Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Poetry

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke is a classic Australian work of poetry composed by renowned poet, C.J. Dennis (1876-1938). This verse-novel chronicles Bill's coming-of-age through romance, love, and fatherhood. From rambunctious street-strolling youth to settled, responsible father, Bill's story unfolds with keen Aussie larrikinism and humour. This work is narrated as a duet by Denis Daly (Bill) and Sarah Bacaller (Doreen).

First published in the Bulletin in the nineties, Paterson's verse has enjoyed enduring success throughout Australian literary history. Paterson had an intimate knowledge of life in the outback: he knew bushmen and he knew horses. His boundary riders and shearers, his buckjumpers and station hands, are real characters—the first realistic portraits of Australians in the bush at work and play to appear in verse. Many of the characters he created have so imprinted themselves on the public imagination that they have become part of Australian folklore.

The Odyssey has survived nearly three thousand years because it speaks to a simple, powerful truth: sometimes the hardest battle is not the war abroad, but the long, uncertain journey back home. In this modern prose retelling, Homer's epic is presented as a continuous story rather than as verse. The language is clear and contemporary, but the structure and major episodes of the original are faithfully preserved.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was one of the most prominent members of the Imagist movement, a brief flowering of modernist poetry, in which Ezra Pound was also involved. Williams was also an accomplished painter and art critic. Imagist verse is characterized by a distinct economy of verbiage and freedom of rhythm. Sour Grapes was his fourth collection of poetry and was published in 1921. As with much of Williams' early works, critical acclaim was slow in coming. Today, the collection is considered to contain some of his most significant poems.

The selection of eighteen poems is taken from Tennyson's first collection, published in 1830. The most famous poem in the collection is Mariana, a dramatic narrative, which, like The Lady of Shalott, describes the tragic fate of an abandoned woman. All the poems feature the elegant euphony for which Tennyson's verse has become famous.

Together with Omar Khayyam and Jalāl ud-Din Mohammad Rumi, Khwaja Shams-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz-e Shirazi, more commonly known just as Háfiz, is considered one of the major figures of classical Persian literature. Gertrude Lothian Bell (1868 - 1926) was a traveler, archeologist, political advisor, and authority on Middle Eastern history and literature.

Phillip J. Mather's masterful rendition of this timeless classic is a must-listen for any with an interest in and respect for the past.

The Witch of Atlas is a poetic narrative, written in 1820 and published posthumously in 1824. The witch is the daughter of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. The plot is built around her adventures, during which she creates an androgynous creature, Hermaphroditus, who is both the companion of and the servant to the witch. She plays a series of pranks upon mankind, with the ultimate aim of revealing the essential foolishness of oppression and conflict and enabling the realization of a final Utopia.

This poem, rich in its palette of human emotions, is couched in simple narrative language. Some critics have sought to interpret the poem as an allegory and find a specific meaning for every phrase and picture, but the richness of its symbolism is not favorable to this kind of treatment. In some ways, it resembles a piece of music. Each mind can draw from it a personal, and, to the individual, satisfactory interpretation.

Possibly one of the most dissected poems ever, Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

A man was hanged in Reading Gaol during Wilde's imprisonment there. In "The Ballad", written after his release, he tells of the horror of the event and its effect on himself and his fellow prisoners. First published 1898, under the pseudonym C.3.3 - the number by which Wilde was known in the prison, consisting of the cell block, landing number and cell number of his cell.

New Poems by D.H.Lawrence. Narrated by Denis Daly. This audiobook is a collection of 42 poems first published in 1920. In it, Lawrence explores the possibilities of free verse, of which he says in the preface: “This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, the English poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was a true mystic. While more celebrated poets, like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Arnold, were content to express their religious leanings in traditional devotional formulae, Thompson strove to portray the divine directly, in all its terrifying majesty. In this way he is more akin to earlier masters, like Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, than to the poets of his own day.

Unlike the other verse novels of C. J. Dennis, this collection of 13 poems is focused on political satire. The action is set in the society of an arboreal race, known as Glugs, and described by the author "stupid race of docile folk". Among the targets of Dennis's mocking scrutiny are free trade, social conformity, and extravagant bureaucracy.

The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, narrated by the award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti and professional actress Kathy Verduin, is a collection of short free-verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois.

Like his great contemporaries, John Keats and Lord Byron, Shelley suffered an untimely death, but still managed to stun the world with a wide-ranging body of work, including poetry, drama, and criticism. His poetry is that of a young man, a lover of nature and fiercely critical of institutionalized corruption, and virtuosic in his use of language and imagery.

Masterfully read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, travel to the town of Hamelin suffering from a rat infestation, when a piper dressed in multicolored ("pied") clothing appeared, claiming to be a rat-catcher. He promised the mayor a solution to their problem with the rats. The mayor, in turn, promised to pay him for the removal of the rats (according to some versions of the story, the promised sum was 1,000 guilders). The piper accepted and played his pipe to lure the rats into the Weser River, where they all drowned. The rest is a legend enjoyed for centuries.

Háfiz (1315-1390) was a lyric poet, a major figure in classical Persian literature. The compendious anthology of his poetry simply titled the Divan contains several hundred odes, from which this small selection was made by the translator. In the introduction Bicknell writes: ...we must look upon Háfiz as one of the few poets in the world who utters an unbroken strain of joy and contentment. His poverty was to him a constant fountain of satisfaction, and he frankly took the natural joys of life as they came....

America a Prophecy (1793) is the first book in Blake’s Continental Prophecies - the other two being Europe a Prophecy (1794) and The Song of Los (1795). The poem was engraved on 18 plates with illustrations by Blake, and survives in 14 known copies. Written during a time of great political and social upheaval, Blake uses his own complex invented mythology to explore the human need to resist tyranny. His verse is rich in metaphor, powerful, and apocalyptic in scope.

The Iliad, set 9 years into the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he wearily travels home from the war. The two epics provide the basis of Greek education and culture in the classical age. They have long remained among the most significant poems of European tradition. Produced here in full cast arrangement and narrated by Rob Goll, one can experience these age-old stories in a brand new way.