Books And Libraries

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations; Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere; commanding their love; earning their veneration. For Emily Dickinson they are frigates that 'take us Lands away'; for Wordsworth they are 'a substantial world; both pure and good'; Alberto Rios calls them 'the deli offerings of civilization itself'. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: libraries where one can best hear "a choir of authors murmuring inside their books;" as Billy Collins has it; bookshops; especially second-hand ones; 'too small for the worlds they hold; where words that sing you to sleep; stories that stalk your dreams; open like windows in a wall' (Gillian Clarke). The poets collected here include Catullus; Horace; T'ao Ch'ien; Dante; Petrarch; Boccaccio; Ronsard; Lope de Vega; Shakespeare; Marvell; Blake; Pope and Keats; more recent luminaries include Brecht; Cavafy; Gabriela Mistral; Dylan Thomas; Iku Takenaka; Pablo Neruda; Wislawa Szymborska; Anne Stevenson; Maya Angelou; Derek Walcott; John Burnside and Ian McMillan.