Villanelles (Various); Everyman, 2012

A comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle – the first anthology of its kind. The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem arranged in five tercets and one quatrain in which only two rhymes may be used. Two single-line refrains must be repeated alternately throughout, and drawn together at the end. This presents a considerable technical challenge, but one to which poets have responded for almost two hundred years, fascinated by the combination of recurrence and surprise that the villanelle offers. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century – by Thomas Hardy, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Oscar Wilde and others – to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’. Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Sherman Alexie and Rita Dove, demonstrating the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single strict poetic form.

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