Penguin Books Australia

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

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

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

Revered in eleventh-century Persia as an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam is now known first and foremost for his Ruba'iyat. The short epigrammatic stanza form allowed poets of his day to express personal feelings, beliefs and doubts with wit and clarity, and Khayyam became one of its most accomplished masters with his touching meditations on the transience of human life and...

One of the earliest extant versions of the Tristan and Yseut story, Beroul's French manuscript of The Romance of Tristan dates back to the middle of the twelfth century. It recounts the legend of Tristan, nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, and the king's Irish wife Yseut, who fall passionately in love after mistakenly drinking a potion. Their illicit romance remains secret for many years, but the relentless...

Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.

First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative work. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the reader back to Wordsworth's formative moments of childhood and youth, and detailing his experiences as a radical undergraduate in France at the time of the...

One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The Complete Poems contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published in his lifetime - including Epigrams, The Forest and Underwoods - alongside a wide variety of his other...

Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works— Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha —as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems.

In The Moving World , the immediacy of Michael Heald's poems rises from the practice of exploring the experience of experience itself.  These are poems which shed many familiar poetic devices (the richness of metaphor, the play of language) to explore the singular moment of presence in deliberately conscious beings.

The Taste of River Water
New and selected poems by Cate Kennedy

Two Poets contains exciting new collections by leading Western Australian poets, Andrew Lansdown and Kevin Gillam, with an introduction by poet and critic Lisa Gorton.  Both Lansdown and Gillam have distinctive voices but share a strong sense of place, and concern with craft.  In ther introduction, poet and critic Lisa Gorton describes their approaches to style:

Dorothy Porter writes about love, sex, heartbreak and desire like no one else. Love Poems collects her most powerful love poetry: portraits of longing and infatuation, of bliss, passion, uncertainty and devotion. It includes extracts from her award-winning and best-selling verse novels, as well as poems and lyrics spanning her whole career.

The Bee Hut brings together the poems Doroty Porter wrote in the last fi ve years of her life. By turns expansive and intimate, effusive and contemplative, these poems roam widely - into history and to sacred places both mythic and personal. Porter's writing glows and shimmers with passionate curiosity and exuberant love of life.

The Golden Bird brings together the best of Robert Adamson's work from the last four decades, as well as many superb new poems. Selected and arranged by the author, it provides an accessible introduction to Australia's foremost lyric poet and an insight into the recurring themes that have shaped his remarkable body of work.

'Robert Adamson is one of Australia's national treasures.' John Ashbery...

In these times of global and personal uncertainty, why turn to poetry? In Saved by a Poem, Kim Rosen reveals how a poem can be a companion through difficulty-acting as a guide when we are lost; a salve when we are wounded; and a conduit to insight, freedom, and joy.

VILLAIN  is a new collection by Justin Clemens. Invoking the spirit of celebrated French poet, vagabond and thief Francois Villon – some of whose ballads are translated here – these poems range from the violent and obscene to the lyrical and sublime, sometimes within a single verse.