Reddit mentions: The best british & irish poetry books

>I would like to see a LOTR edition that includes Tolkien's illustrations, like they did with some of the latter editions of The Hobbit.

I haven't read The Art Of The Lord Of The Rings, but to the best of my knowledge it contains all of the LOTR related artwork and illustrations Tolkien did, little of which is really comparable to the full illustrations he did for T.H (with the LOTR I think most of the illustrations were maps/sketches/illustrations of buildings to help him plan out the geography, rather than designed specifically to accompany the text but I may be mistaken), his artwork in T.H has a definite charm to it but Tolkien recognized his own limitations as an artist and IIRC he talks about declining and offer to illustrate LOTR himself in one of his letters (frankly I'm surprised he even found the time to write it)

>The P.E. are expensive! I suppose a great deal of work goes into compiling these but I will probably shy away from them (for now, at least).

Like I said I don't read/have much interest in the linguistic material, though I'd imagine such journals have very small print runs and a limited amount of readers, pushing the cost up for everyone involved.

>It is amazing how vast the world of Middle-earth and Tolkien is.

It certainly is, and there is still apparently a huge amount of unpublished material (though whether any if merits publication is a different matter).

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Index:Unpublished_material

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letters_not_published_in_%22The_Letters_of_J.R.R._Tolkien%22

(In The Readers Companion is noted that as of 2006 Hammond and Scull had recorded some 1,500 unpublished letters, and more continue to come to light)


http://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2250

>A further, but quite distinct, consideration in this connection lies in the relation of The History of Middle-earth to the original writings. In my Foreword to The Peoples of Middle-earth, pp.ix-x, I referred to the forerunner of the History as 'an entirely "private" study, without thought or purpose of publication: an exhaustive investigation and analysis of all the materials concerned with what came to be called the Elder Days, from the earliest beginnings, omitting no detail of name-form or textual variation.' This work, which I called The History of the Silmarillion, and which I began after the publication of my 'constructed' text, runs to more than 2600 very closely typed pages, and it does not even touch on the Second and Third Ages. When the possibility arose of publishing at least part of this work, in some form, it was obvious that it would have to be heavily reduced and curtailed, and the part of The History of Middle-earth dealing with the Elder Days is indeed a new presentation of The History of the Silmarillion, and a severe contraction of it, especially in respect of the sheer quantity of variant manuscript material reproduced in full.

And then you have the various annotated, illustrated or expanded editions of the books with even more material...

Worth noting 'The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun' is being re-released later this year:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lay-Aotrou-Itroun-J-Tolkien/dp/0008202133

>Now I see all the biographical and analysis works include exclusive previously-unpublished material; and collecting things with a similar suit outside the most popular books is simply impossible.

Yes that is unfortunately true, unless you are very very rich, the best you can do is pick and choose on what seems most interesting.

>One could argue whether these are part of the Legendarium, but surely a true collector would not want to miss any of Tolkien's writings.

Well, good luck trying to track down a copy of:

http://www.tolkienbooks.net/php/philologists.php

for a reasonable price!

>Also, would you recommend The Atlas of Middle-Earth?

Definitely, excellent book, here's the table of contents if you are interested:

http://imgur.com/a/FSME9

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Atlas_of_Middle-earth

Though again make sure you buy the revised 2nd (not sure if there is a 3rd) edition.

>Regarding LOTR, I've heard the 60th Anniversary Edition from HarperCollins contains the most correct text. I think its worth getting.

I've been thinking about getting that myself, but I've heard mixed things about the binding, and the plastic slipcase looks a little flimsy but the Alan Lee illustrations are very tempting...I currently have a 2007 paperback edition based on the 50th Anniversary text and I think the 60th edition only has a couple of minor corrections from that (though I may be wrong).

The Golden Transcendence Trilogy, starting with "The Golden Age". It's fantastic and it saddens me more people haven't read it. Here is the Amazon review:

> The Golden Age is Grand Space Opera, a large-scale SF adventure novel in the tradition of A. E. Van vogt and Roger Zelazny, with perhaps a bit of Cordwainer Smith enriching the style. It is an astounding story of super science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden age writers.

> The Golden Age takes place 10,000 years in the future in our solar system, an interplanetary utopian society filled with immortal humans. Within the frame of a traditional tale-the one rebel who is unhappy in utopia-Wright spins an elaborate plot web filled with suspense and passion.

> Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets first an old man who accuses him of being an impostor and then a being from Neptune who claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government that Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. He is an exile from himself.

> And so Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the transformed solar system--Jupiter is now a second sun, Mars and Venus terraformed, humanity immortal--among humans, intelligent machines, and bizarre life forms that are partly both, to recover his memory, and to learn what crime he planned that warranted such preemptive punishment. His quest is to regain his true identity.

> The Golden Age is one of the major, ambitious SF novels of the year and the international launch of an important new writer in the genre.

Hi cruxclaire, I used Amazon's createspace publishing services to self-publish my work. I intend on releasing a new book soon, but this is my first I published about a month ago: https://www.amazon.com/Introspection-Brenden-M-Norwood/dp/1541222660

It's free to use, and even though the royalties kinda suck it's more the experience of having something you've written in your own hands that makes it all worth it. I recommend if you do decide to self-publish that you format your collection the size of the book you want (I recommend the Statement option which I believe is 5.5"by 8.5" or the other way around) so you don't have to reformat at the end.

Even though I know I'll never really be famous or anything, self-publishing has really improved my self confidence as a writer :D And I feel that if the opportunity to get seriously published ever presented itself, I'd at least have a few collections of my work to show. All in all, createspace's process is easy, free, and well worth your time. Would recommend starting there!

On the subject of writers block -

I thinks it's reading that cures it. I go through periods of writing loads; on the bus, on the train, at work, just after sex, on the toilet, in bed, in the kitchen, everywhere, all the time. I'll hit a point and my output will slow to a drizzle, then I read.
I've just started buying new books and getting into different poets that i've not read before, and it's great. I'll read a bunch of stuff, a lot of it will be interesting, but without impact - then, i'll found something that'll click and make me think 'I want to do something like that!', and the writing period will start again.
I guess this also crosses over into inspiration.

the other thing that's really spurred this all on, is that i've started running an open mic poetry night. Each time i'll read a couple of my own, as well as a couple of poems that I've enjoyed recently. 'Her anxiety' by W.B.Yeats, 'The applicant' by Sylvia Plath & 'Meditation on the A30' by John Betjeman are all poems that i've really enjoyed reading recently. It's that I have to come up with new content every month, to keep it fresh, that helps me to keep my mind active. I try and remember as many as I can off the top of my head, but my head is usally filled with all sorts of other things than I need to remember, like what the point of all this rambling was ...

AH YES! Read more poetry, read shit, read things you've never read before and all that kinda stuff. Read 'Crow' by Ted hughes, you can find some not-too-expensive paperbacks on that shit-heap, Amazon. 'Crow' is portrayed as some kind of trickster death god, that's been influencing the world from the beginning - well worded violence and insanity, as to be expected from Ted, with good humour thrown in their too.

Plus, I read a great one from Toby Martinez de las rivas the other day. It was all about meeting eyes with your lover, whilst they're having a pee.

I've read most of those and LOVED them. I'll just say you're looking for fictional "good books" and go from there. I recommend:

1. Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels by Scott Lynch. My favorite books of all time--and that's saying something. It's about a gang of con-artist thieves caught between their biggest heist and a powerful mage and his employer, who wants to use them as a cat's paw.
   
   
2. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Excellent fantasy with a witty, resourceful, extremely intelligent protagonist. Set in two timelines, the protagonist is the only survivor of a gypsy clan that was destroyed by a powerful enemy he vows to hunt down.
   
   
3. The Orphans of Chaos trilogy by John C. Wright. Amazingly original fantasy, with 4 paradigms of power and featuring a showdown between the Titans and Olympian gods.
   
   
4. The Golden Age Trilogy also by John C. Wright. This is faaaaar-future sci-fi (think 1+ million years), it's extremely creative, and if anyone else had attempted to write it, it would have turned into gobbledygook.
   
   
5. The Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King starting with The Beekeeper's Apprentice. This is a re-imagined Sherlock Holmes series done very well, set after his official retirement, when he meets a young woman who matches his intellect and observation skills and decides to take her on as protege.
   
   
6. The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. Pretty great YA fantasy in which trained practitioners can move beyond the gates of death...and have to battle things that come back from beyond those gates.
   
   
7. The Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathon Stroud. I had a ball with these books when they came out. Features a snarky demon and his master.
   
   
8. The Hungry City Chronicles by Phillip Reeve. Set in a post-apocalyptic type world where cities are mobile and move around, chasing smaller cities down across the landscape and cannibalizing them for resources.
   

Evan Currie's Odyssey One series is more military than pure space opera, but it is awesome.

The Golden Oecumene series by John C Wright is a Transhuman Space Opera of epic proportions. I highly recommend it.

Rachel Bach has a great series called Fortunes Pawn. Also a lil closer to military sci-fi but it has some nice Space Opera themes.

Joshua Dalzelle has a great series called the Black Fleet, again more military sci-fi than true space opera, but very good none the less.

The Reality Dysfunction series though, if you are looking for a meaty Space opera to lose yourself in is a must read series.

____

I almost forgot about the Manifold Series by Stephen Baxter and the Darwin's Radio series by Greg Bear. Both are phenomenal reads, and while technically they are set in the near future and aren't space opera per say, they are must reads for anyone into Sci-Fi.

Lord Byron:

There are notable examples of the Byronic hero in the verse tale The Giaour, also notable for one of the first descriptions of vampirism in English literature, and the drama Manfred. Beppo is a short humorous later work that in tone and form could be considered a prototype for his masterpiece Don Juan. I also recommend the end of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, starting from Canto IV's stanza CLXXV, which is some of his best poetry.

As for a specific physical book, I like this volume because it has his complete works in a compact form, with Byron's original footnotes. The big drawback is that uses two column formatting and small print to cram everything in. The Oxford World's Classics volume Lord Byron: The Major Works looks like a good selection, that includes all the pieces I recommended, and it will be more readable because it uses one column and larger print.

Mine:

Somewhere a Raven is Dreaming, $10
free version

 

A Soul in Baker's Dozen Pieces, $5
free version

 


Kick and the Cheese Warehouse, $5
free version

 


Mine and others:
The Best of OCPoetry, Years 1-3
free version

 

I believe the role of the modern poet to be much the same as the modern comedian or comic artist, albeit in a different format - which is to say or write in a way that is societally relevant and/or essentially forces someone to use their brain.

Starting out, I imitated Robert Frost, Robert Browning, and William Blake.

I want to be more like James Elroy Flecker (when it comes to use of meter), Brenden Norwood (the guy keeps coming up with these brilliant images that I wish I thought of first), and LF Call (an unending wellspring of creativity. I mean those birdsong poems, mein Gott...). There's plenty more, including the rest of the team here, but those are who come to mind at the moment.

The most recent thing to inspire one of my poems was playing Taps at a military funeral - not just hearing it over a loudspeaker at night, or even hearing a bugler play it as I watch the casket get loaded on the plane, but being the one to play it - the cold metal, the shifting light, the family and me both trying to keep it together, the whole experience.

My favorite post-singularity fiction is the Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright. Superintelligent AI, virtual reality, and mind uploading, and he still manages a deeply human tale of epic heroism. It's a little hard to get into for the first three or four chapters, but then it really takes off. I've read it three times.

Greg Egan's work is pretty interesting, eg. Permutation City, which is mainly about uploading etc.

For more of the near-future speculation side of Accelerando, Cory Doctorow writes a lot of good stuff. And there's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which is post-singularity.

Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is pretty much a classic, covering nanotech, AI-based education, and all sorts of craziness. One of my favorites.

Ghosts in the Cosmos - A collection of poems inspired by dreams and nightmares, by friends and family, by fleeting moments and half-formed thoughts, by passing strangers and those who permanently tattoo themselves onto our lives whether we want them to or not.


Available on Amazon for $1.24 / £0.99 or for free via Kindle Unlimited.

I’m currently preparing to self-publish my first ‘real’ book and put this together to learn how Kindle Create and the whole
Amazon self-publishing system works.

Would appreciate your feeeback :)

The Golden Age by John C. Wright, and its two sequels, The Phoenix Exultant: and The Golden Transcendence.

It's not quite what I think you mean by transhumanism, but it's a great posthuman novel. The publisher says:

> The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on all the races of humanity and transhumanity.

The trilogy is written with style and humor, with a strong dash of the classics, and with an eye toward limits and implications of communication across different levels of computational capacity, mind architecture, and processing speed.

In fact I think I just talked myself into re-reading it :-)

Most of his poems are available in some form online, but I highly recommend this volume: https://smile.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Fragments-Volumes-II/dp/0701188413

The editor has gone back to the manuscripts, as well as letters from Owen to his mother, siblings, and other poets (notably Siegfried Sassoon) and given a comprehensive two-volume set containing every known poem and fragment, as well as drafts, in chronological order. You can actually viscerally feel Owen's resolve steeling as he matures as a poet, reading this alongside "Collected Letters" - I don't understand why Owen isn't really taught at all here in the USA...

Harper Collins has been coming out with Deluxe Editions of all of Tolkien's books, in a matched set with individual slipcases. I have two of the set and they are fantastic. The binding and paper quality are impeccable and they look great. In my opinion, they're the best versions of his books out there.

Lord of The Rings

The Hobbit

The Silmarillion

The Children of Hurin

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

Tales from the Perilous Relm

[Unfinished Tales](http://www.tolkien.co.uk/product/9780007542925/Unfinished+Tales+(Deluxe+Slipcase+Edition)

Consider Philip Larkin. He's super down-to-earth, the language is no-frills but still beautiful, and he tackles some of the biggest subjects out there. Take for example the infamous "This Be the Verse."

I have this edition and really like it.

Love love this!!!

Who is e.h.??

Edit: answered my own question.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1326060805/ref=sr_isbn_r?keywords=9781326060800

Grouping them in threes is intriguing and I think you're on to something.

I've always included all of their albums and grouped them in pairs, with the latter album serving as a sort of companion piece or further exploration of the more original material on the former. I've always looked at it that way based primarily on the changes that coincided with their live tours, but I've had to make a couple of exceptions.

Bear with me: Boy/October is an obvious pairing right from the start. Under a Blood Red Sky also obviously the live album from the War tour. Then came Unforgettable Fire and Wide Awake In America. The Rattle and Hum film and album is an obvious extrapolation of The Joshua Tree album and tour. They "dreamed it all up again" and reinvented their music (and tour) with Achtung Baby, then recorded Zooropa while still on tour and merely expanded the whole ZooTV concept. So far so good.

Pop is where things get a little tricky and my whole "Albums In Pairs" theory needs an exception, though I often think Pop and its reception are something of an exception in U2's oeuvre anyway. Influenced by a lot of the club mixes from the Achtung/Zooropa days (which they liked), and with some songs leftover from the Zooropa recording sessions, they decided to take ZooTV and make it even bigger with PopMart. They were ultimately unhappy with the result and reaction was mixed, so there was never a companion piece or further exploration of what they were trying to do with Pop. I suppose you could throw in the fact that this is where they decided to release their Best of: 1980-1990 album and remind fans they hadn't completely lost their freaking minds as a kind of follow-up (and for the record I still dig Pop, but I'm glad they remixed and properly finished some of the songs like Gone.)

ATYCLB and HTDAAB can and should be grouped together largely based on the similarities of both tours, as well as the sonic and lyrical themes that run through both albums. But then I have to make another exception with No Line On The Horizon because it has no follow-up or companion album, and the 360 Tour was a behemoth that hearkened back to PopMart but was never expanded with material from a second album.

Which brings us to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and with titles obviously inspired by William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I think we can assume that there will not be a third album with a similar title, or an expansion of the I+E Tour. Therefore, if my theory holds up, the next album and tour will be completely different. Unless they do Songs of Ascent, in which case your groupings in threes might start to make a lot more sense.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, NLOTH and the 360 Tour could be considered a follow up to Pop and an expansion of the PopMart tour, they just leapfrogged ATYCLB/HTDAAB to get to it. That's if you want to stretch my theory a little to avoid making exceptions.

You need to do research on your time period if you want to do that. Start with sources like wikipedia and just figure out what century you're interested in. As another commenter has pointed out, the period is called "medieval" and Shakespeare came later.

In fact, during the Medieval period, people spoke Middle English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English

There are some works in Middle English that still exist and are relatively easy to find. Works by Chaucer will probably be the easiest to find. There are abridged versions, but if you want to know what Middle English actually sounded like, don't buy one. The Book of the Duchess isn't too long.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Duchess-Geoffrey-Chaucer/dp/1517564433

I'm not suggesting you spell things as Chaucer does, but at least give it a read to get a sense for what's accurate to your time period.

I suggest you go for a mixed anthology, such as this one which was compiled by voting at a UK radio Station;

An anthology that covers ground from medieval to post-modern poetry, includes various demographics of poets and myriad themes and styles is I think the best way to introduce yourself to poetry and gives you a chance to really explore what sparks your interest for further reading.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Classic-FM-100-Favourite-Poems/dp/0340713208

yay! a truly random contest, a chance to own the complete works of Robert Burns!

Check out Longfellow and Wordsworth. For something more complicated but still similar to Whitman, look at Browning.

For a modern twist, see Mary Oliver. Her descriptions of the natural world are, I think, just as powerful as Whitman's. You won't go wrong there.

Some of their Selected poetry:
Wordsworth Book: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-William-Wordsworth-Poetry-Library/dp/1853264016

http://www.amazon.com/Longfellow-Selected-Poems-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140390642

http://www.amazon.com/New-Selected-Poems-Volume-One/dp/0807068772

Glad you enjoyed it! yeah, Carol Ann Duffy is a great poet. She's been Britain's Poet Laureate for the last decade! The first Scott and the first woman to do so! You'll likely enjoy a collection of her poems in The World's Wife, which retells many classic stories with a tragi-comedic, feminist flair. She's recently stepped down from the laureateship, but not before her publishing her latest collection Sincerity. In it, she goes hard on recent political issues.

I recommend Wendy Cope and Billy Collins.

Wendy Cope is a UK poet. Her first collection Maiking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis is perhaps her most famous.

Billy Collins was the US Poet Laurette. He has a wonderful way with words. Highly recommended.

I love Wendy Cope and she has some good collections - Family Values and Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis ae two of my favourites

Other works of fiction that contain the concept of a metaverse;

Books

• The Otherland series, by Tad Williams, beginning with City of Golden Shadow (sidenote, this series also has an MMORPG based on it, currently in closed beta, and recently (October of last year) brought back from the dead)
  
  
• The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons, beginning with Hyperion.
  
  
• The Golden Oecumene, by John C. Wright, beginning with The Golden Age.
  
  
• Accel World, by Reki Kawahara, beginning with Kuroyukihime's Return. (If you are familiar with the manganime Sword Art Online, this is by the same author, and shares the same universe)
  
  
• This Alien Shore, by Celia S. Friedman. (amazon link)
  
  
• The Sprawl Trilogy, by William Gibson, beginning with Neuromancer.
  
  
• Accelerando, by Charles Stross. (free e-book link)
  
  Anime and Manga
  
  
• The .hack series, specifically .hack//SIGN
  
  
• For a lighter feel, there's Summer Wars (available on CrunchyRoll) and the INCREDIBLY similar second Digimon movie, Our War Game!. Also I guess by extension, but not really explored as much, the entire Digimon series, as it takes place in an analogy for the internet.
  
  
• Serial Experiments Lain
  
  
• Okay fine, here's Sword Art Online (CrunchyRoll link)
  
  Film
  
  
• The Singularity is Near, a speculative documentary based on the Ray Kurzweil book of the same name.
  
  
• The Thirteenth Floor, a crime thriller about the owner of a VR simulation company getting murdered.
  
  ----
  
  I know I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the genre, because if there's one thing humans are good at, it's writing fucktons on what we like.
  
  So feel free to comment additions to this list, or opinions on what I've currently included. I have by no means read/watched all of these, so having someone with actual experience with each of these weigh in would be nice.

...and it's available for pre-order on Amazon UK, at least. Thank you for reminding me of that! It will have a bunch of otherwise very hard-to-find poems that were early versions of much of the work in the book as well as, apparently, an unfinished prose story about Tom.

>The Poets of Reddit: The Best of OCPoetry Years 1-3 $5.14, 186 pgs, softcover




Do you take poems that users post in this subreddit and sell them in a book?

One of my sci-fi favs which is CRUNCHY in its sci-fi is The Golden Age by John Wright. The plot is twisty enough you won’t know where it will head, but the ideas in the book are so constant that many have trouble reading it. Not because it’s bad but rather it’s DENSE. The next two in the trilogy is easier though. Do please read some reviews first.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Age-Paperback-ebook/dp/B000FA5QJK/

I would recommend reading the book, it’s dope! here you can buy it on amazon I think. if I did it right

The Golden Age trilogy has a lot of future-law in it. The main character is essentially caught up in a legal battle which he can't remember due to his memories being erased. One of my favorites of the last 10 years or so.

The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin.

• By John C. Wright: The Golden Age (first in a trilogy) and the upcoming Count to a Trillion (likewise).
  
• By Greg Egan: Permutation City (in its second half) (excerpt), Diaspora (excerpt), Border Guards, Schild's Ladder (excerpt), Riding the Crocodile/Incandescence (excerpt of the latter).
  
• Possibly Iain M. Banks' Culture series; they say you should start with The Player of Games.
  
• Riding the Crocodile and the elsewhere-mentioned Thousandth Night first appeared in the anthology One Million AD.
  
• Relevant TV Tropes pages: Human Subspecies, Time Abyss, Transhuman Aliens.
  
  In response to this comment, Egan's one example of someone who wrote near-future stories in the '90s that remain non-ridiculous.