Best of
Poetry

1971

Selected Poems


Jorge Luis Borges - 1971
    This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los Conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara


Frank O'Hara - 1971
    Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

Selected Poems


Marina Tsvetaeva - 1971
    An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play


Wallace Stevens - 1971
    Edited by Holly Stevens, it includes some poems not printed in his earlier Collected Works.

Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems


Fernando Pessoa - 1971
    Now Richard Zenith has collected in a single volume all the major poetry of "one of the most extraordinary poetic talents the century has produced" (Microsoft Network's Reading Forum). Fernando Pessoa was as much a creator of personas as he was of poetry, prose, and criticism. He wrote under numerous "heteronyms," literary alter egos with fully fleshed identities and writing styles, who supported and criticized each other's work in the margins of his drafts and in the literary journals of the time. From spare minimalism to a revolutionary exuberance that recalls Leaves of Grass, Pessoa's oeuvre was radically new and anticipated contemporary literary concerns to an unnerving degree. The first comprehensive edition of Pessoa's poetry in the English language, Fernando Pessoa & Co. is a work of extraordinary depth and poetic precision. "Zenith's selection of Pessoa is a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century." -- Booklist

The Book of Nightmares


Galway Kinnell - 1971
    Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

The Black Poets


Dudley Randall - 1971
    an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."—from the Introduction by Dudley Randall

Transformations


Anne Sexton - 1971
    The fairy tale-based works of the tortured confessional poet, whose raw honesty and wit in the face of psychological pain have touched thousands of readers.

Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran


Kahlil Gibran - 1971
    Inviting reflection on the meaning of love and eloquently rendering the chain of moments that the experience of love leads us through, this famous inspirational poet channels the same proverbial simplicity and lyrical beauty that made his poem "The Prophet" instantly and internationally loved.

Imaginations


William Carlos Williams - 1971
    These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.”The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

Revolutionary Letters


Diane di Prima - 1971
    They were also used as guerrilla theatre. The poems in this edition address some of the history of the past 20 years and were written as the various occasions arose.

Poems by Faiz


Faiz Ahmad Faiz - 1971
    This collection of his poems is representative of the best in contemporary Urdu writing. The Urdu text is presented with English translations.

Crossing the Water


Sylvia Plath - 1971
    Published posthumously in 1971, they add a startling counterpoint to Ariel, the volume that made her reputation. Readers will recognise some of her most celebrated poems – ‘Childless Woman’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Insomniac’ – while discovering those still overlooked, including her radio play Three Women. These two extraordinary volumes find their place alongside The Colossus and Ariel in the oeuvre of a singular talent.

The Portal of the Mystery of Hope


Charles Péguy - 1971
    Schindler, JrIn what is one of the greatest Catholic poetic works of our century, Péguy offers a comprehensive theology ordered around the often-neglected second virtue which is incarnated inhis celebrated image of the ‘little girl Hope'.

Selected Writings


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie


Maya Angelou - 1971
    Simultaneous hardcover re-issue by Random House.

The Carrier of Ladders


W.S. Merwin - 1971
    

Songs of Love and Hate


Leonard Cohen - 1971
    Includes many photos of Cohen and article/interview with him that originally appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. The music notation includes guitar tablature. Songs included are:"Avalanche""Sing Another Song, Boys""Famous Blue Raincoat""No Diamonds in the Mine""Last Year's Man""Love Calls You By Your Name""Joan of Arc""Dress Rehearsal Rag"

Selected Poems


Giuseppe Ungaretti - 1971
    His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age. Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.

Wonderings


Kenneth Patchen - 1971
    His new universe is exciting and spirit-cleansing. the light streaming from the hand and heart of this poet-artist illuminates the darkness, the sordid and confused pettiness of our day-to-day existence.

Scenes of Life at the Capital


Philip Whalen - 1971
    

Tent Posts


Henri Michaux - 1971
    As if they were dictated at the "front line," so to speak, Tent Posts is a book of theoretical urgency, ideas written down quickly (and brilliantly) by the great Belgian author.

The Will to Change


Adrienne Rich - 1971
    They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."—David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review

Train Ride


Ted Berrigan - 1971
    Cover art and design by Joe Brainard. First printed in 1979 using letterpress and handbinding, this second printing is limited to 999 copies and is a digital facsimile of that first edition, 7 inches tall by 5 inches wide (except for updates to the colophon and copyright pages).TRAIN RIDE, subtitled 'February 18th, 1971: for Joe [Brainard], ' is a long poem in the tradition of Herodotus, Goethe, Laurence Sterne, Agatha Christie, & Blaise Cendrars--a poem of the travails & pleasures of travel, truly of the late 20th century in that its verbal events are more internal than external: 'Out the Window / is / Out to Lunch!!'--one of the results of the developments of industrial capitalism initiated by steam engine and rail-way...Thus we have a great deal of hypothetical & remembered fucking, money, friendship--'amistad'--and, indeed throughout, witty & precise meditation on the act of writing itself. The persona that emerges is the 'poet in the state of surprise' (Apollinaire), a saintly yet human figure, addressing us with wonderful Peruvian frankness: 'I'd be a terrific Senator / because I'd love it' ... The 'Our Friends' section is a marvelous catalog of prominence... One could go on cataloging the delights of the ride: one would be wiser to simply urge all who can run & read to take it, with Ted Berrigan, a Great Companion.--Anselm Holl

Will You Be My Friend?


James Kavanaugh - 1971
    WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND? contains poetry by James Kavanaugh who has brought hope and joy, laughter and courage to millions of loyal, enthusiastic readers with moving collections of poetic reflections about life.

Configurations: Poetry


Octavio Paz - 1971
    Paz himself translated many of the poems from the Spanish. Some distinguished contributors to this bilingual edition include, among others, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp. Denise Levertov, and Muriel Rukeyser. Paz's poems, although rooted in the mythology of South America and his native Mexico, nevertheless have an international background, transfiguring the images of the contemporary world. Powerful, angry, erotic, they voice the desires and rage of a generation.

The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems


Diane Wakoski - 1971
    Her poetry probes the difficulties that the individual encounters in relationships with others, with the natural world, and with cultural and popular ideas. - -britanica

Edward the Dyke and Other Poems


Judy Grahn - 1971
    Drawings: Wendy Cadden, Brenda Crider, Gail Hodgins, Sunny, Susann

Apocalypse and Other Poems


Ernesto Cardenal - 1971
    The editors of this volume, Robert Pring-Mill and Donald D. Walsh, have chosen a representative selection of Cardenal’s shorter protest poems, epigrams, religious, and Amerindian verse. Also included are two of Cardenal’s most impressive longer works: the haunting and melodic elegy, “Coplas on the Death of Merton,” and the title poem, “Apocalypse,” in which the theme of an ever-threatening nuclear holocaust is the core of a modern rendering of the Book of Revelations. At Our Lady of Solentiname, his religious community on an island in Lake Nicaragua, living and working in the manner of the early Christians, Father Cardenal embodies what he professes: “Now in Latin America, to practice religion is to make revolution.” An informative introduction has been contributed by Robert Pring-Mill of Oxford University. The translations are by Thomas Merton, Robert Pring-Mill, Kenneth Rexroth and Mireya Jaimes-Freyre, and Donald D. Walsh, who also translated In Cuba, Cardenal’s assessment of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary society, published by New Directions in 1974.

Dismantling the Silence


Charles Simic - 1971
    

Little Book of Love


Kahlil Gibran - 1971
    This title is a collection of his reflections on love and friendship, illustrated with the poet's own original paintings.

Collected Poems


Jack Kerouac - 1971
    Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.Kerouac wrote poetry in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku (and his own American variants of it, which he sometimes called “Pops”), the Buddhist sutra, the prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight (which he described as “the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight”), doggerel ballads and free-form songs, the psalms preserved in early notebooks, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”But his sense of form was closely allied to a commitment to spontaneous utterance—to a poetry awake to “All the endless conception of living beings / Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness / Throughout the ten directions of space”—and a longing for transcendent experience that marked his work from the beginning. “My only ambition,” he wrote in 1943, “is to be free in art.” That freedom came at a high personal price. Kerouac’s collected poems immerse us in what editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell describes as “the impenetrable complexities, engulfing vulnerabilities, and insoluble demands that life made on his heart and mind.”Many poets have found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work. Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking”; Michael McClure saw him as using “the whole of his life . . . as an instrument of perception”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan singled out Mexico City Blues as crucial to his own artistic development.

Copacul-animal


Gellu Naum - 1971
    

The Tablets


Armand Schwerner - 1971
    THE TABLETS takes its place as a worthy successor of the great American long poems of our century: Pound's Cantos, Williams' Paterson, Olson's Maximus, Zukofsky's A. The first edition, published in 1968, included eight tablets. Over the years, THE TABLETS continued to grow. The present edition is the first to include all twenty-seven tablets that Schwerner had completed at the time of his death, along with the poet's own commentary on the work in the form of Journals/Divagations. This edition also includes a CD of Schwerner reading extensive selections of THE TABLETS. Schwerner's poem mimics the conventions observed in real scholarly editions of ancient cuneiform texts ... THE TABLETS is a Chinese-box puzzle, in place of a primal scene of archeological insight, a game of hide-and-seek, in place of 'knowledge, ' uncertainty, speculation, make-believe and trompe l'oeil effects--Brian McHale

Stanzas for Iris Lezak


Jackson Mac Low - 1971
    

Blues and Roots/Rue and Bluets: A Garland for the Southern Appalachians


Jonathan Chamberlain Williams - 1971
    This new, much enlarged edition of Blues and Roots displays all of the above. Williams has tramped the Appalachian Trail for decades, botanizing, jotting down specimens of authentic American speech, graffiti, superstitions, and nostrums—always curious, alert, and affectionately attentive. Blues and Roots focuses on the linguistic horizon of Appalachia in lyrics of wonder and light, of wit and comic incongruity, in found poems of the speech of his mountain neighbors. Publishers Weekly said of the earlier edition, “One of the most beautiful and evocative tributes to the Appalachians and its people yet published.” Blues and Roots is a fine celebration; Wiliams is a joyful ringmaster.

Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End


Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 1971
    . . . It can be read, enjoyed, studied by people who like reading poetry, including—I would suspect—poets.”—Richard M. Elman, New York Times Book Review

Truth of Poetry


Michael Hamburger - 1971
    Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of almost every major poet of the period, Hamburger's non-partisan approach and practitioner's appreciation of the aesthetic problems ensure that the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire are lucidly and sympathetically discussed. Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan, which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His poem-sequence 'Late' appeared in 1997.

Shab Khoon / شب خون


Ahmad Faraz - 1971
    

Chinese Rhyme-Prose


Burton Watson - 1971
    Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid of prose and rhymed verse, more expansive than the condensed lyrics, verging on what would be called Whitmanesque. The thirteen long poems included here are descriptions of and meditations on such subjects as mountains and abandoned cities, the sea and the wind, owls and goddesses, partings and the idle life. Burton Watson is universally considered the foremost English-language translator of classical Chinese literature of the past five decades. His graceful translations are accompanied by a comprehensive introduction to the development and characteristics of the "fu" form, as well as excerpts from contemporary commentary on the genre. A pathbreaking study of premodern Chinese literature, "Chinese Rhyme-Prose" was selected as one of sixty-five masterpieces for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. First published in 1971, it has been out of print for decades.

Selected Poems of Claude McKay


Claude McKay - 1971
    

Briefings: Poems Small and Easy


A.R. Ammons - 1971
    More than his contemporaries, he has perfected a voice that, to cite Emerson, is 'ready to render an image of every created thing.'"David Kalstone says, "The poems are, by and large, tough or wry meditations, striking out into strange landscapes, dreams or nightmares, which are seen with entire clarity, no blurring, as if this were the only way the mind could be unwound on the page. The book forms a journal of mental states, each poem finding a form and a scene for a very exact mental encounter of discovery. . . . 'Small and Easy' is the way everything is finally made to seem, like the rarest dancing, in which briefly and freshly the dancer shows us what space is like by showing how much he can possess."

Selected writings, 1962-1971


Joe Brainard - 1971
    

Ulanga Raja (উলঙ্গ রাজা)


Nirendranath Chakravarti - 1971
    Written during the insurgent Naxalite movement (West Bengal, India) at its peak, the poems, in a sense reflects the mindscape of theliterate middle-class of that unsettled time.

Deans New Gift Book of Nursery Rhymes


Janet Grahame-Johnstone - 1971