The Zoo of the New

Book excerpt: In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. They have looked for those poems which see most clearly, which speak most vividly, and which have meant the most to them as readers and writers. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness- words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the twenty-first century. This book stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.