Ten Poems for Spring

Sunshine and showers, cuckoos, frogs, daffodils and cherry blossom.... Poets writing about spring certainly have no shortage of material. Our selection of poems takes in many of these yearly delights. There are contemporary voices a poem in which a dog sniffs around a city park and enjoys the new smells, and another where an "immortal frog" seems to promise the speaker fresh hope and a return to good health. In a poem from the nineteenth century, spring is a time of renewal when the world is restored to its original beauty: "What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning..." - from 'Spring' by Gerard Manley Hopkins This delightful mini-anthology provides a taste of the countless ways in which this most uplifting of seasons has been celebrated in verse over the centuries. Poems by Thomas Carew, John Clare, Nichola Deane, Emily Dickinson, Valerie Gillies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, AE Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jessica Mookherjee and Alicia Ostriker. Cover illustration by Alexandra Buckle.