Bücher der Reihe Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

An anthology that includes such legendary songs as "Suzanne", "Sisters of Mercy", "Bird on the Wire", "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "I'm Your Man" and poems from many collections including "Flowers for Hitler", "Beautiful Losers" and "Death of a Lady's Man".

Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations - the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India's Ganges, Egypt's Nile, the Yellow River of China - and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it is natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents. English poets from Shakespeare and Dryden, Wordsworth and Byron to Ted Hughes, John Betjeman and Alice Oswald; Irish poets - Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, to name but a few; Scottish and Welsh poets from Henry Vaughan and Robert Louis Stevenson to Robin Robertson and Gillian Clarke. A whole raft of American poets from Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey and Grace Paley. Folk songs. African-American spirituals. Poems from ancient Egypt and Rome. From medieval China and Japan. And a truly international selection of modern poets from Europe (France, Italy, Russia, Serbia), India, Africa, Australia and South and Central America, all combining in celebration of the rivers of the world. From the Mississippi to the Limpopo. From the Dart to the Danube. Plunge in.

Place of refuge, place where we can be ourselves; place we long to escape from, place where we are confronted by absence and loneliness; shabby downtown apartment or idyllic country cottage. Like it or loathe it, home is where we do most of our living. Home is, of course, many things to many poets. It is Billy Collins's favourite armchair and Imtiaz Dharker's 'Living Space' in the slums of Mumbai. It is Wordsworth's 'dear Valley' of Grasmere, and Philip Larkin's Coventry, that place where nothing so famously happens. It may be somewhere we long for, perhaps unattainably: Ovid and Mahmoud Darwish lament their home countries, Kapka Kassabova seeks 'a house we can never find', while Jules Supervielle is 'Homesick for the Earth'.There is an abundance of domestic life. Attend a miserable breakfast chez Jacques Prévert; observe Wendy Cope and partner happily 'Being Boring'. Cut to Anna Barbauld's washing-day, Marilyn Nelson dusting, Buson mending his clothes and Fiona Wright contending with a Tupperware party. Peep in on Amy Lowell in the bath and John Donne in bed, Auden in the privy and Joy Harjo at the kitchen table. Here are removals and homecomings, neighbours good and bad. Inevitably, after a year of enforced domesticity, some lockdown thoughts (Anna McDonald, Pauline Prior-Pitt); Mary Oliver's dream house, Naomi Shihab Nye's homes where children live, the far-from-safe houses of U. A. Fanthorpe, and some final reflections on the idea of a dwelling place from Rumi, Emily Dickinson, John Burnside, Vinita Agrawal, Derek Walcott, Les Murray and Iman Mersal. It may not always be sweet, but there is certainly No Place Like Home.

Messages of hope in the midst of pain - in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World', Wislawa Szymborska's 'The End and the Beginning' and Stevie Smith's 'Away, Melancholy' - make this a perfect gift for anyone on the road to healing.