Christina Georgina Rosetti

This is a unique celebration of that most beautiful and self-possessed of creatures--the cat. More than 50 poems are included, reflecting every feline mood: the comic, the aristocratic, the lazy, the cunning, the fierce, the inscrutable. Lovers of cats and lovers of poetry will be delighted by the wide-ranging nature of the collection by poets such as T.S. Elliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, Edward Lear and many others. One of the most attractive features of the book is the choice of pictures. A stunning selection of drawings and paintings by such artists and illustrators as Renoir, Manet, Picasso, Hogarth, Cruikshank and Lear add to the charm of the verse, making this a book to be treasured by cat lovers everywhere.

When his mother goes to the hospital to have a baby, Noah's worst fears about a baby around the house are realized when he goes to stay with Bib and her family.

Compiler's Note The only poems of Christina Rossetti now in print--apart from those reproduced in anthologies--are the rhymes for young children, Sing-Song, first published in 1872. Some of these are included in my selection (on pp. 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 44, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 and 72) and I have given them titles, although originally published without. The text of the poems has been taken from the definitive edition of the poet's work: The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes by Michael Rossetti, published in 1904. Where I have included extracts from longer poems, as on pp. 22, 24, 42, 47, 61, 63 and 81, I have given titles to the extracts, while indicating the title of the whole poem at the end. Where consecutive poems happen to have the same titles (as on pp. 73, 74, 84 and 85) I have replaced these with first-line titles. D.P. October, 1969

ix, 54 p. ; 22 cm

Speculative poetry travels winding roads leading to wondrous worlds, regions never traversed by mainstream verse. Fantastic poems range in the material they treat from the strange but explainable to the utterly fanciful, from horror to wonder, and from the rigidly verisimilitudinous to the purely surrealist. They may utilize traditional prosody or may avail themselves of the discontinuities and fragmentation of modernist free verse. They may use as setting the primary world, a secondary world, or a combination of the two. With roots planted firmly in the mythic and folkloric epics and ballads of yore, and branches reaching high into the endless skies of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror, speculative poetry is a historic and vital poetic genre, the source of the most thoughtful, imaginative verse being written today. Red Sky features over 100 years' worth of speculative poetry from yesterday's masters, modern award winners, and emerging stars. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, metaphysical encounters and startling futuristic speculations, these poems will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of speculative poetry.