Oxford Poets

Ranging across various forms and tones, this poetry compilation expounds upon the Australian landscape, and its natural objects and inhabitants. Combining humor and gravity, it ponders the destruction of our planet and the detrimental effects of progress.

The latest anthology in a renowned series that has featured writers such as Charles Tomlinson, Rebecca Elson, and the Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Brodsky, Oxford Poets 2013 includes 19 poets whose work is marked by wit, imagination, and thematic range. The collection celebrates the vibrancy and vitality of new writing today and includes poets Gregor Addison, Emily Ballou, Paul Batchelor, Riina Katajavuori, Frances Leviston, and Leonie Rushforth, among others. The individual voices are distinctive, yet they share a commitment to the truth of their experience and an excitement with the possibilities of language.

The third full collection of poetry from a critically acclaimed British poet begins with a series of 26 poems based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. From there, the poems travel to a variety of locales, including a California ravine, a Venice piazza, the Atlantic Ocean, and outer space. An extract from a new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is also included. Focusing on the themes of love, time, myth, and history, this highly anticipated collection explores the diversity of thought and landscape through the voice and reflection of a distinctively female perspective.

Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis's search for her lost father, the young South Wales Borderer who led his troops across the desert by starlight in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, and a mixture of formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq war seen from a woman's point of view: the horror of sons and daughters being sent into battle, the struggles of widows and orphans. Woven through the personal and geopolitical content is a more ancient strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's first piece of written literature, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power, and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in 4,000 years.