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The Zoo of the New
'So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We're sure it won't be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present'
In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the 21st Century.
This book stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots, a suit of armour and a microscope.
Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.
In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the 21st Century.
This book stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots, a suit of armour and a microscope.
Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.
- GenresPoetry
483 pages, Hardcover
Published March 30, 2017
4 people are currently reading
74 people want to read
About the author
Nick Laird
32 books109 followersNick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975. He read English Literature at Cambridge University, and then worked for several years as a lawyer specializing in international litigation.
He is the author of two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover's Mistake, and two collections of poetry, To A Fault and On Purpose. A new volume of poetry, Go Giants, is forthcoming from Faber in January 2013.
Laird has won many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Rupert and Eithne Strong award, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has published poetry and essays in many journals including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and wrote a column on poetry for two years for the Guardian newspaper.
He has taught at Columbia University, Manchester University and Barnard College.
He is the author of two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover's Mistake, and two collections of poetry, To A Fault and On Purpose. A new volume of poetry, Go Giants, is forthcoming from Faber in January 2013.
Laird has won many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Rupert and Eithne Strong award, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has published poetry and essays in many journals including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and wrote a column on poetry for two years for the Guardian newspaper.
He has taught at Columbia University, Manchester University and Barnard College.
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