Gift Guide for Poetry Lovers

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This Christmas, our Booksellers have been busy curating gifting guides to suit all. Whether you're buying for that cousin who lives to travel, a Cricket obsessed uncle; looking for the perfect gift for little ones, big ones or difficult ones, we've got you covered.

Presenting our Gift Guide for Poetry Lovers:

Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Anonymous

From the creator of the beloved @PoetryIsNotaLuxury Instagram account, a gorgeous poetry anthology that is a gift and a guide for readers through every season of life. In Summer, you’ll find lush landscapes and love poems for weddings and anniversaries, alongside expressions of joy and exhilaration. Autumn ushers in nostalgic poems about home and family and friendship, nesting and gratitude. Turn to Winter should you require lyrics about loneliness or an ode to comfort. Spring is packed full of verse celebrating new beginnings and all that the future might hold.

Poems & Prayers

Matthew McConaughey

From the Academy Award-winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Greenlights comes an inspiring, faith-filled, and often hilarious collection of personal poetry and prayers about navigating the rodeo of life and chasing down the original dream, belief.

A Christmas Ghost Story

Carol Ann Duffy (author), Vivien Mildenberger (illustrator)

It’s Christmas Eve in London’s financial district. A billionaire in his penthouse suite is visited by the ghost of Sarah Whitehead, the grief-stricken nun who has haunted the Bank of England for hundreds of years. What follows is a spellbinding journey through the night and around the globe as the ghost shows the billionaire the human suffering on which his excessive wealth depends. A gorgeously illustrated tale for our times with all the magic of Dickens, reminding us that love is the greatest treasure of all.

Rhyme and Reason

Mark Forsyth

Some people worry that they don't appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn't written to be appreciated, it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people. Rhyme & Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, and into the heart of Byromania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British psyche. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings, it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

What Remains

Hannah Arendt (author), Dr Samantha Rose Hill (editor and translator), Genese Grill (translator)

Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth century’s foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetry—especially that of Dickinson, Goethe and Lowell—informed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems. In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography. For nearly forty years after her death, these poems remained hidden among the archives of the Library of Congress, until 2011, when they were rediscovered by scholar and translator Samantha Rose Hill. Now, for the first time in English, Hill and Genese Grill present Arendt’s poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York’s Upper West Side.

A History of England in 25 Poems

Catherine Clarke

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. A History of England in 25 Poems is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Catherine Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

Virgin

Hollie McNish

In this highly anticipated collection of poetry, Hollie McNish unpicks the role this word has played in her own life, as well as others, with her trademark mix of humour, fury and compassion. Whether considering if Mary was a fan of her own nick-name, to rejoicing her annual excitement in ice cream vans, to looking back on how ridiculously she ate creamy mashed potato with her family after apparently 'losing' her own virginity, she examines in her own inimitable way the tracks this concept makes throughout so many minds, and the possibilities of freedom. At times hilarious, at times harrowing, always hopeful - a poetic love letter against the more nefarious effects of purity culture packed with stacks of honeycomb, hand holds and early morning light.

Spells

Sarah Shin (editor), Rebecca Tamás (editor)

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe. Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

Tove Ditlevsen (author), Sophia Hersi Smith (translator), Jennifer Russell (translator)

While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry until the end of her life. This new selection offers English readers a chance to explore her brilliant, surprising verse across nearly four decades of writing. In this playful, mournful, witty collection, little girls stand tip-toe inside adult bodies, achievements in literature and lethargy are unflinchingly listed, and lovers come and go like the seasons. Gorgeously translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, with an introduction by Olga Ravn, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die cements Ditlevsen as one of the twentieth century's most creative writers.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney (author), Bernard O'Donoghue (editor), Dr Rosie Lavan (editor), Matthew Hollis (editor)

This is the long-awaited, definitive edition of Seamus Heaney's poetry. It encompasses all the poems Heaney published in his lifetime as well as the small number that appeared after his death: twelve single volumes, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Human Chain (2010), and those poems published in pamphlets, journals and magazines or with limited circulation. In addition, the book includes a selection of unpublished material chosen by the poet's family. It is a body of work that, in its entirety, resounds with the 'lyrical beauty and ethical depth' cited by the Nobel committee: poems 'which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.' Critical introductions to each collection and notes that illuminate the history and development of the poems make this the essential volume for admirers of Heaney's work.