Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson

    It is full of typical classroom events that will be recognized and enjoyed by everyone - from never-ending projects, reading tests, quarrels, making-up, excuses and 'Please, Sir, it isn't fair', Please Mrs Butler accurately portrays everyday primary school life. Fritz Wegner's line drawings beautifully complement the hilarious and poignant verses.Praise for Please Mrs Butler:'Hilarious and poignant school verses about primary school life. A real winner' - Guardian'Clever, funny and nostalgic, the collection is a delight' - Sunday TimesPLEASE MRS BUTLER - The most important 20th-century children's poetry book' - Books for Keeps poll

    Featuring a wealth of beloved classic poems from the past and modern glittering gems, every child who opens this treasury will find a world of surprises and delights which will instill a lifelong love of poetry. Featuring 572 unforgettable poems, and over 400 one-of-a-kind illustrations from the Caldecott-winning illustrator of the Frog and Toad series, Arnold Lobel, this collection is, quite simply, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of poetry.

    They are the personal records of one man's encounter with the Divine.

    Like it or not, it outwits whatever I then thought to say and gains thereby whatever I was in saying it. Thankfully, I was never what I thought I was, certainly never enough. Otherwise, when it came time to think specifically of this collection and of what might be decorously omitted, I decided to stick with my initial judgments, book by tender book, because these were the occasions most definitive of what the poems might mean, either to me or to anyone else. To define their value in hindsight would be to miss the factual life they had either made manifest or engendered. So everything that was printed in a book between the dates of 1945 and 1975 is here included as are also those poems published in magazines or broadsides. In short, all that was in print is here. I'm delighted that they are all finally together, respected, included, each with their place--like some ultimate family reunion! I feel much relieved to see them now as a company at last. I'm tempted to invoke again those poets who served as a measure and resource for me all my life as a poet. But either they will be heard here, in the words and rhythms themselves, or one will simply know the. This time I am, in this respect, alone these are my poems. We are a singular compact. Finally, there's no end to any of it, or none we'll know that simply. But I'm very relieved that this much, like they say, is done. So be it.

    This edition, containing an extensive introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Césaire's poetry—the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook—will remain the definitive Césaire in English.

    Many of the poems are from his early years and all convey his freshness and youthful spirit, exhibiting his celebration of love and delight in common natural phenomena. Etcetera was first published by Liveright in 1983. This newly reissued edition is published in a uniform format with Is 5, Tulips Chimneys, ViVa, XAIPE, and No Thanks.

    A bumper volume of the best poems by a hugely funny and quotable writer.

    Including his late poems in free rhythms from the years between 1801 and 1806, the period just prior to his hospitalization for insanity.

    I looked at Eddie. Eddie's looking at me. Big grin on his face. I knew he had done it. Last week he put pepper in the raisins. The yucky things your brother does, the annoying things your parents say, the funny things you feel. Michael Rosen knows all about YOU! Look inside and see if he's spotted your deepest, darkest secrets. A much-loved classic of family life from the brilliant Michael Rosen & Quentin Blake.

    His familiar alter ego, Mr. Cogito, is the subject of a third of the poems in this collection, and these easily stand up as well as the Cogito poems we are familiar with from the earlier eponymous collection. The rest, often on classical subjects (Damastes, the Anabasis, Babylon, Beethoven), are an excellent contrast and complement. Herbert is on the top of his form in these poems which were largely written after Poland was again put under martial law. His concerns are always broad, though they are more politically oriented here. Herbert's precise moral vision is well conveyed in his verses, and it is certainly a voice worth paying attention to. The collection is highly recommended

    He brings to the ordinary--to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams--magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake...are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said.In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way.This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 - 1939).

    She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry--thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural--are brought to bear on it at once.

    Snyder reveals the roots of community in the family and explores the transmission of cultural values and knowledge. "In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand." In exploring this axiom of Lu Ji’s, Gary Snyder continues:I am an axeAnd my son a handle, soonTo be shaping again, modelAnd tool, craft of culture,How we go on.This is a collection of discovery, of insight, and of vision. These poems see the roots of community in the family, and the roots of culture and government in the community.Formally, the 71 poems in Axe Handles range from lyrics to riddles to narratives. The collection is divided into three parts, called "Loops," "Little Songs for Gaia," and "Nets," each containing poems of disciplined clarity. Gary Snyder knows well the great power of silence in a poem, silence that allows the mind space enough to discover the magic of song.

    Written from exile and in prison, Dalton's work deftly balances love, death, revolution, and politics, with compelling language and seductive verse. The volume includes introductory essays by Dalton's friends and contemporaries: Ernesto Cardenal, Claribel Alegría, and Hardie St. Martin.

    Service to the Yukon Territory. Soon, he was famous as the poet who chronicled the Klondike gold rush and the savage beauty of the frozen north. His tales of hard-bitten propectors and sourdoughs in "The Land God Forgot" make vivid, exciting reading. Here are all the brawling, colorful characters that Service immortalized, including One-Eyed Mike, Dangerous Dan McGrew, Pious Pete, Blasphemous Bill -- and, of course, the lady known as Lou.

    Most of all, it is about how the creative imagination breathes and thrives. The effect is dazzling." Brent Morris, American Poetry Association Newsletter.

    It is this girlby Pierodella Francesca, unbuttoningher blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go intolabor. Come, we can go in.It is beforethe birth of god. No-onehas risen yetto the museums, to the assemblyline bodiesand wings to the open airmarket. This iswhat the living do: go in.It's a long way.And the dress keeps openingfrom eternityto privacy, quickening.Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present momentforever stillborn, but going in, each breathis a buttoncoming undone, something terriblynimble-fingeredfinding all of the stops.Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.

    

    With reverence for the ordinary and in search of the extraordinary, Those Who Ride the Night Winds is Nikki Giovanni's most accessible collection ever. She displays her passion for and connectedness to the people and places that touch her. The reissue of Nikki Giovanni's seminal 1984 collection will once again enchant those who have always loved her poems--and those who are just getting to know her work.As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the civil rights and Black Power movements in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial figure. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered.Nikki Giovanni is our most widely read living black poet, and in her most accessible collection to date, we become aware of the poet as a human being we can relate to, someone affected by and concerned with events. The title of this collection refers to people who have tried to make changes, people who have gone against the tide, people who were unafraid to test their wings. Included are poems about John Lennon, Billie Jean King, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. There are poems about friends, lovers, mothers, and about the poet herself.Long known as the "Princess of Black Poetry," Nikki Giovanni is as alive and vibrant as ever. Her many readers will find once again in this collection the warmth, wit, passion, and caring about people that have always distinguished her work. Strong, direct, tremendously energetic, visionary, vulnerable, and real, these poems reveal a great spirit among us; a woman in her human dimension; a person all readers can identify with and believe in.

    From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarme to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

    For the Sufis, the road to spiritual knowledge could never be confined to the process of purely intellectual activity, without the direct, immediate experience of the Heart. In this book we are concerned with one art that the Sufis made peculiarly their own: poetry. Why should Sufis in general, and Persian Sufis in particular, choose to write poetry? When they wanted to 'be themselves', lovers of the Truth, they needed a language more intense, closer to the centre of human awareness than prose. Truth is beautiful, so when one speaks of it, one speaks beautifully. As the lover sings to his beloved, so did the Sufis to theirs. Love itself creates a taste for this language, so that even the prose writers of Sufism scatter verse throughout their works and create poetic prose. The overwhelming theme of this poetry is the Love relationship between the individual, the lover, and his Beloved, God.

    Translated from the French by Norma Cole. Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death.Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night caf�s where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you.--Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the PostfaceShe enunciates the words for desire and for loss of the other words with harrowing intensity...[and] explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category.--Michael PalmerIn Danielle Collobert's NOTEBOOKS the urgency of her writing is accompanied by the weight of hindsight--that we know how it ends--and yet it is not stifled by morbidity. Instead, the intensity and integrity of her struggles rise to the surface. Collobert's questions--of presence in the world, of politics and intimacy--are constantly recovered from the blur of experience. Collobert moves towards and away in a feverish attempt to connect, stay connected--whether in her personal encounters, moments of activism or writing--and though she ultimately chooses death, there is enough life in her writing to carry on: 'the hum of life all around... I open / and I close.'--E. Tracy GrinnellIndelible fragments.--Jeff JacksonThe text of this book is sourced from several notebooks and loose pages found in the Paris hotel room where Danielle Collobert committed suicide... Spanning over 20 years of her life, the text in form resembles the poetry of It Then, though the content is in most cases less abstract. Fragmented phrases separated by dashes describe her interior life, her extensive travels, her relationships with men (though always rather vaguely), her recurring need for solitude, and above all, her experiences with writing. Throughout there is a haunting, hunted desperation in her words, as in each new place she finds herself, she encounters the same familiar struggles with indifference and anxiety, always with death not far from her mind.--S. D. Stewart

    

    Jackson Mac Low's REPRESENTATIVE WORKS: 1938-1985 is a compilation that follows the work of American experimentalism through one of its strongest arrangers. Mac Low, a proponent of "systems of chance," treated chance and choice as equal-handed characters in the making of poetry. Despite his intentional steering toward randomness, Mac Low's poetry "always has a remarkable compassion and humor...just as there are ways of jumping off or in or on." Robert CreeleyMac Low writes attentively and "his poetry, even though it looks like it, is poetry." John Cage"

    

    Her poetic interests have become more diverse, but her style remains as supple and pure and strong as ever. The book begins with a number of poems about childhood — the day she left her sandbox to pursue the strawberry ice cream in the sky, the long summer nights when she played Red Light, Green Light, the anxious, whispered conferences about lipstick and french kissing. Later, the husband, the children, the lover. Later still, the poems about the chemistry of dying, the days and hours that unwind themselves, the words that no longer matter.

    

    Native American Studies. This anthology of poetry includes fifty-two poets from more than thirty-five different Native American nations. Some of the poets include Elizabeth Woody, Joy Harjo, Adrian C. Louis, Barney Bush, Jim Barnes, and Peter Blue Cloud. Each poet is introduced with a biographical paragraph followed by a selection of their poetry. The publication Booklist says this book is recommended for large high school libraries as a generous collection of poems by present-day American Indian writers. Library Journal found it essential for subject collection in academic and larger public libraries.

    

    

    With insightful candour, Toi Derricote's poem explores the ways in which her confusion about love and sex and longing took away from the pleasures of pregnancy and motherhood.

    

    With Consider the Butterfly, Carol Lynn moves her relationship with readers in a new and more intimate direction, sharing personal stories in "an innocent and awesome show-and-tell" of her experience with the phenomenon of synchronicity. This volume contains 47 of her newest poems.

    VECTORS AND SMOOTHABLE CURVES, the collected essays of one of our foremost writers, brings together "The New World," "A Partial Glossary," "The Brother in Elysium," and shorter works on Thoreau and Oppen. Included are meditations on time, desire, and the roots of American literary thought. Few books in our time are as provocative and rewarding

    It ranges in tone and content from celebration to satire. While the collection can, I hope, be read for pleasure, I would like to think of it also as a record, a history of the different ways in which homosexual people have been seen and have seen themselves. Only if we know something about the past is there a chance we can do something about the future. To that extent, I would like to think of the voices collected here as those of encouragement."— Stephen Coote

    

    Poems consider mortality, grief, loneliness, violence, religion, the past, art, nature, and love.

    On its release, reviewers commented:       "She achieves . . . intellectual         substance . . . without sacrificing emotional richness. Fulton's lively,         distinctive style and buoyant faith . . . are most evident." -- Choice       "Her fast-paced verse         rolls off the tongue like colloquial speech, or flows like rhythms of         American jazz." -- Publishers Weekly       "Fulton's distinct voice         marks her as a poet to watch." -- Library Journal       One of "two extremely         impressive poetic debuts in 1983. By the time she's through, we want to         shout 'encore!'" -- David Lehman, Newsday and The Philadelphia         Inquirer       "Reading her . . . you         must sharpen your spirit to be moved by what is uncanny and rare."         -- Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Review       "Delightful, energetic         poems, alive with the exhilaration of creation." -- Stephen C. Behrendt,         Prairie Schooner

    

    A volume of Miscellaneous Poems, Songs, Stories collected by Kindergarten Teachers from Steiner Schools in Britain for use in their work.

    

    Passions and Impressions is both a sequel to and an enlargement of Neruda's Memoirs, recording a lifetime of travel, of friendships and enmities, of exile and homecoming, of loss and discovery, and of history both public and personal. Above all, it is a testament to Neruda's love for Chile-for its citizens, its flora and fauna, its national identity. His abiding devotion pervades these notes on a life fully lived.

    

    

    

    Written in diary form like his all-time bestseller, Listen to the Warm, this book details the slow, secret search for love, the joy of finding someone, and the nearly indefinable emptiness left behind when love goes.

    The Forces of Plenty appeared in 1983, the second of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s five volumes of poetry.

    Many were inspired by the remote Cotswold valley where she lived for ten years; others by the border country of Cumbria and the Welsh Marches. Her posthumous Collected Poems (1985) was one of the landmark volumes of postwar British poetry. She was one of the finest ever readers of poetry, and this new edition includes an audio CD of her reading a selection of her poems, along with an interview.

    She was also a writer of prose sketches, a translator of Sanskrit, and a literary theorist. This study combines intellectual history, biography, and literary criticism to create a vivid portrait of this important writer and her era.

    

    

    

    The poems themselves were often copied by hand and smuggled onto Mexico, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In all those countries, except Nicaragua, this poetry is banned. The thirty-nine poets represented here give potent voice to the struggles of their peoples under the crushing oppression of life "under the volcano" in these war-stunned lands. Many of these women and men have been jailed, exiled, killed, or otherwise made to disappear. Still they survive in these faithful and sensitive translations by a new literary underground in North America.