A Poet's Guide to Britain - Hardcover

Sheers, Owen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 014119202X ISBN 13: 9780141192024

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology that ties in with the BBC series of the same name.

Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, and our land. Under the headings of six varieties of British landscape - London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forest, and Coast and Sea - he has collected poems that evoke qualities of the land, city and sea and have become part of the way we see these landscapes. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series, while also supplementing the poems included in the programme with his own personal favourites.

About this title

About the Author

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000) was short-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year and the Forward Prize Best 1st Collection 2001. Owen has also written for Radio, TV and newspapers. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society's 20 Next Generation Poets. Owen's 2nd collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. Owen's first novel, Resistance (Faber, 2008) won a 2008 Hospital Club Creative Award and was short-listed for the Writers Guild Best Book Award. Resistance is translated into nine languages.

From the Back Cover

Extract to come??

From the Inside Flap

The British landscape has produced some of the most powerful and unforgettable poetry ever written. Here acclaimed young poet Owen Sheers takes us on a journey around Britain, and through the great poems that have been inspired by its varied and dramatic scenery.

Travelling from village to mountain, clifftop to city, woodland to heath, Owen reveals the stories that lie behind the poetry of our landscape, and the poets who captured it. Here are voices both historical and modern, from William Wordsworth's sonnet 'On Westminster Bridge', celebrating the beauty of a London dawn, to Sylvia Plath's 'Hardcastle Crags', a potent and visceral evocation of the Yorkshire moors. There are poems from across the length and breadth of the British Isles, among them Matthew Arnold's meditation on love and faith, 'Dover Beach', Lynette Roberts's 'Poem from Llanybri', depicting the security of a close-knit Welsh village community, Louis Macniece's 'Woods', a tribute to the rural Dorset of his childhood, and George Mackay Brown's 'Hamnavoe', an elegy for his postman father on the windswept island of Orkney.

Exploring how the vital, ongoing link between place and verse has enriched our literary heritage and our sense of national identity - and continues to do so - this book is a celebration of the poems that have become part of the way we see our landscape.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 014119202X
• ISBN 13: 9780141192024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256