COUNTY Limerick is a place of kings and commoners. It is where Donn Fírinne, king of the Munster fairies, is said to have once roamed and where Sean na Scuab, a poor broom seller from the wrong side of the river, was chosen to be mayor of the city. It is a land filled with stories, poetry, music and drama.In these pages you can read about Sionainn, who was carried away by the flowing waters of the River Shannon; the bright and beautiful goddess Áine, the fairy queen, who knits the earth's green mantle below Lough Gur; Finn MacCool and his band of warri ors, the Fianna; the wise woman Joan Grogan and her ingenious cures; foolish Tadhg who outwitted a gang of thieves; and the poet-magician, Gearóid Iarla, on his horse with silver shoes.In this unique collection, storyteller Ruth Marshall recounts tales of mystery, music and magic from across the rich tapestry of the folklore of County Limerick.

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was an eccentric, reclusive poet, though born to a family of good standing within their Massachusetts community. She had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime, though posthumously her sister found a cache of nearly eighteen hundred, all of which have now been published. Emily's style was broke with the common forms of poetry at the time, and foreshadowed what was to come. Her work was harshly criticized when first published, but she is now considered one of the American greats.

In this'Song offerings', Tagore uses modernized images from classical Indian love poetry to symbolize his yearning to merge with the Supreme. So the mudstained traveller, the parched summer earth, the bride awaiting the return of her lord, the first monsoon shower, the flowers, the rivers and the conch are images which gain a mystical depth in these poems. Included in this edition is W.B. Yeats'Introduction to Tagore's English translation of the work.

Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), recipient of France's Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal, the Lotus Prize, and the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, is widely considered Palestine's most eminent poet. State of Siege was written while the poet himself was under siege in Ramallah during the Israeli invasion of 2002. An eloquent and impassioned response to political extremity, the collection was published to great acclaim in the Arab world. Munir Akash's translation, including an introduction exploring the rich mythology of these poems, presents the first book-length, bilingual edition of State of Siege to an English audience.

In Leaves of Grass, American poet Walt Whitman assembled most of his poetic works. Included in this collection are some of Whitman's most famous poems, including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "O Captain! My Captain!" The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855 and contained only twelve poems. Whitman kept revising his collection throughout his life; the final edition contains more than three hundred poems. This is an unabridged version of the poems from the final edition of Whitman's celebrated collection, published shortly before his death in 1892.

Jalaloddin Rumi's Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, or 'Spiritual Couplets', composed in the 13th Century, is a monumental work of poetry in the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. For centuries before his love poetry became a literary phenomenon in the West, Rumi's Masnavi had been revered in the Islamic world as its greatest mystical text. Drawing upon a vast array of characters, stories and fables, and deeply versed in spiritual teaching, it takes us on a profound and playful journey of discovery along the path of divine love, toward its ultimate goal of union with the source of all Truth. In Book Two of the Masnavi, the second of six volumes, we travel with Rumi toward an understanding of the deeper truth and reality, beyond the limits of the self. Alan Williams's authoritative new translation is rendered in highly readable blank verse and includes the original Persian text for reference. True to the spirit of Rumi's poem, this new translation establishes the Masnavi as one of the world's great literary achievements for a global readership. Translated with an introduction, notes and analysis by Alan Williams and including the Persian text edited by Mohammad Este'lami.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath's complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes. By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but--after 1956--all she wrote. -- Ted Hughes, from the Introduction

Along with writing comedic and dramatic plays, William Shakespeare was also a master poet. Using the sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), he composed 154 poems covering timeless themes of love, beauty, and mortality. The poems' subjects--the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet--have become nearly as famous as the sonnets themselves. While not the first to write poems in sonnet form, Shakespeare's sonnets are considered the most influential examples of this style. The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto; this is an unabridged collection of all of Shakespeare's iconic sonnets, including Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments"), and Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun").

The ancient Greek hymnic tradition translated beautifully and accessibly.  The hymn--as poetry, as craft, as a tool for worship and philosophy--was a vital art form throughout antiquity. Although the Homeric Hymns have long been popular, other equally important collections have not been readily accessible to students eager to learn about ancient poetry. In reading hymns, we also gain valuable insight into life in the classical world. In this collection, early Homeric Hymns of uncertain authorship appear along with the carefully wrought hymns of the great Hellenistic poet and courtier Callimachus; the mystical writings attributed to the legendary poet Orpheus, written as Christianity was taking over the ancient world; and finally, the hymns of Proclus, the last great pagan philosopher of antiquity, from the fifth century AD, whose intellectual influence throughout western culture has been profound. Greek Poems to the Gods distills over a thousand years of the ancient Greek hymnic tradition into a single volume. Acclaimed translator Barry B. Powell brings these fabulous texts to life in English, hewing closely to the poetic beauty of the original Greek. His superb introductions and notes give readers essential context, making the hymns as accessible to a beginner approaching them for the first time as to an advanced student continuing to explore their secrets. Brilliant illustrations from ancient art enliven and enrichen the experience of reading these poems.  

The first bilingual volume of poems by leading Irish twentieth-century poet Seán Ó Ríordáin In the mid-twentieth century, a new generation of poets writing in Irish emerged, led by the young Seán Ó Ríordáin, among others. Ó Ríordáin's work has stood the test of time well, and he continues to engage today's Irish readers and writers. This well-rounded selection of poems brings most of Ó Ríordáin's works to English-language readers for the first time. The poems appear in their original Irish alongside English translations by some of Ireland's leading poets. Also included for the first time in English is Ó Ríordáin's essay What Is Poetry?, considered an extraordinary touchstone of critical insight for poets and literary commentators. The volume reflects Ó Ríordáin's seven main concerns: poetry and its place in the artist's life; the plural self; the relationship between the individual and society; gender relations; the nature of animals; Ireland, its language and culture; and mortality.

This title looks at Thoreau's poetic language and the aesthetics of American nature writing. In this intriguing literary experiment, Ian Marshall presents a collection of nearly three hundred haiku that he extracted from Henry David Thoreau's ""Walden"" and documents the underlying similarities between Thoreau's prose and the art of haiku. Although Thoreau would never have encountered the Japanese haiku tradition, the way in which the most important ideas in Walden find expression in the most haiku like language suggests that Thoreau at Walden Pond and the haiku master Basho at his 'old pond' might have drunk at the same well. Walden and the tradition of haiku share an aesthetic that embodies ideas in natural images, dissolves boundaries between self and world, emphasizes simplicity, and honors both solitude and humble, familiar objects. Marshall examines each of these aesthetic principles and offers a relevant collection of 'found' haiku. In the second part of the book, he explains his process of finding the haiku in the text, breaking down each chapter of Walden to highlight the imagery and poetic language embedded in the most powerful passages. Marshall's exploration not only provides a fresh perspective on haiku, but also sheds new light on Thoreau's much-studied text and lays the foundation for a clearer understanding of the aesthetics of American nature writing.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.