E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

    Shikwa (1909) and Jawab-i-Shikwa (1913) extol the legacy of Islam and its civilising role in history, bemoan the fate of Muslims everywhere, and squarely confront the dilemmas of Islam in modern times. Shikwa is thus, in the form of a complaint to Allah for having let down the Muslims and Jawab-i-Shikwa is Allah's reply to the poet's complaint.

    The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)―here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger―made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Días Hábiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacza el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz's most recent collection, A Tree Within (Árbol Adentro).With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson.

    These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

    Funny and laid-back, his clear, often brief poems are easy to understand and enjoy -- which is why his readings are sometimes standing-room-only affairs. Collins may be a college professor and NEA-grant recipient, but he's not above using a disinfectant ad as an epigraph. "Public restrooms give me the willies," reads the epigraph to a poem appropriately titled "The Willies." That man-on-the-street brand of humor, utterly stripped of academic pretense, is trademark Collins. QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS, a reissue of Collins's fourth volume of poems, offers 70 pages of well-formed, very American verse that -- not surprisingly -- doesn't require a shelf of dictionaries. In fact, just as he laughs at epigraphs, Collins gleefully pokes fun at the very concept of dictionaries. Here, for example, are the opening lines to "The Hunt," which initially offer the flowing, dreamy verse many expect from a poet:       Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country      that lie beyond speech      Noah Webster and his assistants are moving      across the landscape tracking down a new word.Then Collins really gets going, letting his claws dig in. In the next stanza, that trademark humor really shows:      It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,       one that will seldom be used by anyone,       like a synonym for isthmus      but they are pursuing the creature zealouslyCollins could be talking about poetry itself, a form "zealously pursued" but too often "seldom used." Despite the deadpan tone, these are poems that are aware of poetic tradition. QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS opens with a poem called "American Sonnet," which announces that "We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser." Collins seems to believe that his particular American landscape and culture requires a variation on the standard forms of Western tradition. This country, he seems to say, demands a rethinking of it all.Part of that rethinking is a probe of the whole idea of a "poet." Collins asks the questions his students would love to ask, if they only had the guts. How, he asks, do you know for sure if a poet is contemporary? This, of course, is a twist on the earlier, unspoken-but-understood question of "What makes a sonnet a sonnet, anyway?" addressed in the first poem.Just as he produced an American "sonnet" that rolls off the tongue with the ease of banter, Collins comes up with an American, can-do answer to the "who's a contemporary poet?" question:       It is easy to find out if a poet is a contemporary poet      and thus avoid the imbroglio of calling him Victorian      or worse, Elizabethan, or worse, medieval.      If you look him up in The Norton Anthology of English Literature      and the year of his birth is followed only by a dash      and a small space for the numerals only spirits know,       then it is safe to say that he is probably aliveThough clothed in simple words and humor, Collins is actually taking a pretty sophisticated jab in these two stanzas, which are the first part of the appropriately titled poem "The Norton Anthology of English Literature." Is a poet worthy simply because he is in the anthology? And do these omnipresent anthologies really define periods and countries? Coming just a few pages after the Noah Webster reference, Collins may also be pushing his readers to wonder about the anthologizers' research processes.Collins loves to mix poems to history's overachievers with odes to underachievers or family pets who never seemed to have much, if any, ambition. In one of the book's sweeter poems, Collins offers praise of a character named Riley. Here's the last stanza of the very brief poem "The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography," where yet again, Collins mixes the quotidian and the poetic, letting his linguistic ability peep through the everyman persona at key moments:      He never had a job, a family or a sore throat.       He never mowed a lawn.       Passersby would always stop to remind him      whose life it was he was living.       He died in a hammock weighing a cloud. In a book that mentions weighing a dog and stripping layers of clothing off as he writes, it makes sense that this poet doesn't flinch from depicting the weighing of a cloud. Like the character who never had a sore throat, Collins writes glitch-free poems that are both a breeze and a blast to read. --Aviya Kushner

    Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, “Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.”The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.

    He seems to be writing the poems we all need to read right now." --Antioch Review Larry Levis was born in Fresno, California, in 1946. His first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award from the International Poetry Forum, and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1972. His second book, The Afterlife, won the Lamont Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1976. In 1981, The Dollmaker's Ghost was a winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Among his other awards were three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Larry Levis died in 1996.

    women and men have always given voice to the impulse to celebrate the world that surrounds and sustains them. Now, as we face a diminished present and an uncertain future, the need to honor the interconnection between people and the planet is heightened. From Walt Whitman, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Black Elk, to Margaret Atwood, the Rig Veda, and the chant of a Samar fisherman, the varied voices linked here offer songs and prayers for land, sea, and air; graces for food; and invocations, poems, and passages that reveal in the common spiritual heritage of all who cherish creation.

    Do you knowWhat the message of WesternCivilization is? I am alone.This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.

    Vincent Millay defined a generation with her passionate lyrics and intoxicating voice of liberation. Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, this Modern Library Paperback Classics collection captures the poet’s unique spirit in works like Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from This-tles, and Second April, as well as in “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. As Milford writes in her Introduction, “These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millay’s reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page.”

    Fiction. Published in 1992, well before Sherman Alexie became well-known as the screenwriter for the film SMOKE SIGNALS, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING has now been turned into a film with none other than Alexie himself in his directorial debut. The screenplay for the movie, which recently won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, is loosly adapted from this book. Many film-goers will want to visit or revisit the elegaic poems and stories that set the tone for the film itself. In an age when many 'Native American' writers publish books that prove their ignorance of the real Indian world, Sherman Alexie paints painfully honest visions of our beautiful and brutal lives--Adrian C. Louis.

    Walker’s complete poems, including new and previously unpublished verse, collected for the first time-with author’s notes that provide historical perspective on spiritual and political issues of the last three decades. This title has been selected as a Common Core Text Exemplar (Grades 9-10, Poetry)

    Philip Levine's New Selected Poems (1984) by adding to it a generous choice of major from each of the two volumes that followed it: Sweet Will (1985) and A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988).

    His evening readings in Hindi/Urdu-speaking regions drew thousands of listeners. Associated with the Communist party in his youth, Faiz became an outspoken poet in opposition to the Pakistani government. This volume offers a selection of Faiz's poetry in a bilingual Urdu/English edition with a new introduction by poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali.

    Nature as delight. Nature as mother and sister. Nature as victim. Nature as companion and reminder of what is wild in us all. Here, among more than a hundred poets and prose writers, are Diane Ackerman on the opium of sunsets; Ursula K. Le Guin envisioning an alternative world in which human beings are not estranged from their planet; and Julia Butterfly Hill on weathering a fierce storm in the redwood tree where she lived for more than two years. Here, too, are poems, essays, stories, and journal entries by Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, Gretel Erlich, Adrienne Rich, and others—each offering a vivid, eloquent response to the natural world.This second edition of Sisters of the Earth is fully revised and updated with a new preface and nearly fifty new pieces, including new contributions by Louise Erdrich, Pam Houston, Zora Neale Hurston, Starhawk, Joy Williams, Kathleen Norris, Rita Dove, and Barbara Kingsolver.

    Here, in a new selection of 200 poems from five decades, is the distinctive voice of Robert Creeley, reminding us of what has made him one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

    Here women's voices fill the age-old silence about matters central to their experience-from menstruation, sexual intimacy, and childbirth to caretaking, household rituals, and death. These writings represent a healing vision of the sacred that emerges from the particular consciousness of women-a vision that partakes of the world of earth and flesh. With contributions by Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Hildegard of Bingen, Lucille Clifton, Annie Dillard, Joy Harjo, Erica Jong, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Kathleen Norris, Marge Piercy, Starhawk, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, and others.

    Hers is poetry of birth, death, children, community, history, sexuality and spirituality, and she addresses these themes with passion, humor, anger and spiritual awe.

    In this, her thirteenth book of verse, the author of "The Dream of a Common Language" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" writes of war, oppression, the future, death, mystery, love and the magic of poetry.

    Now in paperback, "Complete Short Poetry" gathers all of Zukofsky's poetry outside his 800-page magnum opus entitled" "A""--including work that appeared in "All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964," the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition "80 Flowers," as well as several fugitive pieces never before collected."Zukofsky is the American Mallarm," writes Hugh Kenner, "and given the peculiar intentness of the American preoccupation with language--obsessive, despite what you may read in the newspapers--his work is more disorienting by far than his exemplar's ever was. Mallarm had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."

    The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader provides the most comprehensive selection of Baraka's work to date, spanning almost 40 years of a brilliant, prolific, and controversial career, in which he has produced more than 12 books of poetry, 26 plays, eight collections of essays and speeches, and two books of fiction. This updated edition contains over 50 pages of previously unpublished work, as well as a chronology and full bibliography.

    He not only helped give new vitality and direction to the old conventions of court poetry, but created works that, because of their depth of feeling, continue to attract readers to the present day.

    Vincent Millay, perhaps the premier American lyricist of the twentieth century.

    Innocence is the ability to look at the world with fresh eyes. On The Poetry of Self Compassion, David Whyte looks at innocence as a faculty of exploration and a source of courage, compassion and self knowledge.

    These jeweled, intricate poems, like the multilayered "In Search of Evanescence," locate and reflect the America that must be "unseen to be believed."Somewhere between cartographer and stargazer, the Nostalgist links images of water, desert, and myth, returning to Tucson in the monsoons, or seeing Chile in his rearview mirror, all the while creating an intense and vital vision.

    His fresh and beautiful prose translations will re-open many half-forgotten doors, and stimulate new enthusiasms.

    . . .

    Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father.

    With more than 1,100 poems, it is the most varied and comprehensive selection of traditional Japanese poetry now available in English.Ezra Pound called poetry "the most concentrated form of verbal expression," and the great poets of Japan wrote poems as charged and compressed as poems can be. The Japanese language, with its few consonates and even fewer vowels, did not lend itself to expansive forms, making small seem better and perhaps more powerful. There is also the historical context in which Japanese poetry developed—the highly refined society of the early courts of Nara and Kyoto. In this setting, poetry came to be used as much for communication between lovers and friends as for artistic expression, and a tradition of cryptic statement evolved, with notes passed from sleeve to sleeve or conundrums exchanged furtively in the night.Add to this the high sense of decorum that dominated court society for centuries, and you have the conditions that led to the development of the classical uta (also referred to as tanka or waka), the thrity-one-syllable form that acts as the foundation for virtually all poetry written in Japanese between 850 and 1900.In choosing poems, the compiler has given priority to authors and works gnerally acknowledged as of great artistic and/or historical importance by Japanese scholars. For this reason, major poets such as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Izumi Shikibu, Saigyo, and Matsuo Basho are particualarly important collections such as Man'yoshu, Kokinshu, and Shin kokinshu. In addtion, the volume also contains samplings from genres such as the poetic diary, linked verse, Chinese forms, and comic verse.

    These are not stories in the contemporary sense, but tales spun out of the mystical and the ordinary, a history of men sizing up other men and bottles being passed around a campfire. ...If death figures here, there is also the dichotomy of images honing in on an inevitable end and a language that is enormously, relentlessly alive--Silvia Curbelo.

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

    Ritsos felt defeated in his own health and politics, but as a poet he experienced a surge of creativity that is fascinating to follow in its chronology and exactitude.

    The first is to present in a new English translation 255 representative hokku (or haiku) poems of Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the Japanese poet who is generally considered the most influential figure in the history of the genre. The second is to make available in English a wide spectrum of Japanese critical commentary on the poems over the last three hundred years.

    In fact it is a very common form of political organisation and one which has characterised much of the human past. People Without Government describes briefly the anarchic political structures of a number of these societies. True they are mainly small-scale hunting, gathering and horticultural groups. However, the social organisation of certain large populations with complex relations is also sometimes anarchic. Thus anarchy applies to a broad spectrum of different kinds of societies. This book seeks to show what anarchy has been like in practice. Special attention is paid to the techniques of leadership, maintaining order and decision-making. The dynamic interplay between freedom and authority is considered, particularly the apparent tendency of anarchic polities to degenerate into states with government and for organisations to become oligarchies, and it is concluded that liberty and individuality are at best very tenuous and fleeting entities. There can be no relenting in the struggle for freedom.

    Amazing in its thematic range and stylistic breadth, his poetry "leaps continents and covers war and peace, intolerance and human striving . . . a passionate and essential edition of his collected poems" ( The New York Times).

    some of the best devotional verse the English language affords..." While the term "mystic" may have connotations that reach beyond traditional Christian thinking, it actually refers to a common spiritual experience that unites anyone who has fellowship with God. The poems in this book were hand-picked by Tozer and follow a logical pattern, going in line with the very nature of salvation itself and the death of Jesus on the cross, man's contemplation of his own sin, redemption, communion with God, awaiting the return of Christ, and celebrations of eternal fellowship with God in Heaven. Both intimate and exhilarating, The Christian Book of Mystical Verse is a book for anyone who seeks to worship God the Father, and who finds the rich language of Christians of old a great help in that endeavor.

    It includes stories, essays, poems, paintings, and photographs by a group of gifted writers and artists.

    They illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.

    In a series of short aphorisms, Jabès continues his lifelong interrogation of "The Book" both within the Jewish cultural tradition and twentieth-century modernism. Jabès' life work is driven in part by Mallarmè's concept of the limit, of the space beyond limits, and the space defined by such a limit. His work is pervaded by a sense of melancholy and loss, and never so much as in Desire for a Beginning/Dread of One Single End, as its title would suggest. Even in his last work, Jabès continues to struggle admirably with questions of being and not-being, of life and art, displaying the intelligence and passion of a great writer.

    As Ashley tells it...An over-the-hill entertainer, and his somewhat younger pal, Buddy (The World's Greatest Piano Player), find themselves in a small town on the Midwest circuit playing at The Perfect Lives Lounge. They become friends with the son and daughter of the local Sheriff, and the four hatch a plan to do something that if they are caught, it will be a crime, but if they are not caught it will be art. They've set themselves a kind of metaphysical challenge. This book includes the complete libretto, in seven episodes, followed by thirty-eight pages of Robert Ashley talking about his ideas and the making of the opera. He's opera's James Joyce...no other new music theater so rewards effort by getting under your skin and molding your consciousness-The New York Times.

    In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other.The tigers that crouched in Blake's baleful spiritual forests, the roses and sunflowers whose mystical properties he rendered with such accurate music, the angels with whom he wrestled and who delivered prophetic books to him late at night, were literally more real to him than the London, where, in the period of the French Revolution, he lived out his life of poverty and indignant isolation.  One of England's great lyric poets; one of Europe's great visionaries.Introduction by Kathleen Raine(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

    Available again in a revised reissue, AWASH WITH ROSES, Patchen's classic collection of 100 love poems, includes a biographical introduction of Kenneth and Miriam Patchen by the writer's biographer Larry Smith.

    Using the language and props of our modernity with cinematic speed and haunting lyric power, Logue gives a close-up view of war unlike anything else in recent poetry.

    In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.

    Latino/Latina Studies. Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Latino Literature Prize. Cervantes stretches the resources of language, imagery, and the dialectics of love, hunger, and aesthetics. "Cervantes is a poet with a clear, strong voice.... Her work is refreshing and deceptively simple, reflecting love of language and music. She manages all this without sacrificing the humor, power, and complexity of themes she explores as a female, Latina-American, lover, intellectual, and writer"--Jessica Hagedorn.

    

    

    Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers' completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition.The first three volumes of this four-volume work, will present chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The present volume consists of poems written from 1939 to Jeffers' death in 1963, including the dramatic poems The Bowl of Blood, Medea, and The Double Axe byt were eventually omitted for reasons that are unclear; and those poems from his last years, which appeared posthumously in The Beginning and the End, that seem to be completed drafts.

    An illustrated collection of poems for very young children, including works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Shel Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky.

    It contains translations of 108 ghazals selected from the works of nine major poets: Wali, Dard, Mir, Ghalib, Momin, Iqbal, Hasrat, Firaq and Faiz. The translations are faithful to the sense and spirit of the original and are couched in a lucid, poetical language. For the convenience of the non-Urdu knowing reader, the author has provided in the book, in addition to the text in Urdu Romanised versions of the ghazals. Among other features of the book should be mentioned the introductory essay on the ghazal, which is comprehensive and fully illustrated, and brief biographical notes on the poets, along with their authentic portraits.

    LIVING INSTEAD was published by North Point Press in 1991 and is now available from Talisman House and from SPD. William Bronk has been called one of America's greatest living poets (Compound Eye). The way Columbus or someone earlier/ came to a place to be called a New World/ though not more new than the old world was/ --there all along and people living there--/ is like the way a poem is come upon: / you think there's something there, go see what. (from Exploration)

    Fine art, and book illustrations from Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, Richard Dadd, Henry Fuseli, Sir John Everett Millais, William Blake, Noel Paton, and William Holman Hunt will grace the pages of this elegant edition. With beautiful four-color art, and a whimsical design, Shakespeare on Love will make a timeless gift.

    The collection focuses on levy's visual, experimental and lyrical poems, and presents a basic selection of his poetic works. Includes a radio interview with levy, and articles by his contemporaries D.R. Wagner, Kent Taylor and Douglas Blazek. In addition to a substantial selection of levy's free verse, this book presents facsimile reproductions of his visual poems and collages, including the Concrete poem sequence "Zen Concrete" and excerpts from "The Tibetan Stroboscope", as well as the mimeo edition of the long poem "Cleveland Undercovers."

    Finalist, 1991 National Book Award for PoetryWinner, Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry

    Dunn's landscape at the end of the century embraces the spectrum of urgencies and obsessions that we live with and for. It's a landscape that we share with citizens and spies, revelers and mourners, women who weep, men who keep secrets, and especially with the poet himself.

    Some discovered the truth before it was too late. Others still drape their blues in the silken sounds, swirling in dimly-lit rooms in an endless, blinding slow dance.Patricia Smith, born and raised on Chicago's West Side, grew and thrived on the bright promise of Motown. Life According to Motown, the new collection by the five-time champion of Chicago's famous Uptown Poetry Slam, recounts in vivid imagery the lessons taught by and learned from Motown, as well as a thrilling collection of new works.

    Presented as poetry, this collection of sharp-edged social criticism and shrewd observation coincides with the release of Reed's new album.

    This is a collection of sixty powerful love poems.

    He was the most brilliant creative genius produced by the Indian Renaissance.

    

    poems from ancient Sanskrit, tr Schelling

    

    A campaigning narrative poem with an anthology of prose writings on the devastating effect of the motor car on our lives.

    With the recent popularization of Persian poetry, this book is the most authentic translation of mystical literature -- translated and analyzed by the renowned Sufi Master Seyedeh Dr. Nahid Angha. This book includes an introduction to reading and understanding mystical poetry and a glossary of esoteric terms.

    The Sighted Singer makes available a revised and significantlyexpanded version of Against Our Vanishing and includes Grossman's recent treatise " Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetry." This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion—across generations—of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure."

    All author proceeds from the book will go to the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project. 6 photographs. Dried corsages. Like swans on still water. Saturday night. Mellow on morphine. Letter from home. Like Emily Dickinson. Second tour. Grandfathers rocking. My dead are not silent. Initiated in agony / Dana Shuster --Okinawa 1969. Seventeen summers after Vietnam / Mary Pat O'Connor --7 times 52. Flashback. The best act in Pleiku. Holy Saturday 1971. Dreams that blister sleep / Sharon Grant --Vietnam 1965 / Judith Drake --Saigon. Mamsan. Pre-op. Road show. Combat zone. Snafu / Kathleen Trew --In this land. The kid. Wounds of war. July 20, 1969. Dying with grace. Confession. Crone. In the war zone. Knowing / Marilyn McMahon --A boom, a billow. Vo Thi Truong. Walking class. Row upon endless row. The Moon is a nuisance / Lady Borton --Kenny / Emily Strange --How do you say I love you in a war? Dear Mom. I know you've waited. Do you really want to know / Bobbie Trotter --Two villages. Vermont Vietnam (I) / Grace Paley --Vietnam. A nurse's lament. We went, we came. Our own parade / Janet Krouse Wyatt --My son's childhood / Xuan Quynh --Vigil. Recollection. Some days. The walk to the Wall. In war and peace. Guided journey. Flashdance. Camouflage. Peace. Coral Bay / Joan A. Furey --Sister Mary. The coffee room soldier. Vietnam, oppressive heat. I hold them. Cordwood / Penny Kettlewell --The friendship only lasted a few seconds. Being a vet is like losing a baby / Lily Lee Adams --The Vietnamese mother / Huong Tram --Hello, David. I went to Vietnam to heal. Where's the tripwire, Jack? / Dusty --Cheated. To my unknown soldier boy / Mary Lu Ostergren Brunner --The trouble is triteness / Winifred Schramm --Flashbacks. The tears. The "Vietnam vet". The tears. Death speaks. Under the covers. Keep mum. The general's car. Armistice Day. The statue. The peace to end all wars / Norma J. Griffiths --How many sounds? It's too easy. TV wars--first blood part II. Middle East montage. For Molly. Making friends / Lynda Van Devanter Buckley --To An Phu. From this distance I talk to you / Ha Phuong --Saving lives. Unseen. Hindsight / Mary O'Brien Tyrrell --One small boy / Kathleen F. Harty --Recovery / Mary Beyers Garrison --In memoriam / Joan Parrot Skiba --Eyes / Helen DeCrane Roth --Left behind. Our war. It's been so long. "Thanks, nurse". / Diane Carlson Evans --Dark angel / Joan Arrington Craigwell --My war. Unnamed. Reunited / Diane C. Jaeger --The gift in wartime. Dream of peace / Tran Mong Tu --Where are they now? / Margaret Flatt --Montagnard bracelets. Crying. Saigon? / Sara J. McVicker --Look into my eyes and see. When the parade passed by / Joyce A. Merrill --Images at the Wall / Linda Spoonster Schwartz --Even now / Bernadette Harrod --Confessional. Short 1968-1990 / Lou McCurdy Sorrin --How do you say goodbye? / Penni Evans --My letter to the Wall / Nguyen Ngoc Xuan --Poem without name / Minh Duc Hoai Trinh

    Now, with A Poet's Bible, Rosenberg presents a fresh retelling of the Bible's greatest tales, which introduces 15 new authors and reveals the imaginative power of the original verse.

    Poems discuss a journey across the ocean, a veterans' cemetery, money, an abandoned collection of dolls, and a man who escapes from his prison cell to commit a murder.

    "Let the eye enlarge with all it beholds," she says in the opening poem; she becomes a seer, as the San Francisco Review of Books has said, “returning to the role of the poet as it served the human race for centuries: to fuel our thinking, show us our world in new ways, and to get us to feel more intensely.”

    Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer. "To say that this is a book of the immigrant experience--which in some sense it is--is to underrate the range of form and feeling that Gervitz brings to it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self. Like Pound's Cantos or Zukofsky's A, hers is the work of a lifetime: a life's work including not only autobiography and familial memories as a kind of history but rife with religious and mystical imagery from Jewish kabbala to Mexican folk Catholicism and beyond. Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficult poem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes"--Jerome Rothenberg.

    The poems are invaluable for what they reveal of the artist's innermost feelings about such universal themes as love, death, and redemption. "A superb introduction to Michelangelo's life, a masterful bilingual presentation of his written work, commentaries, and an annotated bibliography. . . . A handsome volume of pure scholarship that will find a permanent place in one's library, to be dipped into from time to time as a source of deep enjoyment."—Virginia Quarterly Review "For educated readers who want to know what Michelangelo's poetry manages to do, who want a guide through the Italian and even more through the conventions that enabled Michelangelo to write at all, this is an indispensable book."—Richard Howard"The exceptionally difficult task of translating Michelangelo's poetry has been accomplished with aplomb: equally successful is the no less difficult task of placing the poems within their biographical, social, intellectual, and artistic context. Saslow's annotated translation will be the standard critical edition of Michelangelo's poetry."—William E. Wallace

    

    This, the second of the two volumes, covers poets from Blake to Heaney, and provides an excellent portrayal of a wide variety of eighteenth to twentieth century poets.The richness and variety of this tradition are represented in this collection by all the great and familiar names, but also some of the less well-known poets who have often provided startling exceptions to the poetry of their age. The result is a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of the depth, diversity, and energy of poetry written in Britain and Ireland.Beginning with William Blake, this second volume, covers many of the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats). It gives a generous survey of nineteenth century verse, including that of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, and Lewis Carroll, with poets from the twentieth-century being represented by poets such as Graves, Betjeman, Larking, Hughes, and Heaney.

    Talking with a range of fellow poets and writers (Clark Coolidge, George Oppen, George MacBeth, Tom Clark, Charles Ingham, Barry Alpert, and Anne Waldman, among others) in New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Boulder, and elsewhere, Berrigan speaks with an illuminating and disarming candor about a wide range of topics: the art and craft of poetry, his own work, his methods of composition in books such as The Sonnets and in many specific poems (including various collaborative writings with other poets and painters), his relations with and influence by and upon other writers and/or painters in the New York cultural "scene in the 1960's and 1970's (Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, among the writers; as well as the painters Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, etc.). Whatever the subject, Berrigan invariably shoots from the hip straight for the mark: "Sometimes I hear my words before they get to my lips, and if I don't like them I change them before they get out." The result is an important, and wonderfully entertaining, account of the mind-at-work of one of this country's most important contemporary poets.

    Much of his poetry consists of deeply felt lyrical meditations on a variety of themes—love, death, the transience of joy, the impermanence of youth and beauty, the immortality of art, and other topics—expressed in verse of exquisite delicacy, originality, and sensuous richness.This collection contains 30 of his finest poems, including such favorites as "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "On seeing the Elgin Marbles," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Isabella; or, the pot of Basil" and the celebrated Odes: "To a Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," "On Melancholy," "On Indolence," "To Psyche," and "To Autumn." These and many other poems, reproduced here from a standard edition, represent a treasury of time-honored poetry that ranks among the glories of English verse.

    "WHY AM I SO BROWN? is a compelling scenario of ideals and cultural activism. Trinidad's signature poem 'Let Us Stop This Madness' sets the tone for a plurality of global political justice. Through an integration of barrio rhythm and street orality, he finds identity and culture. His sensitive and mature hand captures a consciousness that is a framework for aesthetic realism and change. In this, Trinidad's fifth book, his sense of humanity has gelled into completeness. This is a must read for anyone who will take the challenge to investigate this form we call poetry"-Ron Allen, Horizons in Poetry, Detroit, Michigan.

    Cole Swensen's PARK is a book of poetry devoted to the discoveries and happenings in an unspecified park. Swensen, who was recently awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, takes an aesthetic interest in the phenomena of park-ness and an interest in seeing as a way of knowing what makes a place a generator of experience. The poem is organized numerically and gestures at its own fluidity as in the park "every time I've been back...I've had the distinct impression that everything is moving."

    All the English and Italian verse, and most of the Latin and Greek is included, as is a generous selection of his major prose works. The poems are arranged in order of publication, essential in enabling the reader to understand the progress of Milton's career in relation to the political and religious upheavals of his time. The extensive notes on the text cover syntax, vocabulary, historical context, and classical and biblical references. The Introduction traces both Milton's changing conception of his own vocation, and the critical reception his work has received over the past three centuries.

    It's a classic because it's the first collection of poems selected by kids! It includes clever creations from some of the most popular names in children's poetry, including Bill Dodds, Timothy Tocher, Joyce Armor, Robert Pottle, Bruce Lansky, and Kenn Nesbitt. Humorous illustrations by Stephen Carpenter make this book even better.

    Ford has been in the advance guard from his precocious beginnings in the Deep South through his experiments in lyrical surrealism in the 1940s up to his recent poetic epiphanies of Nepal.The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote that the effect of Ford's "particularly hard, generally dreamlike poetry. . .is to revive the sense and force them to re-see, re-hear, re-taste, re-smell, and generally re-value all that it was believed had been seen, heard, smelled, and generally valued."

    Yet this anthology, which includes both undisputed masterpieces and achievements in hitherto neglected fields, is the first to reveal the full range and diversity of the century's poetic riches. What emerges is the most complete picture available of the poetic vitality of the sixteenth century.

    

    This contains the poems of his years of persecution, from his journey to Armenia in 1930 until 1934, when he was arrested and exiled to the Urals for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin. Written and preserved by a miracle, his poems have become in Peter Levi's description "all gems and ingots" in the McKanes' translations.

    invasion of Panama, and modern life.

    This collection of more than 360 haiku, arranged seasonally and many rendered into English for the first time, attempts to reveal the full range of the poet’s extraordinary life as if it were concentrated within a year. Issa’s haiku are traditionally structured, of seventeen syllables in the original, tonally unified and highly suggestive, yet they differ from those of fellow haikuists in a few important respects. Given his character, they had to. The poet never tries to hide his feelings, and again and again we find him grieving over the lot of the unfortunate – of any and all species.No poet, of any time or culture, feels greater compassion for his life of creatures. No Buddhist-Issa was to become a monk—acts out the credos of his faith more genuinely. The poet, a devoted follower of Basho, traveled throughout the country, often doing the most menial work, seeking spiritual companionship and inspiration for the thousands of haiku he was to write. Yet his emotional and creative life was centered in his native place, Kashiwabara in the province of Shinano (now Nagano Prefecture), and his severest pain was the result of being denied a place in his dead father’s house by his stepmother and half brother.By the time he was able to share the house of his beloved father, Issa had experienced more than most the grief of living, and much more was to follow with the death of his wife and their four children. In the face of all he continued to write, celebrating passionately the lives of all that shared the world with him, all creatures, all humans. Small wonder that Issa is so greatly loved by his fellow poets throughout the world, and by poetry lovers of all ages.

    Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time.Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers.Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

    A collection of poetry by Cornelius Eady.

    

    In this book, one of the foremost Arab poets reinterprets a rich and ancient heritage.He examines the oral tradition of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, as well as the relationship between Arabic poetry and the Qur’an, and between poetry and thought. Adonis also assesses the challenges of modernism and the impact of western culture on the Arab poetic tradition.Stimulating in their originality, eloquent in their treatment of a wide range of poetry and criticism, these reflections open up fresh perspectives on one of the world’s greatest – and least explored – literatures.Adonis is widely considered among the greatest living Arab poets. Born in Syria in 1930, he settled in Lebanon in the 1950s, where he became a central figure in the Arab world’s new poetic movement. In 1956 he helped establish the literary magazine Shi‘r, and in 1968 founded its successor, the equally prestigious Mawakif. Both played a seminal role in the revival of the Arabic literary tradition. Adonis is the author of several classic works that have led to a rigorous reassessment of the Arab cultural heritage.

    

    . . .Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

    

    A few are hard to read, they are so griefladen; yet they leave us with a sense of release into a deeper understanding of the human heart. Playful lovers, lovers' cruelties, the divertissements of the sexual revolution - her treatment of these subjects in direct, lighthearted, courageous terms has earned her a vivid reputation as a speaker of truths that all women, and honest men, recognize and respond to.

    

    In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991 gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Ether Dome is his seventh book of poems.

    Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeatshimself."(' The New York Times Book Review) "In his early 80's, in some of the best poetry of his "career" (if such a smallhearted word applies to this kind of a life), Milosz is still asking questions that are virtually unanswerable but morally essential: What is it like to have been alive? Who am I? Have I done more good than evil? The first and final province, as Milosz has seemed to know more and more surely over the years, is desire. If it is desire that always leads us away from our beginnings, then it is also through it that we are always being led back toward them, never quite getting there, but creating the world, and ourselves as we go."(' The Harvard Review)

    This is a small stage, sometimes cold and darkened, but filled with characters so finely etched that they stand out as clearly as steeples against the sky. David Budbill plunges into the soul of New England to find characters and stories with lessons for anyone wanting to find the intrinsic nature of the region that has been called "all of America's backyard." These dark, lyrical, funny narrative poems portray the hopes and joys, pains and despair of people who have been bypassed or bruised by the twentieth century. Budbill has written a song of the down-and-out or overlooked, a song of the unsung. This anthem of the rural renaissance is microcosmic in setting, but universal in scope.

    Chosen as one of The New York Times Book Review's Notable Poetry Books of the Year for 1991, Living Wills is at once an arresting collection of Cynthia Macdonald's new poems and a substantial selection from her four earlier books.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    A contemporary of Columbus, Lorenzo is hardly known in the English-speaking world as a major Quattrocento writer, author of a large and varied body of poetry as well as an important literary treatise. His poetry and patronage were instrumental in renewing the vernacular literature of his age after a period of stagnation.That Lorenzo's literary writings were for the most part never translated is a fascinating curiosity of history, attributable to the irreverent, bawdy subject matter of many of his poems, objections to his authoritarian politics, and the unconventional features of his poetic realism. Yet Lorenzo is now seen as the most interesting exponent of the cultural renaissance that he encouraged. His longer poems in particular reveal the central concerns, everyday activities, and favorite ideas of his day. No other Florentine writer succeeds in capturing as he does the beauty, seasonal changes, and rhythms of life of the Tuscan countryside. His poetic realism is that which sets him apart from his age, yet makes him such a vivid portrayer of it. The availability of his works in English will serve to modify and enlarge our conception of the Florentine Renaissance.