The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation

(Paperback)

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The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning and consolation Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes and Alice Oswald. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.

Reviews

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you -- Susie Goldsbrough * The Times *
Poignant memorable impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the task of grieving for the threatened loss of an entire world -- Rowan Williams * New Statesman *
A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail *
The giants of the genre are well presented there are discoveries aplenty so monumental is this anthology that one can imagine it pillowing a knights head on an elaborately carved marble tomb -- Anthony Gardner * Tablet *
Funny, angry and provocative the anthology is a success ... the editors introduction is excellent clear, informative and thought-provoking -- Sean OBrien * Telegraph *

Author Bio

Stephen Regan (Author) Stephen Regan's books include Irish Writing- An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (2004) and The Sonnet (2019). He has taught at Ruskin College, Oxford; Royal Holloway, University of London; and Durham University, where he is Professor Emeritus. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Melbourne. Andrew Motion (Author) Andrew Motion's most recent collection is New and Selected Poems 1977-2022 (2023). He was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, is co-founder of The Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart, and since 2015 has lived in Baltimore, where he is Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.