self-pity more characteristic of Petrarchism. This new translation captures the essence of a poetic legacy whose exuberance and emotion can still be deeply felt today.” —Eric MacPhail, author of Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress “Ronsard is a towering figure in the history of European poetry, but his work is little read these days other than in the form of single-line quotations. Henry Weinfield has made a substantial selection that reflects different aspects of Ronsard’s immense output from his earliest love-sonnets to his death-bed meditations. Translating sixteenth-century French poetry into English verse while remaining close to the original is a formidable task, but Weinfield’s sensitivity and ingenuity are equal to the challenge: he has found an idiom which both retains the flavor of the Renaissance and remains fluent and transparent to modern ears. The French text is provided on facing pages so that even those unfamiliar with early modern French will be able to explore the original. This is an important act of cultural transference that will give Ronsard’s extraordinary poetic imagination a new lease of life for readers of the twenty-first century.” —Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College “First came Henry Weinfield’s irreplaceable versions of Mallarmé in 1994, and now comes a second masterpiece of translation with this new selection of Ronsard. Weinfield has a supernatural talent for rendering the most difficult poets into clear, cadenced, and beautiful English. The man is a wizard.” — Paul Auster, Editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

An enlightening and entertaining collection of the most esteemed love poems in the English canon, retold in contemporary language everyone can understand James Anthony has long enjoyed poetry with a strict adherence to beat, rhythm, and rhyming patterns, which he likens to the very best pop songs. This drew him to the rewarding 14-line structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet he often found their abstract language frustratingly unintelligible. One day, out of curiosity, he rewrote Sonnet 18—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day—line-by-line, in the strict five-beat iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the original, but in a contemporary language a modern reader could easily understand. The meaning and sentiment—difficult to spot, initially—came to life, revealing new intricacies in the workings of Shakespeare's heart. And so, James embarked on a full-time, year-long project to rewrite all 154 of the Bard's eternal verses creating SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS, RETOLD. This collection of masterful reinterpretations brilliantly demystifies and breathes new life into Shakespeare's work, demonstrating the continued resonance of a playwright whose popularity remains over 400 years after his death. Now, the passion, heartbreak, deception, reconciliation, and mortality of Shakespeare’s originals can be understood by all, without the need to cross reference to an enjoyment-sapping study-guide. Coming with a foreword by Stephen Fry, this is a stunning collection of beautiful love poems made new.

"The first comprehensive collection of Davidman's poetry, A Naked Tree includes the poems that originally appeared in her Letter to a Comrade (1938), forty other published poems, and more than two hundred previously unpublished poems that came to light in a remarkable 2010 discovery"--Publisher's description.