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  Petrarch's Canzoniere -...

  Francesco Petrarch

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  Francesco Petrarch's Canzoniere (translated in English as 'Scattered Rhymes') is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their deep exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), this collection includes 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 4 madrigals and 7 ballate. 
  These Scattered Rhymes almost always return to Laura, a women who Petrarch loves deeply, whom he first saw on a Good Friday. On this same day, some years later, Laura died. But Petrarch's love does not wane, in fact at points it burns brighter. Il Canzoniere also serves as a valuable contemporary insight into 14th century religion and the role of the papacy in Christendom. 
  Petrarch's work is one of civilization's most immaculate achievements. Michael R. G. Spiller regards Il Canzoniere as 'the single greatest inspiration for the love poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the seventeenth century'. 
  Following his acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno, which 'immediately joins ranks with the very best available in English' (Dr Richard Lansing), Peter Thornton brings the poetry of Petrarch to the 21st Century in direct and luminous verse. 
  Here's a madrigal, number 52 in the sequence. 
  52 
  However much Diana may have pleasedthe lover who by like chance spied her bareamid the frigid water, I no less 
  delighted in the shy hill shepherdesswashing a wisp of veil to keep her hair,glinting with gold, protected from the breeze.  
  And even now, when the sky burns above,she makes me shiver with a chill of love.

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  Mother Nature (MacDonald)

  George MacDonald

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of Mother Nature by George MacDonald. This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 3, 2013.George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister.  He inspired J. R. R. Tolkien and other authors with his fairy tales and fantasy novels. (Summary by David Lawrence)

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  Leaves of Grass

  Walt Whitman

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  A seminal event in American literature, this nineteenth-century collection of poetry and essays celebrates nature and humanity’s place in it.Leaves of Grass is a timeless collection of poems and essays penned by influential nineteenth-century writer Walt Whitman. This profound compilation explores topics such as nature, mysticism, mortality, transcendentalism, and democracy. Inspired by personal experiences and observations, Whitman spent almost four decades piecing together the complete work, sharing societal ideals and epiphanies about life that still resonate with readers today.

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  The English Summer

  Holly Hopkins

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  *SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* *A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation*
  
  Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A 'pie-faced' St George upstaged by the horse.
  
  The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus.
  
  This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed.
  
  Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.

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  Trace Evidence

  Charif Shanahan

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  A Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Chicago Book of 2023"A truly magical achievement." —Ocean VuongIn Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles Shanahan's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

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  A Shropshire Lad

  Alfred Edward Housman

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  A Shropshire Lad contains 63 poems by Housman which talk about mortality and living life to the full.

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