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

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.