Catching Life by the Throat: Poems from Eight Great Poets

This one-of-a-kind anthology, including an audio CD, brings eight great English-language poets to life.

Catching Life by the Throat unites the sound, sense, and sensibility that lie at the heart of great poetry. It features eight great poets, with brief, accessible essays concerning their life and work and a selection of their poems, and it is accompanied by an 80-minute CD recorded live at the British Library: Ralph Fiennes reading Auden, Edward Fox reading Eliot, Roger Moore reading Kipling, Harold Pinter reading Larkin, and more. Whether you believe (like Robert Frost, who inspired the title) that poetry is a way of “taking life by the throat” or (like T. S. Eliot) that it “is one person talking to another,” nobody does it better than the poets featured in this book. For a novice discovering the rich heritage of English-language verse or a seasoned poetry reader, Catching Life by the Throat is an extraordinary introduction to eight iconic poets.

Josephine Hart (1942 - 2011) was the author of five novels, including Damage, Sin, and The Reconstructionist. She began hosting the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library in 2004.