Best of
Poetry

1990

House of Light


Mary Oliver - 1990
    Winship Book AwardThis collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity.

Above the River: The Complete Poems


James Wright - 1990
    From his Deep Image-inspired lyrics to his Whtimanesque renderings of Neruda, Vallejo, and other Latin American poets, and from his heartfelt reflections on life, love, and loss in his native Ohio to the celebrated prose poems (set frequently in Italy) that marked the end of his important career, Above the River gathers the complete work of a modern master. It also features a moving and insightful introduction by Donald Hall, Wright's longtime friend and colleague.

The City in Which I Love You


Li-Young Lee - 1990
    ContentsI.Furious VersionisII.The InterrogationThis Hour And What Is DeadArise, Go DownMy Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out LoudFor A New Citizen Of These United StatesWith RuinsIII.This Room And Everything In ItThe City In Which I Love YouIV.The WaitingA StoryGoodnightYou Must SingHere I AmA Final ThingV.The Cleaving

Awake


Dorianne Laux - 1990
    Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

Selected Poems, 1966-1987


Seamus Heaney - 1990
    Includes the complete and revised version of his long poem, "Station Island," as well as a number of prose poems previously unpublished in the U.S.

I Shall Not Be Moved


Maya Angelou - 1990
    This memorable collection of poems exhibits Maya Angelou's unique gift for capturing the triumph and pain of being black and every man and woman's struggle to be free. Filled with bittersweet intimacies and ferocious courage, these poems are gems–many-faceted, bright with wisdom, radiant with life.

A Box of Rain: Lyrics, 1965-1993


Robert C. Hunter - 1990
    Hunter also explains the sources of certain songs and describes the evolution of others over years of performance. Complete discography.

Something Big Has Been Here


Jack Prelutsky - 1990
    "A wealth of funny new verse from a favorite poet. Prelutsky's comic muse is at its best here. Another winner."—Kirkus Reviews. "Prelutsky has done it again."—School Library JournalSomething big is right here!It is this book of wonderful, funny poems by beloved children's poet Jack Prelutsky. If you've read The New Kid on the Block, you have some idea of the treat ahead. And if you haven't, all you have to do is start reading!Here are four vain and ancient tortoises, a rat of culture, Super Samson Simpson, a meat loaf that defies an ax, five flying hotdogs—and many, many more people, animals, and things that are destined to become part of the lives of everyone who loves to laugh.Say them, chant them, learn them by heart, or just read them—Jack Prelutsky's poems are incomparable.

In Mad Love and War


Joy Harjo - 1990
    Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they are one with the deer and the fox, the hawk and the eagle, the sun, moon, and wind, and the seasons – “spring/ was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.” There are enemies here, also lovers; there are ghost dancers, ancestors old and new, who rise again “to walk in shoes of fire.”Indeed, fire and its aftermath is a constant image in the burning book. Skies are “incendiary”; the “smoke of dawn” turns enemies into ashes: “I am fire eaten by wind.” “Your fire scorched/ my lips.” “I am lighting the fire that crawls from my spine/ to the gods with a coal from my sister’s flame.”But the spirit of this book is not consumed. It is not limited by mad love or war, and “there is something larger than the memory/ of a dispossessed people.” That something larger is, for example, revolution, freedom, birth.

Selected Odes


Pablo Neruda - 1990
    Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden's selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet's vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her trans-lations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems.

The First Four Books of Poems


Louise Glück - 1990
    Includes "Firstborn", "The House on Marshland", "Descending Figure", and "The Triumph of Achilles".

A Heart Full of Love


Javan - 1990
    0-935906-02-9$5.00 / Javan Press

Let Evening Come


Jane Kenyon - 1990
    Her quietly musical poems are intensely moving, compassionate meditations intently probing the life of the heart and spirit. Observing and absorbing small miracles in everyday life, these apparently simple poems grapple with fundamental questions of human existence.

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes


Seamus Heaney - 1990
    Written in the fifth century BC, this play concerns the predicament of the outcast hero, Philoctetes, whom the Greeks marooned on the island of Lemnos and forgot about until the closing stages of the Siege of Troy. Abandoned because of a wounded foot, Philoctetes nevertheless possesses an invincible bow without which the Greeks cannot win the Trojan War. They are forced to return to Lemnos and seek out Philoctetes' support in a drama that explores the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency.Heaney's version of Philoctetes is a fast-paced, brilliant work ideally suited to the stage. Heaney holds on to the majesty of the Greek original, but manages to give his verse the flavor of Irish speech and context.

All You Who Sleep Tonight: Poems


Vikram Seth - 1990
    He evokes the unspeakable ironies of Auschwitz and the light-blasted streets of Hiroshima. He conducts the reader through Lion Grove in Suzhou, China, and across the Golden Gate Bridge on its fiftieth anniversary. Throughout, he displays the lyricism and attentiveness that distinguish the best poets of every era."Clear as a glacial pool, often as deep, Vikram Seth's new poems shine with unfashionable virtues. Seth gives joy by writing brilliantly well, unafraid to feel and to start us feeling." -- X. J. Kennedy

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990


Frank Bidart - 1990
    In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.

The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990


Charles Wright - 1990
    This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).

The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems


Adélia Prado - 1990
    Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes.As Ellen Watson says in her introduction, "Adelia Prados poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments...And, seemingly at every turn, there is food." But also, an abundance of dark things, cancer, death, greed. These are poems of appetite, all kinds.

John Keats


John Keats - 1990
    He published three volumes of poetry before his death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. This authoritative new collectioncontains the majority of Keats's non-dramatic poetry, including Endymion in its entirety, and a substantial selection of letters that provide important background material to the poet's life. Offering both prose and verse in an accessible, chronological order, this collection also includes usefulappendices on St. Agnes' Eve and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and provides a handy glossary of classical names. Keats poetry and his letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding. This remarkable volume attests to an astonishing maturity of power.

Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry


Mahmoud Darwish - 1990
    He was exiled to Beirut in 1956 and later became a Lebanese citizen. The founder of the influential journal Mawaqif, a critic as well as a poet, he has exercised enormous influence on Arabic literature. He is the author of Sufism and Surrealism, also published by Saqi.Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birweh in Galilee, Palestine. His family fled to Lebanon in 1948 when the Israeli Army destroyed their village. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands. He died in August 2008.Samih al-Qasim is a Palestinian born to a Druze family of Galilee in 1939. He grew up in Nazareth and has long been politically active in Israel, suffering imprisonment many times. A prolific writer, he had published six collections of poetry by the time he was thirty.

Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems


Zbigniew Herbert - 1990
    Translated from the Polish by award-winning translators John and Bogdana Carpenter, these sixty-eight verse and prose poems span forty years of Herbert's incredible life and work. The pieces are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems.Here Zbigniew Herbert's poetry turns from the public--what we have come to expect from this poet--to the more personal. The title poem, "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp , is a three-part farewell ode to the inanimate objects and memories of childhood. Herbert reflects on the relationship between the living and the dead in "What Our Dead Do," the state of his homeland in "Country," and the power of language in "We fall asleep on words . . . " Herbert's short prose poems read like aphorisms, deceptively whimsical but always wise: "Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head, and trunk. They have nice snouts, and small eyes.... Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes."Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems confirms Zbigniew Herbert's place as one of the world's greatest and most influential poets.

Collected Poems


Edwin Morgan - 1990
    The poet's transforming imagination is democratic, generous, and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes "Poems of Thirty Years," "Themes on a Variation," and some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands/Rebelió


Martín Espada - 1990
    Poems in English and Spanish that discuss what it means to be Puerto Rican in the United States today.

Some Thing Black


Jacques Roubaud - 1990
    The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud--poet, novelist, mathematician--composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind's failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ("I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell"). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ("But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly"). While acknowledging "death calls for a poetry of meditation," Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection--the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in--becomes a "memory infinitely torturous." And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ("These memories are the darkest of all"), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ("I did not save you from that difficult night"). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death's harsh presence ("This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death") and in its acceptance of the mind's limitations ("I do not understand"). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud's wife in 1980 entitled "If Some Thing Black."

No Language Is Neutral


Dionne Brand - 1990
    As a woman, a black, and a lesbian, Brand arrives at a rigorous and nakedly ruthless reclamation of the poetic.

Where Many Rivers Meet: Poems


David Whyte - 1990
    Where Many Rivers Meet: Poems

A Brighter Garden


Emily Dickinson - 1990
    Tasha Tudor's vivid watercolors match the delicacy of the moment and capture the special connection between nature and humanity that Dickinson so brilliantly captured in her words.

Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi


Rumi - 1990
    Included here are the notorious "Latin Parts" that Reynold Nicholson felt were too unseemly to appear in English in his 1920s translation. For Rumi, anything that human beings do--however compulsive or ludicrous--affords a glimpse of the inner life.

Poems of Arab Andalusia


Cola Franzen - 1990
    This poetry of Arab Andalusia made a profound impact on Spain's Generation of ‘27. Rafael Alberti says that it "was a revelation for me and had a great influence on my work, but above all influenced the work of Federico García Lorca."Cola Franzen's vibrant, delicious and faithful renderings of this poetic motherlode are, to quote from a poet in her marvelous compilation, 'shooting stars that leap agile as acrobats.'" —Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, author of An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles"Of those things which delight the senses (according to a Tradition of the Prophet) the chiefest are 'water, green things & a beautiful face'; therefore a poetry of noble exquisiteness limits itself to certain tropes, in which the wisdom of sensuality is endlessly rediscovered. Blow dust from the folios of the vanished Moors & be stabbed by the URGENT NECESSITY of light-dappled fountains, the fractals of the garden, the transmutations of desire." —Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Ploughing the CloudsCola Franzen has translated from Spanish some twenty volumes of prose and poetry, including Claudia Guillén's The Challenge of Comparative Literature, and Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer by Alicia Borinsky.

Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems


Diane di Prima - 1990
    A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity." – Allen Ginsberg"With di Prima's selected poems, Pieces of a Song . . . we have a chance to examine the powerful gifts this deeply imaginative poet has to offer us . . . ." —Jack Foley, Poetry Previews (website)"A prolific writer generally associated with the Beat Generation, di Prima deserves wider recognition." —Library Journal"She is not about to be regarded merely as a literary figurehead, but as an ongoing contributor to the arts—a presence whose voice continues to positively impact those who listen, as it has for the last half-century." —Verbicide MagazineFeminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

Distance from Loved Ones


James Tate - 1990
    "Mr. Tate is an elegant and anarchic clown. A lord of poetic misrule with a serious, subversive purpose."-John Ash, New York Times Book Review "Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. [Tate's poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that is may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that refuse to lend themselves to instant analysis."-David Lehman, Washington Post Book World

Pharaoh's Daughter


Nuala Ní DhomhnaillMichael Hartnett - 1990
    In this revised form, it appears for the first time in North America as a companion volume to The Astrakhan Cloak, new poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill with translations by Paul Muldoon.

Like This


Rumi - 1990
    Pithy quatrains, ecstatic odes, and long rambles through the Mathnawi (including animal fables, jokes, and stories of human orneriness and innocence), all saturated with Rumi's deep teachings and images of his spiritual surrender.

Crime Against Nature: Poetry


Minnie Bruce Pratt - 1990
    Stunning work designated prestigious 1989 Inmont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets.

Poems Before & After


Miroslav Holub - 1990
    'Poems Before and After' covers over 40 years of his poetry.

Collected Earlier Poems


Anthony Hecht - 1990
    Emotional intensity and formal power were combined in Hecht from his beginnings… The thirty poems in Millions of Strange Shadows are all fully written, but several truly are the best he has published and are very likely to endure.  The very best is ‘Green: An Epistle,’ which is a lesson in profound, controlled subjectivity and self-revelation, an exact antithesis to the opaque squalors of ‘confessional’ poets.  Almost equally remarkable is ‘Coming Home,’ in which the poet John Clare receives a deeper interpretation than any critic has afforded him…”                                                                                              —Harold Bloom, The New Republic THE HARD HOURS (1968)“Anthony Hecht’s first volume of poems, A Summoning of Stones, established him as one of the most accomplished of his extremely accomplished generation.  His work was remarkable enough for its classical poise and elegance, but it also had a weight which set it apart.  Since then his poetry has come clear in a direction nobody could have predicted…He did the most difficult thing of all: this most fastidious and elegant of poets shed every artifice and began to write with absolute raw simplicity and directness.  Only a poet with an immense burden of something to say ever dreams of taking this course, and only an inspired artist can bring it off.  The result here has been some of the most powerful and unforgettable poems at present being written in America,”—Ted Hughes

The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations Of The Voyage


Etel Adnan - 1990
    "With this book of poems Etel Adnan establishes herself as a major poet who belongs beside internationally acclaimed poets like Transtromer, Bly, Neruda, Vallejo, and Pessoa." Eric Sellin"

Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990


Eavan Boland - 1990
    Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention." —David Walker, Field

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone


Galway Kinnell - 1990
    A collection of poems ranging from melancholy meditations of a solitary mind concerning estrangement and the longing for reconnection to the natural world and its creatures closely observed.

A Selected Edition


Alfred Tennyson - 1990
    It provides teachers, students, and the general reader with an affordable paperback of the central body of the work which the "Sunday Telegraph" described as "the best edition this century of the best poet of the last century."

Canvas: Poems


Adam Zagajewski - 1990
    In these sixty-one poems, syntax explodes, masses of detail spill from profuse catalogs, lines break in ways apt but unexpected, and compressed lyrics alternate with extended riffs. European culture is the poet's native province throughout these explorations, and time is a recurrent metaphysical concern.

Vanishing Lung Syndrome


Miroslav Holub - 1990
    This book is darkly witty and mordantly accurate; it documents, among other things, the ignorance, folly and brutality abroad in our world. But it also brims with tenderness, humor, and occasional gleams of hope.

Who Whispered Near Me


Killarney Clary - 1990
    

Mystery Train


David Wojahn - 1990
    . . . Wojahn proves himself a master of the narrative poem, extending his range here with expertly fashioned dramatic monologues and quirky, rhythmic sonnets."--Publishers Weekly

Poguetry


Shane MacGowan - 1990
    The band have been successful throughout Europe and America, combining traditional Irish themes with rock music. The book is also a visual record of their 1988-1989 tour.

My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings


Countee Cullen - 1990
    Excellent Book

The Formal Field of Kissing


Bernadette Mayer - 1990
    Rosy-fingered dawnwho might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of youwere it not for your self-induced revenge of undonenessit’s good to live without a refrigerator! why botherto chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?and of the lonesome Sappho. let’s have it warm for now.

Windows


Robert Creeley - 1990
    For Creeley, age and travel have served to highlight the foreignness of everyday circumstances, so that the window-passages between "inside" and "out" have become increasingly necessary for survival.

The Big Something


Ron Padgett - 1990
    Ron Padgett's poems are remarkably clear, almost invisibly so, like a refreshing glass of cold water poems in which he goes nit-picking with the OED, uses Tulsa plain-speak in the diction of Blaise Cendrars, turns and looks back at the food he has set out and sees it is a painting by Fairfield Porter, builds his wooden dream house, and all a little askew, as the world is. His GREAT BALLS OF FIRE have become indeed THE BIG SOMETHING."

Sound As Thought: Poems, 1982 1984


Clark Coolidge - 1990
    follow-up to SOLUTION PASSAGE, short poems

Laments


Jenny Holzer - 1990
    Jenny Holzer was born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. She first came to prominence in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. Among other awards she has received, Holzer in 1990 became the first woman to ever win the Leone d'Oro at the Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited in most every major museum around the world, and she has created installations for public and private sites including the Reichstag and the Times Square Spectacolor billboard in New York.

Woman Sitting At The Machine, Thinking: Poems


Karen Brodine - 1990
    Karen Brodine's award-winning feminist poetry explores themes of work, activism, sexual identity, family, language, and the author's fight against breast cancer. Published in 1990, WOMAN SITTING AT THE MACHINE, THINKING is the posthumously published, fourth collection of poems by a breakthrough writer on feminist, lesbian and workingclass themes. Brodine's work is widely published in anthologies. This collection includes a bibliography of Brodine's writing, a preface by the renowned feminist and radical poet Meridel LeSueur, and an introduction by Asian American lesbian poet Merle Woo.

Collected Poems


Edgar Allan Poe - 1990
    0—1)Fairy-Land"The Happiest Day"The Haunted PalaceTo HelenTO HelenHymnHymn eo Aristogeiton and HarmodiusImitationTO IsadoreIsrafelThe Lake—to —LenoreTo M. L. S—To My MotherTo One in ParadiseA Pa•anScenes From "Politian"The RavenTo The River —RomanceSilenceThe SleeperSongSonnet—To ScienceSpirits of the DeadTamerlaneUlalumeA ValentineThe Valley of Unrest"In Youth I have Known One"To ZaneThe Rationale of VerseThe Poetic Principle

A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990)


Irena Klepfisz - 1990
    She operates from a stark but deep compassion."--American Book Review

Glasgow Dreamer


Ivor Cutler - 1990
    Cutler's offbeat childhood anecdotes from the years of the great depression. Anyone who has forgotten how to see the world through a child's eyes, or use their imagination, really needs to buy this book and return to it again and again.

Old and New Poems


Donald Hall - 1990
    This volume contains the finest short poetry Donald Hall has written, poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy, poems that have won thousands of readers, as well as various prizes and honors.

Locked from the Outside


Susan Timmons - 1990
    Susie Timmons's first book won the Yellow Press Ted Berrigan Award.

Life Sentence: Selected Poems


Nina Cassian - 1990
    Poems deal with childhood, color, censorship, freedom, greed, loneliness, love, pain, and mortality.

100 песен Владимира Высоцкого


Vladimir Vysotsky - 1990
    Some of the songs in this book have not been previously published and were transcribed from musical records and tapes.

Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life


Peter Oresick - 1990
    It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,         and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,         and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary         anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary         poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative         of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.       Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,         Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,         June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol         Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,         and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169         poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.

A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough


Patrick Lawler - 1990
    From the artful surface of a Russian novel, rich with symbolism and white bears, to a survivor's unwillingness to immerse himself in life or leave it, the poems in A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough hunger for a language beyond the solid, for the fragmentation that makes a scene complete.

FALLING FOR A DOLPHIN.


Heathcote Williams - 1990
    His research led him to a remote cove in the south-west of Ireland where a hermit dolphin was rumoured to live.

Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman


Paul L. Mariani - 1990
    Photographs.

The Book of Gods and Devils


Charles Simic - 1990
    Loneliness, loss, sadness, and mystery mark this wonderful volume of forty-nine poems by Charles Simic, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and praised as “one of the truly imaginative writers of our time” by the Los Angeles Times.

Terra Firma


Thomas Centolella - 1990
    Winner of the 1991 American Book Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. "Selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series, this generally strong first collection, often set in the San Francisco Bay Area or in the wilderness, showcases Centolella's gift for finding wonder in the quotidian, for recovering 'the taken-for-granted.' In 'Task,' the poet writes, 'It's not a savior the world needs / but a savoring spirit, a way to relish what's already / begun to vanish,' and his best work celebrates the beauty, evanescence and inevitable grief of mortal life. An elegy for his Lebanese grandmother, 'Sito,' is especially moving, as is 'Ossi dei morti' (bones of the dead), about the Italian sweet so named: 'It's dark and bittersweet, / this chocolate marrow, this brief time / people call a life. We bite into it / hard. We do this together. / A local cure for sorrow.' At their least interesting, the poems suffer from pedestrianism and an abrupt, gunshot style--e.g., in 'The Garden': 'The closer to terra firma one is / the more firma one feels. After a long hike, I stink, / therefore I am'"--Publishers Weekly.

The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz


Aleksander Fiut - 1990
    The author refutes such easy categorizations of Milosz as "the poet of Poland," "the poet of history," "the poet of the Holocaust." He examines instead such crucial problems as Milosz's search for the essence of human nature, irreducible to historical, social, and biological categories; Milosz's reflection on the erosion of the Christian imagination, which has resulted in a fundamental gap between the individual's inner life and the image of humanity formed by scientific theories; his efforts to rebuild the anthropocentric vision of the world, while acknowledging the elements that have undermined it; and finally, his attempt to recreate in his poetry a language that is both poetic and philosophical.The Eternal Moment originally appeared in Polish in 1987. This version, which quotes extensively from Milosz's Collected Poems, is the first thorough introduction for English-speaking readers to this major poet.

O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters


Langdon Hammer - 1990
    This edition features over three hundred letters, selected to best illustrate the complexity and textures of Hart Crane's turbulent life –– from family pressures, to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality.

Olav Hauge: Selected Poems


Olav H. Hauge - 1990
    tr Robin Fulton

New Dark Ages


Donald Revell - 1990
    The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as: If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful - a true vindication of humanism?"

Art & Love: An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry


Kate Farrell - 1990
    The volume explores many different types of love - romantic, conjugal, filial, platonic, lost, troubled and ideal. The poems represent the work of more than 150 poets.

The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding


Tosh Berman - 1990
    Blum’s Pudding is Los Angeles native Tosh Berman’s first printed collection of poetry. In 1989, Berman left the United States behind, moving to Japan after learning his wife's (artist Lun*na Menoh) mother was ill in Kitakyushu. The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding was penned while both rapt and lost by this transition. Gracefully toiling between the quirky and earnest, these poems describe the liminal space of the foreigner caught between the strange and the familiar. The result is surreal and unclassifiable, a book of love poems overshadowed by isolation and underscored with curiosity and lust. Originally published in 1990 by “Cole Swift & Sons” (Japan) as a small hardcover edition of two hundred copies, this new edition acts to preserve this work and features an introduction by art critic and curator Kristine McKenna, an afterward by Tosh Berman, and additional content by Ruth Bernstein.

Love, Death, and Exile: Poems Translated from Arabic


Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati - 1990
    This collection is a rare, bilingual facing-page edition in both the original Arabic text and in a highly praised English translation by Bassam K. Frangieh-containing selections from eight of Al-Bayati's books of poetry.

Punching Out


Jim Daniels - 1990
    The book is a series of tightly woven poems that play off one another so that the book accumulates tension and energy as it progresses. Daniels treats his characters and their work with respect, giving them a dignity that factory condition deny them. Opting for blunt, straightforward language, Daniels does not try to "poeticize" the factory but rather injects the factory into his poetry.

Laughter in the Walls


Bob Benson - 1990
    This book is tall and unique, a very neat book....

Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems


Gerald Stern - 1990
    

Daddy, Daddy


Paul Durcan - 1990
    Drawing its strength from its urgent treatment of a wide range of contemporary subject matter, Durcan's poetry is striking for the subtlety and strangeness of its unique imagery.In Daddy, Daddy Durcan pushes out in a radical new direction. Fusing the personal with the political, his angry response to violence and oppression in poems such as "The Murder of Harry Keyes" and "Shanghai, June 1989" is incisive and humane. Here also are love poems of all manner and kind; bizarre meditations on the nature of loneliness; and poems of celebration of writers and artists like Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Cezanne. Durcan also embarks on an exploration of his relationship with his father, creating poetry that is compelling in its probing artistry and painful honesty.

Balada Hilang Peta


A. Samad Said - 1990
    These anguished voices come from the ditches and hovels of the shanty towns; the mists and shadows of my memory; the cut and thrust of politics; the confusion of continual travel; the faith of weary humanity; and the compassion of natural conscience. It is right that a poet should want to record not only beautiful things but also the sad voices of mankind and the wounds continually inflicted on the world. If that were not so, poetry would be elegant lamp with no inner flame. Or worse, a splendid galleon, drifting at the mercy of the passing tides.

Days of Summer Gone


Joe Bolton - 1990
    

আমি বেঁচে ছিলাম অন্যদের সময়ে


Humayun Azad - 1990
    আমি বেঁচে ছিলাম অন্যদের সময়ে:I Lived in Others' Time:: A Book of Poems by Humayun Azad

If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller


Vassar Miller - 1990
    Presents the complete texts of the author's eight volumes of poetry together with a sampling of previously uncollected poems.

So Far, So Good


Gil Scott-Heron - 1990
    These works are very political in nature and comment on the current matters of interest during the period of the 1970s and 1980s. The artist shows himself to be a keen analytical observer of the society and its impact upon the people.

Life Can Be Hard Sometimes, But It's Going to Be Okay: A Collection of Poems


Susan Polis Schutz - 1990
    The messages of support and inspiration in this book are comforting reminders that with self-confidence and personal strength, hope is always near and brighter days are soon to come.

We Are a Thunderstorm


Amity Gaige - 1990
     This outstanding book of poetry offers a wide range of sensitive insights, thought-provoking ideas, and amusing whimsies. A lovely book to be savored and enjoyed again and again.

Powers of Congress: Poems


Alice Fulton - 1990
    Sven Birkerts, in The Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and Powers of Congress more than meets that claim. Back by popular demand, this is a reprint of an important collection that continues to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics. It will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought."She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."—Eavan Boland, Partisan Review"Powers of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."—David Baker, Poetry"In Powers of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."—David Barber, Hungry Mind ReviewMarketing plans for Powers of Congress o Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings. o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.Powers of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books of poems include Felt, Sensual Math, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. A collection of her essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999.Alice Fulton's poems appear in five editions of The Best American Poetry series, as well as in The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Twelve Bowls of Glass


Bucky Sinister - 1990
    

The Classic Treasury of Children's Poetry


Louise Betts EganJohn Gurney - 1990
    This enchanting volume for children and parents alike features verses by William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others. A work sure to become a treasured heirloom edition. Full-color illustrations.

The Book of Resemblances


Edmond Jabès - 1990
    

In the Shadow's Light


Yves Bonnefoy - 1990
    Included here is an extensive new interview with the poet in English translation."Included here is a very helpful and touchingly personal interview with the poet. . . . For readers with no prior knowledge of Bonnefoy's work, this volume would be an excellent place to start."—Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement

I Love Therefore I Am


Peter McWilliams - 1990
    

Leap Year Day: New And Selected Poems


Maxine Chernoff - 1990
    

Pillow Talk: A Book of Poems


Roger McGough - 1990
    He also tells you exactly when to cut your fingernails, how to have a real pillow fight and what happens when a burp escapes!

Breath Tracks


Jeannette Armstrong - 1990
    Her tone is clear, her stance honest, her words shimmer in beauty. This book of poems tracks with words the lives, pain and resilience of Native peoples and their long memoried past. Jeannette Armstrong, novelist, poet, children's story writer, and educator lives in Penticton, B.C

Poezii cenzurate


Adrian Păunescu - 1990
    Complete poems from Adrian Paunescu that were banned by communism regime in Romania between august 1968 and december 1989.

The New Oresteia of Yannis Ritsos


Yiannis Ritsos - 1990
    

Four Puppet Plays, Divan Poems and Other Poems, Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces, a Play Without a Title


Federico García Lorca - 1990
    This title gathers previously uncollected poems and dramatic works by the great Spanish playwright.

Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps


Frieda W. Aaron - 1990
    It reveals the impact of the immediacy of experience as a formative influence on perception, response, and literary imagination, arguing that literature that is contemporaneous with unfolding events offers perceptions different from those presented after the fact.Documented here is the emergence of poetry as the dominant literary form and quickest reaction to the atrocities. The authors shows that the mission of the poets was to provide testimony to their epoch, to speak for themselves and for those who perished. For the Jews in the condemned world, this poetry was a vehicle of cultural sustenance, a means of affirming traditional values, and an expression of moral defiance that often kept the spirit of the readers from dying.The explication of the poetry (which has been translated by the author) offer challenging implications for the field of critical theory, including shifts in literary practices--prompted by the growing atrocities--that reveal a spectrum of complex experimental techniques..

John Donne: Selections from Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions and Prayers


John Donne - 1990
    The books will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of every literate religious persons". -- The Christian Century

What Madness Brought Me Here: New And Selected Poems, 1968 1988


Colleen J. McElroy - 1990
    A collection of new and old poems that explore the relationship between language and the self.

The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream: Poems


T.R. Hummer - 1990
    

Hopeful Buildings


Charles Alexander - 1990
    This book collects six works, different from each other in many respects, but all moving with a strong investigative force. Thinking is the experience of everyday living, and Charles Alexander's work is a poetry of thinking. But it is experience, not difficulty, that wonderfully complicates these poems and brings them very close. I hope many people will read HOPEFUL BUILDINGS and take great pleasure both in its detail and in the larger construct that the details, perceived, provide. I do-Lyn Hejinian.