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. Please view the preview of this book for a full listing of the titles included.

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