The Zoo of the New: A Book of Exceptional Poems from Sappho to Paul Muldoon

(Paperback)

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Full of cherished classics and new surprises, an anthology of two beloved poets' favourite verse from the last 500 years In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. They have looked for those poems which see most clearly, which speak most vividly, and which have meant the most to them as readers and writers. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness- words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the twenty-first century. This book stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.

Author Bio

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Co. Tyrone. His poetry collections, published by Faber and Faber, are To a Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007) and Go Giants (2013). He has been awarded the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He is the author of two novels and lives between New York and London. Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collections with Faber and Faber include Nil Nil (1993), God's Gift to Women (1997), Landing Light (2003), Rain (2009) and 40 Sonnets (2016). He has also published translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and all three Forward Prizes; he is currently the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009.