Get ready to serve up a tantalizing feast of poetry lessons. This comprehensive guide offers new ideas that will spur students' creative thinking and offer them new formats for poetry writing. A variety of unique opportunities for developing written and oral language are offered. Grades 5-8

The sixteenth century in France was marked by religious warfare and shifting political and physical landscapes. Between 1549 and 1584, however, the Pléiade poets, including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, Rémy Belleau, and Antoine de Baïf, produced some of the most abiding and irenic depictions of rural French landscapes ever written. In The Poetry of Place, Louisa Mackenzie reveals and analyzes the cultural history of French paysage through her study of lyric poetry and its connections with landscape painting, cartography, and land use history. In the face of destructive environmental change, lyric poets in Renaissance France often wrote about idealized physical spaces, reclaiming the altered landscape to counteract the violence and loss of the period and creating in the process what Mackenzie, following David Harvey, terms 'spaces of hope.' This unique alliance of French Renaissance studies with cultural geography and eco-criticism demonstrates that sixteenth-century poetry created a powerful sense of place which continues to inform national and regional sentiment today.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This plain-speaking introduction to the study and understanding of poetry avoids academic jargon and provides a clear pathway to coming to a deeper awareness of poetry of the present and past ages. The guide is written in a clear and at times amusing style by a long-standing expert in the field. The guide begins by examining the physical shape of a poem on the page, then moves on to a shopping list of topics: Vocabulary Imagery Point of view Personalities Actions The senses Position Rhythm and rhyme External references The unexpected REVIEWS A 'must have' book which encourages the reader to explore poetry in greater depth. To pursue its meaning and thence to delight rather than bewilder. Rex Last has written with humour and alacrity. I shall now unearth my poetry books long since assigned to dusty shelves. (Margaret Holman) I liked that the author, understanding how boring poetry could be at times, adds humour to his explanations at regular intervals. This is an effective way of teaching, as it made me appreciate what he tried to explain faster. It also made me feel refreshed while I read, as I had some good laughs. Furthermore, I liked that the author included exercises on the interpretation of poems and their solutions to enable readers to test themselves, having gained the knowledge that the book sought to teach. There was nothing to dislike about this book, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The author structured his message very well and executed it with perfection. ... I recommend this book for people who are interested in poetry. (Reviewer, onlinebookclub.org.)

“A magisterial book” of nearly five hundred poems from some of history’s greatest Chinese poets, translated and edited by a renowned poet and scholar (New Republic). The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature. This rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton’s book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet’s work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poets. “David Hinton has . . . lured into English a new manner of hearing the great poets of that long glory of China’s classical age. His achievement is another echo of the original, and a gift to our language.” —W. S. Merwin

This book is a study of voice in poetry, beginning in the 1920s when modernism rose to the surface of poetry and other arts, and when radio expanded suddenly in the United States.