Looking Back at Earth: A collection of the author's original poetry centred around the themes of spiritual search and individual identity in the modern world.

Previous collections of the author's poetry can be found at OVID AND OTHERS, see the Contents list on the left of screen.

Nature & Spirit: A further collection of the author's original poetry. 

Previous collections of the author's poetry can be found at OVID AND OTHERS, see the Contents list on the left of screen.

The Presence of Light: A further collection of the author's original poetry. 

Previous collections of the author's poetry can be found at OVID AND OTHERS, see the Contents list on the left of screen

The Singing Of The Real World: A new collection of the author's original poetry. 

Previous collections of the author's poetry can be found at OVID AND OTHERS, see the Contents list on the left of screen

Garcia Lorca :  Fourteen poems of Love and Death  

Garcia Lorca is a major literary figure, not only in Spain, but throughout the world. His work consists of various novels, short stories, and poetry, as well as painting and drawing. On August 19, 1936, during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was beaten, and assassinated. He was accused of subversive activity, but evidence today suggests that it may have been a crime committed in response to his homosexuality. His entire body of work remained censored until Franco's death in 1975. This did not, however, prevent him from becoming one of the most widely read of authors.

Garcia Lorca :  Twenty More Poems in translation

A further selection from Lorca's complete poetry. These creations confirm his lyrical mastery and span his whole output from earlier to later works.

A selection of Lorca's early poetry, prior to the Gypsy Ballads of 1924-27, including poems from the collections Book of Poems, Poem of the Deep Song, Suites, and Songs.

Garcia Lorca : Five in the Afternoon

A further selection of major work including poems from Gypsy Ballads, Six Galician Poems, Sonnets of Dark Love, Uncollected Poems, and the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (the matador, photographed here). 

Garcia Lorca : Theory and Play of The Duende

A new translation of Lorca's lecture on the Duende, the force of authentic artistic inspiration.

Osip Mandelshtam : Twenty-four poems in translation

Osip Mandelshtam was Jewish, of Latvian parents, and was brought up in St Petersburg. He visited the Crimea in 1921. His individualistic poetry with its responsiveness to Classical Greece and Rome, and its lament for the direction the Russian Revolution had taken, provoked and offended Stalin, and he was arrested and exiled to Voronezh (near the Don, south of Moscow) in 1934. He returned from exile, but was re-arrested in 1938, and died on his way to a labour camp.

The ten Duino Elegies were written between 1911 and 1922, the name being taken from Duino Castle near Trieste, where Rilke stayed during the winter of 1911-12. In the Elegies he explores the mysteries, challenges and painful difficulties of modern human existence. 

Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, of German descent and Austrian nationality. Travelling widely, he met Tolstoy, and worked as Rodin's secretary in Paris. He died in 1926.

Rainer Maria Rilke : Selected Poems

A selection of Rilke's major poetry including works from New Poems, Requiem, the Sonnets to Orpheus, and the last Uncollected Poems.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe : 

Faust Parts I & II

Goethe (1749-1832), greatest of German poets, achieved fame with his tragic romance Werther. He travelled to Italy in 1786. His writing includes poetry, plays, travel notes, and the tragedy of Faust which he worked on throughout his life.

Petrarch: The Complete Canzoniere. 

Francesco Petrarca, 1304 to 1374, the great Italian lyric poet, was brought up in Provence where his father a notary lived in exile. He entered the service of the Colonna family, and lived a full public life. His poetry in Italian dedicated to the unknown (possibly mythical) Laura, had an immense humanist influence throughout Europe, as a map of love, and a model for lovers. Sidney in England was a direct heir of the Petrarchan tradition. 

Leopardi: The Complete Canti. 

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)  was born of an aristocratic family in Recanati and plagued, like Heine, by crippling illness. He lived in Florence, Bologna and Milan before finally settling in Naples where he died, the greatest Italian poet since Petrarch. A unique voice, he nevertheless has affinities with Byronic ‘Romanticism’, with the Europe of the ‘superfluous man’ portrayed in the works of Pushkin and Lermontov, and also with Classical Stoicism and Epicureanism.

Baudelaire: Twenty-nine more poems, mainly early or minor, which demonstrate Baudelaire's range of themes and poetic forms.  An initial collection of eighteen major poems by the great French poet, and a brief biography.

Catullus: The complete, unexpurgated poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, with a detailed hyper-linked index.

Catullus led the new poetic movement in the late Roman Republic. His powerful and explicit verse comments, wittily and acutely, on his contemporaries, and on his relationship with Claudia Metelli, his Lesbia. He is also capable of great lyricism and tenderness.

Horace: The four books of Odes.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8BC) knew most of the eminent Romans of his time, including Virgil and Tibullus. Maecenas was his friend and patron, and gave him his beloved Sabine farm. His celebrated Odes brought the subtleties of Greek lyric metre to Latin poetry.

Tibullus and Sulpicia: The complete poems of Albius Tibullus together with the poems of, and about, Sulpicia from the Messalla collection.

Tibullus (c54-19BC) was a friend of Horace and contemporary of Ovid. 

Sulpicia is represented by a number of poems by her and about her.  They exhibit a strong personality, and are a fascinating if all too brief glimpse into the mind of a well-educated Roman girl.

Virgil: The major works of Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19BC). 

The Eclogues: The Pastoral Poems

The Georgics: On Farming

The Aeneid: The Epic of Aeneas of Troy and the Origins of Rome.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde - a modernised version, Troilus and Cressida, which maintains Chaucer's rhymes and diction wherever possible while 'translating' obsolete words and phrases into modern idiom.

Chaucer (c1342-1400) adapted the tale from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and it reveals the influence on him of Italian culture, particularly the poetry of Dante and Petrarch.

Philip Sidney: Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence, Astrophil & Stella, in  a carefully edited text. Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was strongly influenced by Petrarch's Canzoniere. His Elizabethan English, and his complex intellectual style, make reading difficult, and a prose version of each sonnet (and song) is provided to assist understanding.

José Zorrilla: Don Juan Tenorio. A new English verse translation of the Romantic 19th Century play with parallel Spanish text. 

Zorrilla's amusing version of the Don Juan story has some fine poetic moments mixed with burlesque. It contains the usual outrageous elements of the Don's behaviour, with  Zorrilla achieving an unusual surprise ending. 

Jean Racine: Phaedra A new English rhyming verse translation.

Racine (1639-1699) wrote his plays for the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Masterpieces of the French language as well as powerful theatre, Phaedra is without doubt the finest and most compelling of them.  

Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac. A new English verse translation of the Romantic 19th Century play. 

Rostand (1869-1918) wrote Cyrano in 1897 for the great French Actor Constant Coquelin (pictured here). Cyrano, the portrait of the 17th Century musketeer hero with the long nose, is a famous love story, and Rostand's  most enduring and best-loved work.

Aucassin & Nicolette: The charming 13th century French 'chantefable' in a new English translation.

This anonymous work introduces a subversive note of personal and secular love, which finds echoes elsewhere at this early date in the letters of Heloise, and the Tristan and Iseult legend. 

Clear Voices: A personal selection of twenty-five poems translated from major Russian poets.

The selection includes a few poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, Akhmatova and Mandelshtam among others.

Verlaine: A selection of twenty-three poems by Paul Verlaine.

Verlaine (1844-1896) lived a Bohemian life that ended in tragic decline. His famous affair with Rimbaud culminated in his wounding his lover with a revolver shot, and his subsequent imprisonment. He died in a public infirmary. 

Apollinaire: A selection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Wilhelm Apollinaire Kostrovisky (Guillaume Apollinaire) (1880-1918) of Italian-Polish extraction gave Paris the word surrealist and wrote both experimental free-verse and formal lyrics of great precision and beauty. The  latter from Alcools are represented here, along with Vitam Impendere Amori, and the complete Bestiary with the Raoul Dufy woodcuts.

Rimbaud: A selection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud.

Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) that precocious and startling talent, who produced his major poetic work between the ages of 16 and 19 and then renounced literature for ever. After the end of his relationship with Verlaine, he ended as a gun-runner, trader and slaver in Africa. This selection includes major early poems, and extracts from Les Illuminations, Une Saison En Enfer, and the 'Voyant' letter.

Dante: The Divine Comedy : A new, complete, downloadable, English poetic prose translation, with in-depth name index, and comprehensive notes. 

Each Canto is fully hyper-linked to the index/notes and vice versa, and cross-referenced to the Italian text.

Downloading is suggested for fast access.

Dante: La Vita Nuova : The 'New Life' tells the story in prose and poetry of Dante's meeting with and love for Beatrice, and her subsequent death. It forms a prelude to the glories of the Divine Comedy, while providing a model for poets of the art of poetry, and a guide for the noble lover to some of the vicissitudes and effects of love. This new translation attempts to convey some of the sweetness and directness of Dante's simple but powerful Italian. The sections of the text and the first lines of the poems are indexed for easy access. 

Meditations on the Divine Comedy: A canto by canto commentary and reflection on the Divine Comedy, hyper-linked to the prose translation, a concept index, and the detailed name index. The Meditations are designed to highlight the concepts and intentions behind the Divine Comedy, with constant reference to the translated text.

Sextus Propertius:  The Love Elegies. Books I-IV. A new, complete, English translation, with hyper-linked in-depth name index.

Sextus Propertius was the greatest love poet of Classical   Rome's Augustan Age. More intimate, erotic, and tender than Ovid or Catullus, he avoids their pornographic tendency, and expresses aspects of his love for Cynthia, the unknown courtesan, whose relationship with him brought him both joy and pain. A great deal of later poetry derives from him, in particular John Donne's love poetry in Elizabethan England, and Charles Baudelaire's poetry of the City, in Nineteenth Century France, which the anti-war Propertius anticipates in his attitude to Rome, the decadent capital of a vast military Empire.