AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Check out our interview with Jen Hadfield, who won the TS Eliot Prize for poetry earlier this month. Life has been whirl for this 30-year-old poet since winning the award in front of a packed house in London. Now she’s back in Shetland and adjusting to life as Britain’s brightest young poet.

Here’s a novel (pardon the pun) eco tip from Reuter’s and Australia’s ABC News: Loo poetry can help tackle global warming: study Poetry in the loo can cut down on paper use too, says a Japanese group campaigning to save toilet paper as part of the country’s battle against global warming. Simply pasting a “toilet [...]

70 years ago today, Irish poet William Butler Yeats died on the Côte d’Azur.  To mark this anniversary, I was going to note his life and works but I found an interesting tidbit surrounding his death. Apparently, Yeats had very conscientiously  planned his epitaph and location of his grave site but in his last days [...]

Not only is President Obama an avid reader, apparently he’s written a good poem or two in his time. I came across this poem, apparently written by Obama at the age of 19, posted on the blog The Best American Poetry. Pop  Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken In, sprinkled with ashes, [...]

Poetry is everywhere. Folks are debating Elizabeth Alexander’s unauguration poem. The TS Elliot Prize was packed to the rafters. Sadly, the poetry ranks also lost one its number today – British poet John Fairfax has died at 78. The Guardian carries the story. John Fairfax, who co-founded the creative writing community Arvon, is remembered for [...]

Have you ever wondered what happens when you get a lot of poets and fans of poetry crammed into the same room? John Walsh writes at The Independent about the TS Eliot poetry award, which he hosted earlier this week. When I first attended a PBS (Poetry Book Society) readings evening, which features short-listed poets, [...]

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, William DeWitt (W.D.)  Snodgrass died Tuesday after a 4-month battle with inoperable lung cancer.  January 5 was his 83rd birthday. In 1960, Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his first book, Heart’s Needle. The poetry of Heart’s Needle expressed the angst he felt after losing custody of his daughter in [...]

British poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell died last week at the age of 76, reports The Guardian. I met him in 1962 at one such reading, for Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 arts festivals for working- class audiences. He leapt on stage in a many coloured coat like a Blakean challenger and a rock’n’roll hero. He [...]

My colleague Stephanie Naylor has penned an excellent article about studying the poetry of Wilfred Owen. The war poet died 90 years ago. Dulce et Decorum Est is one of the most vivid and horrific poems of World War I. The poem is made all the more powerful by the fact Owen was killed in [...]

Just in time for Halloween we have put together a little feature on the life and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe as well as the 10 most expensive Poe works ever sold on AbeBooks.