The Penguin Book of Elegy

<p><b>'A tremendous sentimental education of a book ... a literary adventure ... chosen with a </b><b>scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair ... fascinating and unignorable' </b>Kate Kellaway, <i>Observer</i> (Poetry Book of the Month)<br><b>'If you have any weakness at all for poetry, this book will draw you in, then devastate you' </b>Susie Goldsbrough. <i>The Times</i><br><br>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.<br><br>In <i>The Penguin Book of Elegy</i>, 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, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Denise Riley.<br><br>The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, <i>The Penguin Book of Elegy</i> 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.</p> <p>Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature: a continuous poetic tradition which stretches back beyond the time of Virgil and Horace to Ancient Greece, speaking eloquently and movingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. In perhaps the purest instance of art's fundamental 'impulse to preserve' (Philip Larkin), it gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate for long, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp.<br><br>In <i>The Penguin Book of Elegy</i>, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, selecting the best and most significant poems and poets from the Classical roots of elegy, and from its Renaissance revival down to the present day. They show how this remarkably resilient and versatile form has continued to adapt itself even as society and religious belief have shifted around it, with striking achievements in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets as different as Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Denise Riley and Gwendolyn Brooks.<br><br>The result is the only comprehensive anthology of its kind now available in the English language. <i>The Penguin Book of Elegy</i> is itself a work of preservation - and a profound and moving catalogue of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and give comfort to those who survive them.</p>