Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. Sharon Olds ‘a poet of sex and the psyche’: Quote Billie Collins.
John Cooper Clarke (born 25 January 1949) is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a “punk poet”.He released several albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continues to perform regularly.
His recorded output has mainly centred on musical backing from the Invisible Girls, which featured Martin Hannett, Steve Hopkins, Pete Shelley, Bill Nelson, and Paul Burgess.
In July 2013, Clarke was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts in “acknowledgement of a career which has spanned five decades, bringing poetry to non-traditional audiences and influencing musicians and comedians” by the University of Salford. Upon receipt, Clarke commented: “Now I’m a doctor, finally my dream of opening a cosmetic surgery business can become a reality.”
Clarke’s poem “I Wanna Be Yours” was adapted by Arctic Monkeys and frontman Alex Turner for the band’s fifth album, AM, released on 9 September 2013. Speaking about the poem to the NME ’s Matt Wilkinson, Clarke said:
I wrote it along with a load of others at the time, I tend to write like that. I remember when it was – about ’83 or ’84 or something like that. It’s come to my attention that it’s the wedding favourite. The number of people that have said, “I had that read at my wedding”, or “My husband proposed to me using that number”… It’s been very useful in the world of modern romance! It is to modern wedding ceremonies what “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” by Eric Idle is to humanist funerals. I probably go to a great many more funerals than you do, so take it from me.
Grown men aren’t supposed to cry. Anthony and Ben Holden, and Kate Allen (Director, Amnesty International UK), introduce readings from poems that haunt a host of eminent men; they explain why, in words as moving as the poems themselves.
With Melvyn Bragg, Richard Dawkins, Ian McEwan, Richard Eyre, Mike Leigh, Simon McBurney, Ben Okri, Simon Russell Beale and Simon Schama.
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by Cecil Beaton, vintage bromide print on white card mount, 1956 Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. The poems were not collected until Eliot’s New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot’s poetic career.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man’s relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is a collection from “the most frightening American poet ever” (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
