We are only happy when we pursue a transcendent purpose, something larger than ourselves. This pursuit involves a deeply meaningful relationship with God by committed participation in the spiritual disciplines. The Lost Virtue of Happiness takes a fresh, meaningful look at the spiritual disciplines, offering concrete examples of ways you can make them practical and life-transforming.

"Crafting Verse: Mastering the Art of Poetry" is a comprehensive guide designed to empower aspiring poets on their creative journey. With ten richly detailed chapters, this book explores every facet of poetic expression, from harnessing inspiration to refining technique, and from exploring themes to sharing your work with the world. Delving into the intricacies of language, form, and emotion, each section provides practical insights, hands-on exercises, and inspiring examples to help you unlock your poetic potential. Whether you're a seasoned wordsmith or just starting out, "Crafting Verse" offers invaluable guidance, encouraging you to embrace your unique voice, experiment with different forms, and cultivate a lifelong practice of poetic exploration. From finding inspiration in everyday life to navigating the complexities of narrative poetry, this book is your indispensable companion on the path to writing amazing poetry.

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.

When you need a quick Bible reference on key life issues-like God's will, your emotions, praying, and worship-turn to the "What the Bible Says About..." series. These brand-new books are a concise, easy-to-read resource on the contemporary topics that affect you. Every book features 12 sections, each addressing a common question relating to the overall topic. Within each section, 2 to 6 related categories provide specific Bible verses that address the questions, and each section ends with a practical wrap-up to help readers apply the scripture one moment at a time. These "What the Bible Says About..." books are priced right at less than $5 each.

This book of poems is a personal journey written from daily reflections and looking back through the pages of my life, by putting pen to paper I have been able to deal with the pain and heartache from incidents out of my control, the beauty that surrounds me that is God created and the utmost joy and pleasure that is part of my life as I learn, grow and develop into a person I can be proud of. I wish to thank the encouragement from my daughter Kimberley who has collaborated with me in putting this book together, my husband Colin who has lovingly allowed me to use him as a sounding board and last but not least David whose insatiable thirst for prose pushed me into putting it all out there for others to read. If it inspires just one other women to search her being and find the courage to put pen to paper and take the journey within and let her spirit soar and lay to rest her pain and share her joy then my job is done.

How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.

In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.

Part 1 seeks to give the student insight into the nature of lyric poetry and the poet's craft; part 2 is a little anthology of lyric verse.