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    The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0
    The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0
    The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0
    Ebook121 pages49 minutes

    The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0

    By Elsinore Books

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    About this ebook

    An anthology like no other.


    “The Vanishing” brings together one hundred of the finest classic and contemporary short poems. The poems are arranged by length, beginning with John Gould Fletcher’s ninety-nine word “Chinese Poet among Barbarians” and proceeding poem by poem with an ever-diminishing word-count. Each poem is one word shorter than the last.
    The collection takes its name from the final “fit” of Lewis Carroll's “The Hunting of the Snark”. Like the hero of Carroll’s tale, this collection “softly and suddenly vanishes away,” until a blank page alone remains.


    Included are masterpieces by Derek Mahon, Helene Johnson, George Mackay Brown, Wislawa Szymborska, James Wright, Edward Thomas, Christopher Reid, Duncan Forbes, Emily Dickinson, Miroslav Holub, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Lux, Louis MacNeice, Frances Cornford, Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wilbur, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen Crane, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Tomas Tranströmer, Michael Longley, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, Thomas McGrath, Patrick Kavanagh, Philip Larkin, Taha Muhammed Ali, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Graves, Anne Stevenson, U. A. Fanthorpe, Amy Lowell, H. D., D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Menashe, William Blake, Bob Arnold, Don Paterson, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and many other outstanding poets. Please view the preview of this book for a full listing of the titles included.


    At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful e-books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between the poems. We regularly update the formatting of our books, to ensure they will always remain perfectly accessible on all e-reader models.


    This book is part of the Best of Poetry series, which also includes:
    The Best of Poetry: Shakespeare, Muse of Fire
    The Best of Poetry: A Young Person’s Book of Evergreen Verse
    The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsinore Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2017
    The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0

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      Book preview

      The Vanishing - Elsinore Books

      Introduction

      For a collection of short poems, only a short introduction will do. These one hundred diminutive masterpieces are arranged by length so that each is one word shorter than the last. This intricate arrangement, however challenging for the anthologiser—who did it his own self to gratify—, should be to the reader only a secondary consideration. Each poem is a fresh universe to explore.

      The collection takes its name from the final fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Like the hero of Carroll’s tale, this collection softly and suddenly vanishes away, until a blank page alone remains.

      Copyright © Elsinore Books 2017

      The Poems

      Introduction

      The Poems

      The Vanishing

      Chinese Poet Among Barbarians

      The Snow Party

      I Think I Could Turn and Live with Animals

      Green Candles

      Meeting at Night

      Invocation

      Feeding Ducks

      There Will Come Soft Rains

      Song of the Seedling

      Mediocrity in Love Rejected

      At the British Museum

      On Receiving News of War

      The Lodging

      The Plot Against the Giant

      O, She Doth Teach the Torches to Burn Bright!

      In Praise of Self-Deprecation

      Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

      I Like to See it Lap the Miles

      Morning, Sailing Into Xinyang

      Escape

      I Stood on a Tower in the Wet

      Nocturne

      Like the Touch of Rain

      Fly

      Recension Day

      House Fear

      The Forest

      Proud Songsters

      The Falling of the Leaves

      Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City

      Exile

      The Endless Pilgrimage

      The Watch

      Now Lift Me Close

      The Night Is Darkening Round Me

      The Villain

      Salutation

      Cartography

      Muse

      Taking Leave of a Friend

      The Desolate Field

      He Hears the Cry of the Sedge

      Parable

      The End of the World

      Skerryvore

      A God in Wrath

      A Poem for Someone Who Is Juggling Her Life

      Eight O’clock

      Harlem

      National Insecurity

      Water-burn

      A Vow to Mars

      Flint

      Talisman

      The Torch

      Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

      Epitaph

      Wet Evening in April

      As Bad as a Mile

      Close Close All Night

      And So

      Winter Trees

      The Cherry Trees

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