Contains the first and "deathbed" editions of "Leaves of Grass," and virtually all of Whitman's prose, with reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals and glimpses of President Lincoln, and attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the war.

    Professor, poetry award winner, performer, and former member of the National Council on the Arts, Harjo’s prose speaks of women's despair, of their imprisonment and ruin at the hands of men and society, but also of their awakenings, power, and love.

    These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.

    Fairy tales have never been more revolting!

    This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer."Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited."--Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review"One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry."--Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

    Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world.The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, an utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.

    . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!

    It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the American Book Award.

    More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.

    Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

    This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume s editor, poet David Trinidad."

    

    Huidobro is considered one of the most significant poets of our century and is recognized as one of the seminal figures in modern Spanish-language poetry.

    From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.

    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.

    Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.

    The only comprehensive study that examines all areas of Basho's work, including haibun, renku and critical commentaries.

    Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

    This volume of fiction and essays includes three short stories, articles on the craft of poetry focusing on the musical function of the line, and a discussion of the relation of poets to politics.

    An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida)

    . . . Doubiago's imagination is always unified and political. . . . Sharon Doubiago is 'a complex of occasions, ' a brilliant response to Whitman, an American poet, free, spiritual and gifted.--Carolyn Forch�A unique search for the meaning of personal and national history, narrated by a woman seeking her own liberation and fulfillment through struggle against the reactionary mores and politics of her time.--Thomas McGrathSharon Doubiago fearlessly enters the labyrinth of our history, our search and danger as woman as human as deep American wanderer. . . . It is a long saga, a woman's history and a history of us all.--Meridel Le Sueur

    

    Spanish and English versions of the poems appear on facing pages.

    

    Conover's introduction, a timetable and album of photographs, Hugh Kenner wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "No, no, not Myrna Loy, Mina...born in 1892, in London; died in 1966 in Aspen, Colorado; a startling beauty all her long life; by profession designer of lampshades and agent of artists (Dali, de Chirico, Braque, Ernst, Gris, Magritte); ...author of mordant free verse published in magazines 1915-25, thereafter lost track of by virtually everybody. Her utter absence from all canonical lists is one of modern literary history's most perplexing data. Loy's is agile wit, hard, unslushy in its admiration for kindred discipline. A bird with no hint of feathers!""Mina Loy," wrote William Carlos Williams, "was endowed from birth with a first-rate intelligence and a sensibility which has plagued her all her life facing a shoddy world."

    A reprint of this 1982 book of prose poetry by the nearly legendary avant-garde stalwart Clark Coolidge still exudes freshness. A long-time master of the jazzy long work, Clark Coolidge has this time turned the long poem in prose into a non-fiction novel or tomb full of buried things taken with you of the new existence of old logic and present looking, all sung by a free man wortking alone and trapped as one is in cave with finite supply of oxygen, food, breath & luck--Bernadette Mayer on MINE. Coolidge's many other titles available from SPD include ALIEN TATTERS, WAY OUT WEST, ON THE NAMEWAYS, and ON THE NAMEWAYS VOL. 2.

    

    A beautiful and moving collection of poetry by a new author.

    Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham. The poems capture brief moments of beauty, the loving bond between family members, and a deep appreciation of Tohono O’odham culture and traditions, as well as reverent feelings about the landscape and wildlife native to the Southwest. A motif of rain and water is woven throughout the poetry in When It Rains, tying in the collection’s title to the importance of this life-giving and sustaining resource to the Tohono O’odham people. With the poems in both O’odham and English, the volume serves as an important reminder of the beauty and changeability of the O’odham language. The themes and experiences expressed by the language educators in this volume capture still-rural community life: children are still bussed for miles to school, and parents still have hours-long daily commutes to work. The Sonoran Desert also remains an important part of daily life—seasons, rain on desert plants, and sacred mountains serve as important markers. In a new foreword to the volume, Sun Tracks editor Ofelia Zepeda reflects on how meaningful this volume was when it was first published and its continued importance. “Things have changed but many things remain the same,” writes Zepeda. “The pieces in this collection will be meaningful to many still.”

    Suspend willingly or not your disbelief and with empty pockets enter the room of the story. Warm your fingers at this candle which is only the stub of a dream and at any time may flicker or go out. Here fire consumes itself with paper and pencil for kindling; here a unicorn waits in the corner its musical horn ready. When I tell you this story is pure fact you will want to leave the room. Stay awhile.

    The speaker is John Sims, an unlettered pig farmer, and the journey is the back roads of southern Utah. While John and his driver drink canned beer, we hear of pranks, pitfalls, bootleggers, rural childhood, bluecollar jobs, and the horrifying tale of an explosive accident on an oil rig.

    Born to an Oklahoma sharecropping family, and part Cherokee, McDaniel began writing when she was eight, and has kept on through a lifetime of working on farms, even when poverty forced her to write on old envelopes and brown paper bags.

    

    Lawrence Poems is Gwendolyn MacEwen’s most integrated, complete and respected work. It is now recognized as her signature poetic achievement.“In 1962, I was staying in a hotel in Tiberias, Israel; the tall, white-haired proprietor invited me downstairs one evening and served me syrupy tea and a plate of fruit. He showed me a series of old sepiatone photographs which lined the walls – photographs of blurred riders on camels riding to the left into some uncharted desert just beyond the door. Some of them were signed.‘It’s Lawrence isn’t it?’ I asked, walking up to one.‘Yes,’ said my host, offering me a huge section of an orange. ‘I rode with him once a long time ago. I see you always carry a pen and paper to write things down. I thought you’d be interested; I thought you’d like to know.’These poems were written some twenty years later.”

    A champion of the French symbolists, he was influential to both Yeats and Pound.

    

    

    

    Included are some of Riley's most durable and endearing works--poems about nature, home, and country as well as the dialect poems for which Riley is famous.

    And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom GunnThom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience. The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

    

    This is the first book of poetry by the late Everette Maddox, one of the best poets ever to live in and write about New Orleans.

    The author argues that there are three major influences which determine the verse-forms used in any language: the natural rhythm of the spoken language itself; the properties of rhythmic form; and the metrical conventions which have grown up within the literary tradition. He investigates these in order to explain the forms of English verse, and to show how rhythm and metre work as an essential part of the reader's experience of poetry.

    Rooted in rural Wales these poems celebrate community and landscape.

    

    

    Five hundred copies were printed at the West Coast Print Center, February 1982, of which 26 are lettered A-Z and signed by the author

    

    

    Employing metaphor, symbolism and satire, Lu Xun's poems make a strong impact on their readers. Not many of Lu Xun's poems survive. The forty-seven in this selection include the majority of them. His later pieces in particular exposed the role of imperialism and the Chiang Kai-Shek government, expressed sympathy for the sufferings of the masses and praised the revolutionary cause of the proletariat. They bear the imprint of the stirring years of the 1920s and 1930s and reveal the course of this intellectual development in those years.

    Hailed as the great lyric poet, Irving Layton has come to be known as one of Canada’s most powerful, groundbreaking voices, an important and influential writer whose distinguished career spanned almost forty-five years. By turns passionate and grave, joyous and apocalyptic, his beautifully crafted poems are illuminated by a strong social and political conscience, and an intensely humanistic view of the world. This is poetry that is timeless and universal. Drawn from his entire body of work, and now reissued in this handsomely redesigned volume, this edition includes a new introduction by Sam Solecki, and selected short excerpts from Irving Layton’s writings on the craft of poetry. A Wild Peculiar Joy once again makes available to readers the poetry of Irving Layton and stands as the author’s definitive selected.