Other books that might interest you

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  Love not me for comely grace

  John Wilbye

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 18 recordings of Love not me for comely grace by John Wilbye. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for September 30, 2012John Wilbye was an English madrigal composer, and is probably the most famous of all the English madrigalists; his pieces have long been favourites and are often included in modern collections. His style is characterized by delicate writing for the voice, acute sensitivity to the text and the use of "false relations" between the major and minor modes. (Summary by Wikipedia)

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  Deirdre Kinahan: Shorts (NHB...

  Deirdre Kinahan

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  'The short play – very traditional to Irish theatre – is a little jewel of a structure, a lightning flash on a different world, the illumination made all the more acute by brevity' Deirdre Kinahan
  Deirdre Kinahan is an award-winning playwright and member of Aosdána, Ireland's elected organisation of outstanding artists. This volume brings together five of her short plays, taken from the full span of her writing career, each of them shining a light into a forgotten corner of our humanity, giving voice to irrepressible characters that the world has done its best to overlook.
  In Bé Carna (Tall Tales, 1999), five women reflect on their lives as prostitutes on the streets of Dublin, a dark tale inspired by true-life stories, reverberating with humanity, warmth and comic humour.
  In Hue & Cry (Tall Tales/Bewley's Café Theatre, 2007), two Dublin cousins, Damian and Kevin, are reunited for a family funeral in a highly charged encounter full of disillusion, denial and dark laughter.
  In Bogboy (Tall Tales/Solstice Arts Centre, 2010), originally written as a radio play for RTÉ, two lost souls – a young heroin addict and a reclusive middle-aged farmer – discover a budding friendship in the bogs of Meath, until a terrible secret comes to light.
  Wild Notes (Solas Nua, Washington D.C., 2018) explores the impact of colonialism through a meeting between Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist who visited Ireland in the 1840s, and a young Irishwoman hoping to emigrate to the country he's running from.
  An Old Song, Half Forgotten (Abbey Theatre, 2023) opens a window into the life and soul of an older actor who is living in care with Alzheimer's disease, rebuilding a man just as he begins to crack and fade.

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  Fred & Madge (NHB Modern Plays)

  Joe Orton

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  Joe Orton's brilliantly inventive and staggeringly bold first play.
  Fred and Madge are a normal couple. Or so we think until a director and an audience member start interrupting and reworking this play within a play.
  Exhilaratingly subversive, the play includes the destruction of the Festival Hall, professional insulters intent on purging society with laughter and a dystopian England overgrown with marigolds. Full of biting satire and sardonic wit, it mingles astutely observed social realism with myth: Fred's job is to push boulders up a hill, and Madge's is to sieve water.
  Written in 1959, Fred & Madge finally received its premiere in 2014 at the Hope Theatre, London.

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  WHAT - The Sunday Times...

  John Cooper Clarke

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  Read by the author, John Cooper Clarke.'Nothing short of dazzling' – Alex TurnerDr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection from one of our foremost satirists.

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  The Poetry of Edmund Spenser

  Edmund Spenser

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  One of the greatest of English poets, Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London, in 1552 and went to school at Merchant Taylors' School and later at Pembroke College, Cambridge.   
  In 1579, he published The Shepheardes Calender, his first major work.   
  Edmund journeyed to Ireland in July 1580, in the service of the newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. His time included the terrible massacre at the Siege of Smerwick.  
  The epic poem, The Faerie Queene, is acknowledged as Edmund’s masterpiece. The first three books were published in 1590, and a second set of three books were published in 1596.   
  Indeed the reality is that Spenser, through his great talents, was able to move Poetry in a different direction.  It led to him being called a Poet’s Poet and brought rich admiration from Milton, Raleigh, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson, among others.   
  Spenser returned to Ireland and in 1591, Complaints, a collection of poems that voices complaints in mournful or mocking tones was published.  In 1595, Spenser published Amoretti and Epithalamion in a volume that contains eighty-nine sonnets.  
  In the following year he wrote a prose pamphlet entitled A View of the Present State of Ireland, a highly inflammatory argument for the pacification and destruction of Irish culture. 
  On January 13th 1599 Edmund Spenser died at the age of forty-six.  His coffin was carried to his grave in Westminster Abbey by other poets, who threw pens and poetic pieces into his grave.  
   This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing.  Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.

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  Heavy Is the Head

  Sumaya Enyegue

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  "Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist?" Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health.This collection does not aim to heal anyone who reads it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt. They are for the girls with difficult names, the boys with softness at their core, and the people with neither. They are meant for the people who are Black, and the people who are not—because we are all tethered together by the heaviness of the human experience.

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