Expecting Miracles by Peter Bland

$22.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Near Fine

Poems of love, loss, comic insight and sensory delight. At 81, Peter Bland’s new work continues to dazzle and amuse. PN Review praises his ‘gentle but powerful assurance’ and Poetry London the ‘intoxicating feeling’ his poetry evokes.

Off the Shelf - A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse by Carol Ann Duffy

$23.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

In Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has commissioned a selection of the UK's most loved and lauded poets to each write a poem in celebration of books and bookshops--the worlds they hold, the freedoms they promise, and the memories they evoke. From a basem ent of forgotten books to the shelves of a cramped Welsh arcade, from the poetry corner of the local bookstore to the last bookshop standing in a post-apocalyptic world, these are poems that pay tribute to all the places that house the stories we treasure. With poems from Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish Makar Jackie Kay, National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, as well as Clive James, Michael Longley, Don Paterson, Patience Agbabi, and many more, this beautiful anthology is a heart-warming reminder of how books nourish us, save us, and inspire us. ...Show more

Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: near fine

The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller Winner of The GoodReads Choice Award for Poetry 2017 From Rupi Kaur, the bestselling author of Milk and Honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. Illustrated by Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising and b looming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of lifesaid my motheras she held me in her arms as i weptthink of those flowers you plantin the garden each yearthey will teach youthat people toomust wiltfallrootrisein order to bloom ...Show more

Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud by Clive James (Editor)

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Essentially, this is Clive James' desert island poems: a selection of his favourite verse and a personal commentary on each.The Fire of Joy was the final book Clive James completed before his death in 2019. It takes its title from the French expression Feu de Joie, which refers to a military celebration when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another in a wave of continuous sound: it is a reminder that the regiment’s collective power relies on the individual, and vice versa.In this book, James has chosen a succession of English poems, exploding in sequence from Chaucer to the present day; they tell the story of someone writing something wonderful, and someone else coming along, reading it, and feeling impelled to write something even more wonderful. After a lifetime, these are the poems James found so good that he remembered them despite himself. In offering them to you, the main purpose of this book is to provide ammunition that will satisfy your urge to discover, learn and declaim verse.As well as his selection of poems, James offers a commentary on each: whether this is a biographical, historical or critical introduction to the poem, or a more personal anecdote about the role a particular poem has played in James’s life, these mini essays provide the joy of James’s enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. Full of the flashing fires of poems you will not be able to forget, this book will ignite your passion and leave you with a contagious crackle rattling in your ears. ...Show more

Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff

$28.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Series: Penguin Modern Classics

The moving portrayal of life in the trenches in WW1, now a new film from the director of Suite Francaise, starring Sam Clafin, Paul Bettany, Stephen Graham and Asa ButterfieldSet in the First World War, Journey's End is the story of a group of British officers on the front line, in a dugout in the trenc hes in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic.'Its unrelenting tension, and its regard for human decency in a vast world of human waste, are impressive and, even now, moving' Clive Barnes ...Show more

Sleeping on Horseback by Frances Samuel

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

'A hundred years are but a moment of sleep,' writes Po, still riding. In her first collection, Frances Samuel leads us into the lives of characters we have not met before in New Zealand poetry. A man with a snorkel trawls fountains for coins; a vending machine produces a sailboat; a zookeeper frees all of his animals; we look for our double so that we can join the ark before it sails. Each step forward clears a path of snow, and contemplates the question 'How do we get there?' These journeys, surreal as well as everyday, are mapped with an exuberant imagination and intelligence. ...Show more

The Yield by Sue Wootton

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energizing power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love. This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; ab out sowing, tending and reaping. Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest. ...Show more

Shakespeare's Sonnets (Popular Penguin) by William Shakespeare

$15.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Series: Popular Penguins

William Shakespeare's sonnets are a beautiful expression of a range of human emotions - from love to grief, anger, jealousy and lust. Including the instantly recognisable 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' as well as a range of other equally moving works, this compilation brings together the compl ete collection of all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets. ...Show more

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan

$35.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

National Anthem is a new poetry collection from award-winning journalist and writer Mohamed Hassan. It charts an intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and as k difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging. Mohamed Hassan was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. ...Show more

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi by Eugene Ostashevsky

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to make themselves understood by peop le indigenous to the island, had there been any. Eugene Ostashevsky's first large-scale project since The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, this new book pursues the themes of emigration, incomprehension, and the otherness of others in a far more complicated and persistent way than its predecessor. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretic, philosophical irony, and narratological handicaps, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi draws on early-modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, 1960s Russian folklore, old-school hip-hop, game theory, controversies of copyright, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, abbreviated as PI. ...Show more

Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell by Lawrence Durrell

$29.99 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Best-Loved Poems: A Treasury of Verse by Ana Sampson

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Best-Loved Poems collects the nation's favourite and the English language's best: poetry's greatest hits. From the classics of Wordsworth, Donne and Keats to such modern masters as Hughes, Heaney and Larkin, work from half a millennium of poetry resides in one beautiful anthology for readers to cherish and make their own. With well over 100 poems, arranged into themes of love, nature, childhood, war and family, and with poems offering time-tested wisdom and advice for all situations, your best-loved are sure to be within these pages - whether they're half-remembered nostalgia pieces or learnt by heart - ready to dip into and refer back to whenever and wherever you are. ...Show more