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.
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
The Vanishing: One Hundred Shorter & Shorter Poems from 99 Words to 0
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If you have any questions, you can contact us at admin@elsinorebooks.co.uk and we'll be with you right away to help.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
Perpetually Successive
Fork of the Road
Hailstorm in May
Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist
It Looks So Simple from a Distance…
There was an Old Person of Gretna
Reindeer Report
Watering the Horse
Rubaiyat XII.
Wind and Silver
Oread
The Viking Terror
Nothing to Save
The Dawn Whiteness
Nocturne VI.
Fog
Please
To Old Age
“Surgeons Must Be Very Careful”
Epigram
Enter
Epigram
The Longest Journey
Hopewell Haiku: XXV.
Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of the Judgement of Paris
Haiku
Stanzas in Meditation: LXIII
Beachhead
Fragment
No Oblivion
Spring
Coward
Proverb
After the Child
The Shortest and Sweetest of Songs
One (Orange) Arm of the World’s Oldest Windmill
On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him