Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Poetry

Temptation looms large in love poetry and religious poetry, but over the centuries, poets have described and explored the topic of temptation from a variety of different perspectives, choosing some very unusual metaphors to illustrate the dangers - or the delights - of temptation. Here are six all-time favorites.

Jim of the Hills is a verse novel written by celebrated Australian poet, C.J. Dennis (1876-1938). It is narrated by shy, hard-working Jim, who works for a sawmill in the Australian bush. With characteristic pathos and wit, the story unfolds in twists and turns as Jim encounters Ben Murray, the Widow, Old Bob Blair, and the angel with the sunlit hair. This Australian classic, originally published in 1919, is a true delight.

Last Poems is the second volume of A. E. Housman's verse to be published in the poet's lifetime. Compiled to present to a dying friend, they poignantly explore in the same gentle, lyrical manner many of those themes of life, death, love, and loss that run throughout his hugely popular first collection, A Shropshire Lad.

One of the best-loved collections in English poetry, A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad deals in simple, gently accessible language, with universal themes of life, death, love, and loss, set against the backdrop of the timeless Shropshire countryside.

Nearly all Michael Angelo's sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his 60th year. To whom they were addressed, we only know in a few instances. Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshiped Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal.

Digger Smith is an Australian soldier who has fought at Gallipoli. An old mate of Ginger Mick's (The Moods of Ginger Mick), he returns from the war to visit the family of a fellow solder, Jim Flood. Narrated by Bill (the protagonist of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and a neighbour of the Floods), the story is woven together with sobering reflections and emotive dynamics expressed within a community of neighbours - friends and families of Australia's soldiers.

Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti. "Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Comes from this poem.

Laura is an aspiring playwright and director. Living off sheer ambition and the odd bit of praise, she struggles more and more to justify her own life choices. After being accepted onto an accessibility scheme, she is given the opportunity to work with her hero, Louis Sherman, but what she encounters behind the scenes defines her career and life forever.

Floyd Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile, and influential American Men of Letters of the first third of the 20th century". Though he was primarily a newspaper and magazine editor, most prominently of the radical left-wing magazine The Masses, he also published many best-selling feminist works. As a staunch advocate of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and progressive education, his writing greatly shocked the American bourgeoisie at the time, to the point where it became so controversial, he was put on trial twice for his subversive literature.

Wilde's first collection of verse, published in 1881, contains many poems which had already been published individually. Among the 61 poems can be found four major works, "The Garden of Eros", "The Burden of Itys", "Charmides", and "Humanitad". Although the initial critical reaction was not particularly enthusiastic, Wilde's poetry aroused enough attention for him to become the object of ridicule in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Patience, in which he is characterized as the "fleshly poet", Reginald Bunthorne.

Award-winning audiobook narrator Mike Vendetti reads "Invictus". Politicians and authors love to quote the inspirational last two lines of this poem: "I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul."

Ballads of a Cheechako is the sophomore volume of Yukon inspired verse from Scottish/Canadian poet Robert W. Service. Published in 1909, it was an immediate success and catapulted Robert W. Service to a household name around North America. This volume contains 22 verses exploring interesting characters and life in the early days of Canada's last frontier. From the man who staked the northern lights, to the Mounted Police, to hard-luck prospectors, and beyond, this book contains much of the framework for the collective vision we all share when we hear the word Klondike.

This collection of meditations on spiritual development was published in 1920. In the words of the author: "You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation."

As the Enlightenment movement was gathering strength in the early 18th century, various challenges to established religious faith were launched. In response, a number of celebrated commentators produced defences of religion and morality, and among these was Alexander Pope, who was inspired to write "some pieces on Human Life and Manners." The result was a collection of poems in rhyming couplets, designated "Epistles", which were published in instalments.

Unlike their biblical precursors, Kahlil Gibran's parables espouse the importance of personal spiritual insight rather than moral rectitude. In Gibran's view, sin and virtue, mercy and justice, and sanity and madness are all sides of the one coin - one cannot exist without its opposite.

I recorded this the day after we lost one of our beloved pets. Rainbow Bridge is the theme of several works of poetry written in the 1980s and 1990s that speak of an other-worldly place where pets go upon death, eventually to be reunited with their owners. It brings a lump to my throat, and often a tear to my eye but also comfort as I recall good times with Pongo.

"Mending Wall" is a poem by 20th-century American poet Robert Frost. It has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature."

This universalist spiritual treatise is the best known work by the Lebanese-born poet and artist Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931). The central figure of the narrative is a fictional prophet, Al Mustafa, who is about to set off on a journey back to his homeland. His departure is delayed when he encounters a group of people who urgently seek his advice on a wide range of topics ranging from the mundane to the highest flights of spiritual introspection.

This collection of verse was first published in 1920. It contains 12 poems published in an earlier collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, together with 12 later poems, four of which are in French. Both collections were dedicated to Jean Verdenal (1889-1915).

Who among us would not wish the return of our lost loved one? Our narrator, while in the depths of grief for his "Lenore", is visited by a talking raven. Is this supernatural raven a voice from the other side, or is our narrator merely following a slow, sorrowful descent into madness?