<p><b><i>''So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We''re sure it won''t be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it did us'' </i>(from the Introduction)<br><br></b>In <i>The Zoo of the New</i>, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly <i>here</i> and <i>now</i> in the 21st Century.<br><br>This book is the condensed result of that search. It stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O''Hara, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Br