Voted Britain's favourite poem in 1996, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over. Its declaration of defiance, so vividly and cleverly expressed, appeals to the rebel in all of us as we secretly yearn to throw off the shackles of propriety and enjoy the gleeful freedom of cocking a snook at the rest of the world. In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she indulges in her fantasy of the gabby old crone with her outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends, remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike. F ..

Presents poems drawn from the author's first four collections, The Unlooked-for Season (Scorpion Press, 1960), Rose in the Afternoon (J M Dent, 1974), The Thinking Heart (Secker and Warburg, 1978) and Beyond Descartes (Secker and Warburg, 1983). ..

Presents a collection of prose fictions by a modern British writer, winner of the BBC's National Poetry Day poll in 1996. This book shows the influence on human lives of the mechanical workings of the world, illuminating many human states, especially love. ..

Jenny Joseph won the prestigious British Forward Prize for the best individual poem written in 1995. Her poem, 'In Honor of Love' was chosen and is included in Ghosts. Joseph's readers will recognize the familiar territory of her 'thinking heart', but her angle here is at a different slant, her mysteries are more resonant, her questioning more urgent, and her voice is both stonier and yet more personal than in her earlier work. These poems take language to its limits, speaking from the other side, echoing the unsaid. ..

Extreme of Things is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present how things work at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, Ghosts and Other Company (1995) and All the ThingsSee (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The 'Season Songs' from Persephone (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the ..