Penguin Books Australia

  you feel with an ember in your mouth dreamt you were playing a stone trumpet a strange lament to accompany a cold ritual smashed souls with bullet holes threaded with wire strung up between this day and the next

The Best Australian Poetry series, now in its seventh year, is widely recognised as the most reliable guide to what is new and remarkable in Australian poetry.
Alan Wearne, guest editor of the 2009 volume, brings to this collection his endless inquisitiveness and his mastery of the infinite complexity of Australian social life.  His selection of 40 poems from Australia's print and online journals...

Described by Rabindranath Tagore as 'revelations of my true self', the poems and songs of Gitanjali established the writer's literary talent worldwide.  They include eloquent sonnets such as the famous 'Where the mind is without fear', intense explorations of love, faith and nature ('Light, oh where is the light?') and tender evocations of childhood ('When my play was with thee').

From the exquisite lyric ' To Helen ,' to the immortal masterpieces ' Annabel Lee,' 'The Bells, ' and ' The Raven,' The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates the author's gift for the form.

Penguin brings you the finest short verse by the greatest writers

A classic anthology of American poetry, from the colonial beginnings in the seventeenth century right through to the twentieth century. From Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman, from Emily Dickenson to Ai, this collection ranges widely across the American poetic spectrum.

Though Hafiz lived in the fourteenth century, his poems are still immensely  popular.  His wisdom, his expressive language and his deep reverence for beauty have made him a favourite poet of lovers, and especially of lovers of God.  Her Daniel Ladinsky explores with learned insight and a delicate hand Hafiz's exquisite verses.  He presents 365 poignant poems-including a section...

An epic masterpiece of world literature, in a magnificent new translation by one of the most acclaimed translators of our time

'Hers will I be, and onely with this thought
Content my selfe, although my chaunce be nought' 

'I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sky and sea'

'And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens'

'Urbane, worldly and robustly sane, the late Updike's poetry bears comparison with writers such as Auden, James Merrill and Seamus Heaney' Daily Mail

John Updike was always as much a poet as a storyteller and the poems in this, his final collection, celebrate the everyday, even as they address his own imminent mortality. It is in the connected series of poems, Endpoint, written on his last few birthdays...

'Go, girls, pursue the violet Muses' brightGifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns'