In this introduction to poetry and contemporary art, brief biographies of Angelou and Basquiat accompany the text and artwork.

    In Some Questions You Might Ask, Oliver gives us this one to chew over: "Is the soul solid, like iron?/ or is it tender and breakable, like/ the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?" Highly recommended.

    Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including the legendary songs Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on a Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat, I'm Your Man, and The Future; selections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. This volume demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.

    It includes some of Brian's best loved stories, including Flying Woman & Believing My Father.

    A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets.Since the Second World War Nakahara’s stature has risen, and his poetry is now ranked among the finest Japanese verse of the 20th century. Influenced by both Symbolism and Dada, he created lyrics renowned for their songlike eloquence, their personal imagery and their poignant charm.This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara’s creative life includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.

    Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered. I wish I'd kept the heart./Even the emblems of our own embarrassment/become acceptable to us, after a while." Doty derives much of his success by offering readers a full gulp of his longish verse, rather than teasing, incomplete sips. My Alexandria won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for 1993.

    Bearing witness to extremity—whether of war, torture, exile, or repression—the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.

    This expanded edition includes a new preface by the author as well as her post-9/11 "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture."

    Bestselling author Robert Bly selects his favorite works by the award-winning poet William Stafford.

    This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

    An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.

    Thich Nhat Hanh's clarity shines forth in Call Me by My True Names, transforming the pain and difficulty of war and exile into a celebration of awareness and the human spirit.

    Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself as a standard work in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are extended; cross-references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.

    

    There's a `just right' quality to the verse that makes it a pleasure to read the words aloud. Because it appeals on so many levels, this is one poetry book that won't sit on the shelf for long."—Booklist.This New York Times Notable Book of the Year is a wonderful introduction to the pleasures of poetry and word play from a master of the genre, Jack Prelutsky.

    Many of the poems in this expanded collection are from Rich's five recent volumes--The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991). Prose selections include When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, Rich's canonical statement on feminism; Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, on being a lesbian in a heterosexual world; Rich's interview for American Poetry Review, which presents a full and frank discussion of her work; and her previously unpublished commentary on the genesis of the poem Yom Kippur 1984. The editors have also taken into account the many essays on Rich and reviews of her work that have been published since 1975. Some earlier biographical selections have been replaced with works that focus on the quality of Rich's writing and her place in twentieth-century American literature--not just as a poet, but as a woman, a lesbian, and a mother. Criticism includes thirteen reviews and interpretations of Rich's work by W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Helen Vendler, Judith McDaniel, Adrian Oktenberg, Charles Altieri, and Joanna Feit Diehl, among others. A second recent study by Albert Gelpi traces the events in Rich's life from which her work evolves. An updated Chronology and Selected Bibliography, as well as an expanded Index, are included.

    Kenyon's fourth collection is built around two perfectly orchestrated poem sequences. In the first, the speaker contrasts memories of her baby carriage with other images from her childhood, such as her parents' toiling away at low-paying jobs. She also recalls the present-day life of her aging, increasingly dependent mother. Melancholia, the subject of the second sequence and several poems surrounding it, has been played to death in modern poetry, but still Kenyon offers new insights and gives even the most depressing poems an uplifting lilt in their final lines. In her hands a list of the latest medications becomes fit material for poetry: "The coated ones smell sweet or have / no smell; the powdery ones smell / like the chemistry lab at school / that made me hold my breath." She writes, in addition to illness, of sleep, insomnia and death. She interacts with the insects, birds and flowers in her New Hampshire landscape, relying on their fragility to teach her of her own. Kenyon describes afterlife, or "the Other Side," with the same precise, hard-edged imagery that fills her other poems." from Publisher's Weekly

    The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory.In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

    Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was the author of ten volumes of poetry and five works of prose. She was named New York State Poet in 1991; her other honors include the Manhattan Borough President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994.

    This is an amazing collection of erotic pleasures.

    A classicist, a headlong visionary, a social radical, and a poet of serene artistry with a lyric touch second to none, Shelley gave voice to English romanticism's deepest aspirations.

    . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occupies.' Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse

    Its method is two-fold. First it presents five important lectures on Persian poetry given by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, who brought Sufis to the West. Then it offers fresh translations by the poet Coleman Barks of some of the poetry Inayat Khan discusses, designed to provide readers with ready access to at least a sample of this wondrous literature, still not easy to find in English. Thus the book presents a brief, but reasonably comprehensive, introduction to one of the great literatures of the world, until recently ignored in the West.

    Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

    Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.

    Included here are many of Galway Kinnell’s best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

    Winner of the 1992 Barnard New Women Poets Prize

    Gunn has made a speciality of playing style against subject as he deals with the out-of-control through tightly controlled meters and with the systematized through open forms.

    "Entertaining, moving, Notley's work engages ever-deepening areas of division and isolation while settling for nothing less than a restoration of wholeness"--Joseph Donahue.

    The tone has deepened over the years, and he may now be seen as a true maestro in his field. Behind the irresistible air of immediacy and spontaneity lies much erudition and an antic imagination intent on subverting "the dominant paradigm." From his earliest books, including his landmark Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti has written poetry "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined. That strength has turned out to be lasting" (Joel Oppenheimer, N. Y. Times Books Review).

    Poetics. This book is a reprint of the popular 1993 Tsunami title by the author of DEBBIE: AN EPIC. Part manifesto, part dramatic dialogue, part epistolary prose, XEclogue jams the categories of Woman and Nature, inventing necessary fantasies of history and place. [Robertson] slams open the shutters of these poems ... This is young, fresh work, full of startling assertions ... She's a brave and eloquent composer. -- Billy Little, Boo Magazine. I want to tell you about the hegemony of my supple extensions. My pliant starlets float like symptoms. They float in the indicative case, flinging accusations, insults, blasphemies and curses. They're cerebral and illegal . . . (Ecologue Five, Phantasie . . . Four p.m.)

    "Poetry," he believed, "is braver than anyone."

    Made possible by recent advances in printing and reproduction technology, the publication of new editions of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1991 was a major publishing event. Now these two volumes are followed by The Early Illuminated Books and Milton, A Poem. The books in both volumes are reproduced from the best available copies of Blake's originals and in faithfulness and accuracy match the acclaimed standards set by Jerusalem and Songs. These two volumes are uniform in format and binding with the first two volumes.The Early Illuminated Books comprises All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; Thel; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Milton, A Poem, second only to Jerusalem in extent and ambition, is accompanied by Laoco�n, The Ghost of Abel, and On Homer's Poetry.

    W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

    Sharing favorites from his collection of long-forgotten turn-of-the-century photographs, and punctuating them with his own moving poetry, Mr. Myers has created a beautiful album that reminds us that "the child in each of us is our most precious part."

    

    Highly politicized and intensely personal, Moraga's work dares to imagine the mythic nation Queer Atzlán: a brave vision for gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of liberation. Moraga crosses literary genres to ruminate on the paradox of being at once inside and outside the myriad struggles and communities—interlocking and often at odds—that spur her art and activism. Speaking from her experience as a queer Chicana activist/artist, Moraga is committed to building a broad politic of solidarity and justice for all dispossessed people.With fierce honesty and incisive political analysis, Moraga offers more than an inspiring portrait of the struggle of an activist artist—she helps us see the world as it is and dream it up anew.

    Bilingual German/English edition.German translations by Holger, with assistance from Jonas Slonacker and Sigrid Mayer.Cover art by Cathleen Miller.

    A massive, comprehensive anthology of poetry from the politically turbulent Russia of this century.  This collection introduces Americans to a number of astonishing poets virtually unknown outside of Russia, as well as presenting the work of some of the most prominent Russian poets of the past 90 years.

    Included is the complete text for the "Ursonate," Schwitters' legendary and lengthy epic of sound poetry, which, as poets, editors and translators Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris comment, "is to sound poetry what Joyce's Ulysses is to the twentieth-century novel."

    Each of the forty-five sections plays against the others, and although wide-ranging and with many moods and changes of tone, Dark Harbor is all of a piece.

    Native American Studies. FIRST INDIAN ON THE MOON opens with the section "Influences": "where I have been/ most of my lives/ is where I'm going/--Lucille Clifton." The stories and poems of Sherman Alexie, an enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpint, Washington, have appeared widely, in such publications as Caliban, Esquire, The World, Beloit Poetry Journal, Red Dirt, Zyzzyva and Story. Alexie has won a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, and lives in Spokane. "These elegiac poems and stories will break your heart. Watch this guy. He's making myth"--Joy Harjo.

    

    Carroll initially made his reputation as a poet, and has won acclaim and comparisons to everyone from Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara for his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery.This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll's Living at the Movies, which was published in 1973 when he was twenty-two, and The Book of Nods, released in 1986. Fear of Dreaming also includes pieces previously unpublished in book form, including "Curtis's Charm," a vignette set in New York City's Central Park about a man convinced he is a victim of black magic, and poetic tributes to Robert Mapplethorpe and Ted Berrigan."His poems' urgent, obsessive metaphors pose tensely against their cool, streetwise surface voice, charging them with an electricity that's at once disturbing, sexual, religious, and psychological."--Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

    A collection of Emily Brontë's poetic works, including the Gondal poems, written alongside her sister Anne.

    As in his earlier talking at the boundaries (1976), and tuning (winner of the 1984 PEN/Los Angeles Literary Award for Poetry), Antin's brilliant improvised disquisitions at once challenge readers' expectations even as they instruct and entertain. A poet, performance artist, art critic, and professor of visual arts, Antin, since his college days in New York in the '50s, has been at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. The avant-garde? Yes, if by this is meant not an image of fashion but the place where art and life intersect, imparting to both a greater urgency - if is meant the place where experience and knowledge find their deepest expression, where the idea of a universal language can find shape, where the price of art is itself, where the fringe is the very center of existence.

    Nancy Wood's eloquent poems reveal the unique wisdom and vision of a people who have been her friends and teachers for more than thirty years.frank Howell's magnificent paintings evoke the beauty and vitality of their ancient culture. Poetry and paintings together creata a haunting portrait of a proud and enduring people whose great love and respect for the earth are valuable examples for us all.

    . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,' but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act.But the motive is "directed by desire" in Jordan.But the motive is "directed by desire" in Jordan

    THE SELECTED POEMS OF TAO CHIN brings into English some of the most important poetry in all of Chinese literature. As David Hinton writes in his introduction, Tao Chien "stands at the head of the great Chinese tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting." Tao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which distinguishes ancient Chinese poetry and makes it seem so contemporary. While maintaining a scholar's attention to the complexities of the original, Hinton here recreates Tao Chien as a compelling poetic voice in English.

    It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked." In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Val�ry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.

    "The eucalyptus is rowing in the light of the streetlamp, the lake-water writes letters to St. Paul, and all the new gods are ambushing at an old saltlick... if Goldberg's brilliantly anthropomorphized and frightening badlands of desire and the tragic life of our suburbs, then here's a version of our extinction you'd better accept as published by fire on the pages of lament"--Norman Dubie.

    Native American Studies. Amongst the poems and prose of OLD SHIRTS & NEW SKINS appear illustrations by Elizabeth Woody, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon. In the best tradition of confronting American reality and exacting vision and meaning from it, Sherman Alexie chooses to use poetic power. His vision is an amazing celebration of endurance, intimacy, love, and creative insight; finally, it is a victory that can be known only by a people who refuse to submit to the thieves, liars, and killers that have made them suffer tremendous loss and pain. "Like the woman who pours her life into a stew of survival, Sherman Alexie has created a meal, not for a reader to consume but for a reader to be changed by. Survival is being documented, changes measured"--Linda Hogan.

    Although they range across eons and firmaments, each is anchored in the Pacific Ocean and the Second World War... The Invention of the Zero was compelling enough to inspire me to read it twice aloud. I don't know when I last found a book of contemporary verse so enlivening in this hurtling, hellbent way...

    Sparked by Archibald MacLeish's assertion that "there always was a relationship between poet and place," Field and his co-editors offer an updated look at the contemporary poetry scene in A New Geography of Poets.

    As a movie, Blue was powerful, disturbing and experimental, devoid of visual images while presenting the voices of Jarman and several actors speaking over a blue screen for more than an hour. As a text, it offers a briefer, more personal and poignant experience. Jarman's writing hovers between poetry and prose, images and metaphors tumbling over one another: "My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart--a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room.'' The author, who wrote previously about his illness in Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk , careens through a variety of topics, randomly etching whatever is on his mind, from Marco Polo, Czar Ivan, van Gogh and Sarajevo to many things blue: jeans, sky, water and delphiniums. More than just the record of an artist losing his sight, this is a look at how a man accepts his impending death with fear, hope, humor and understanding. "Blue is darkness made visible,'' writes Jarman, who died in February 1994 at the age of 52.

    The opportunity exists now for man and woman to evolve in consciousness. It is as if God has extended to all of us an invitation to participate in a great awakening. This book is a part of that invitation.

    "With this fine new collection," says Library Journal, Martín Espada "joins the top ranks of poets anywhere"; in the words of Earl Shorris, he is "well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation."

    His early work distinguished itself by combining lucid images from the natural world with a dreamy inwardness. An imagination of solitude inhabited a solitary landscape; if the sensibility relished an ascetic purity, the body presented itself in the mouth's pleasure of vowel and in the eye's exactness. The later work ... retains these qualities-- sense and imagination-- while it adds more of the world and more of Haines' rigorous intelligence. He writes with a hard instrument on a hard surface, making no disposable verses."--Donald Hall, The Nation"His poems require concentration, rereading, and knowledge beyond what they impart, but the extra effort is richly, religiously rewarded."--Ray Olson, Booklist"If one views Haines' poetic development as a journey from the specific geography of the Alaskan wilderness to the uncharted places of the spirit, then that journey is now complete."--Dana GioiaBorn in Norfolk, Virginia in 1924, John Haines studied at the National Art School, the American University, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art. He homesteaded in Alaska for over twenty years. He is the author of several major collections of poetry; a collection of reviews, essays, interviews, and autobiography, Living Off the Country (University of Michigan Press, 1981); and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (Graywolf Press, 1989). He has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for theArts Fellowship, the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and most recently a Western State Arts Federation Lifetime Achievement Award and a Lenore Marshall/The Nation poetry prize for New Poems 1980-1988 (Story Line Press, 1990). He is currently a freelance writer and teacher and still spends part of each year in Alaska.

    Through these celebrations of birth, partings, and reunions, this gifted writer displays both her love of the Navajo world and her resonant use of language. Blending memoir and fiction in the storytelling style common to many Indian traditions, Tapahonso's writing shows that life and death are intertwined, and that the Navajo people live with the knowledge that identity is formed by knowing about the people to whom one belongs. The use of both English and Navajo in her work creates an interplay that may also give readers a new way of understanding their connectedness to their own inner lives and to other people. Luci Tapahonso shows how the details of everyday life—whether the tragedy of losing a loved one or the joy of raising children, or simply drinking coffee with her uncle—bear evidence of cultural endurance and continuity. Through her work, readers may come to better appreciate the different perceptions that come from women's lives.

    I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our using one another, during his life, to act as a measure, a bearing, an unabashed response to what either might write or say."—Robert CreeleyA seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry embraces themes of empowering love, political responsibility, the wisdom of dreams, the intellect as a unit of energy, the restoration of the archaic, and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding.In this selection of some 70 poems, Robert Creeley has sought to present a personal reading of Charles Olson's decisive and inimitable work—"unequivocal instances of his genius"—over the many years of their friendship.

    His poems of spiritual love still speak directly to our hearts after more than seven hundred years. These classic selections contemplate separation and longing, intoxication and bliss, union and transcendence.

    

    

    . . . He makes articulate the feelings of inarticulate people."--New York Times Book Review

    His readings are legendary and each new collection, from his collaboration with Brain Lynch, Endsville (1967) to Daddy, Daddy (winner of the 1990 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crazy about Women (1991) and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) has borne out the truth of Ezra Pound's dictum that "literature is news that stays news".This book contains Durcan's own selection from his work. It is a literary milestone that has set the seal on his reputation as a poet of international standing.

    This comprehensive selection of over 80 of his odes, hexameters, and elegies is taken from the important early period of his mature work--a time in which we encounter the poet open to nature and love with a rare vulnerability. The translations in Odes and Elegies, including poems never before available in English, render forcefully and directly the deep longing and heartbreak of Holderlin's poetic world; their open, pathos-filled rhythm and disarming clarity present Holderlin's powerful work as distinctive English poems. A bilingual edition, this book also includes informative annotations and translations of drafts and revisions that give deep insight into Holderlin's craft and process, shining new light on the unique poetic voice that marks Holderlin's achievement and continuing influence on poetry and philosophy today.

    This is a nerve storm. In her first collection since Bitter Angel, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, Amy Gerstler explores themes of suffering and redemption through a heady blend of folklore, popular culture, and the natural world in Nerve Storm. The poet Eileen Myles has said that the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply [Gerstler's] materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art. A crackling wit and whimsical instinct guide this collection as Gerstler traipses through humanity's triumphs and blunders, effortlessly revealing the surreal and surprising possibilities inherent in everyday life.

    [Though the poems are arranged chronologically], we have compiled not a historical survey, but rather a collection of poems that represent a variety of times, places and English-speaking cultures. Our selection process was guided by a wish to combine works long accepted as part of the English-language 'canon' with material not always well represented in anthologies--such as, most notably, the poetry of women since the seventeenth century..."Another notion implicit in the framing of this anthology is that English-language poetry has dramatically expanded within the last century. Writers in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, India, Africa and the Caribbean all hold in common with writers in Britain and the United States an English-Language tradition that helped to shape their history and their institutions, and that laid the groundwork for new writings..."In trying to include as wide a selection as possible of representative work...we have had to leave out several well-known long poems. In almost all cases, however, we have chosen to represent a poet by several poems, inviting readers to take a broader view of a given writer's work and ways of thinking." - from the Preface

    This delightful and highly original collection redresses that imbalance, and shows that on the subject of romantic and sexual love women can be just as eloquent as men -- or moreso. Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fikleness, exhiliaration, the pain of parting, and the transience of love. Included are poems from a huge range of women's love poetry which has remained largely invisible since the fifteenth century, as well as poems by well-known names such as Stevie Smith, Emily Dickenson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield Amy Lowell, George Eliot and even Queen Elizabeth I.

    The phrase the dead man resounds throughout like a drumbeat registering the wisdom and genius of ignorance, fallibility, and mutability with a Zen-like detachment. Defying paraphrase, Bell's new poems demand to be understood in the context of the incantatory line as he illuminates the transcendent inscape in its moment of self-revelation. The Book of the Dead Man demolishes boundaries between lyric poetry and serio-comic intensity, and announces a poetics of striking spiritual candor.

    At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989.Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the U.S. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's seventh book published by New Directions and is the first time Forms of Distance appears in a paperbook edition. The translations of David Hinton, who was awarded the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets in 1997, capture both the musicality and density of the original Chinese. Quiet, spare, these are poems of paradox and possibility, of words carefully balanced, of a world on edge.

    The present volume, which contains almost 1,600 songs and poems, covers the period from the earliest times to 784, and includes many of the finest works in the literatures as well as providing evocative glimpses of the spirit and folkways of early Japanese civilization.The texts drawn upon for the poems are the ancient chronicles Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and Shoku Nihongi; the fudoki, a set of eighth-century local gazetteers; Man'yoshu, the massive eighth-century compendium of early poetry (about one fourth of that work is included); and the Bussokuseki poems carved on a stone tablet at a temple in Nara. All poems are presented in facing romanization and translation.

    Expect Good Things

    In Fugues, a lucid and strikingly beautiful original collection, she looks squarely into the face of mortality, love, and aging, to explore the personal as well as universal questions that face each human being.

    Jared Carter's second collection of poems, winner of the 1995 Poet's Prize.

    The imprisoned species of pigs use their slum language; ravens, cuttlefish, sunflowers and a shell-back tick are among those non-verbal members of our natural world which find distinctive voices in this new collection of poems by Les Murray. Few poets could achieve such variety of approach to express character and feelings and to give us their vision of the universe. Les Murray also includes the human animal in the poems which begin and conclude the collection.

    Presented here are 523 poems accompanied by introductions, commentary and illustrations.

    They obey a “bedouin” impulse of their own—fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book’s cross-cultural weave.The poems track variances of union and disunion- social, sexual, mystic, mythic- both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance-chant, cante jando, and other musics."'Purgatorial stealth' (as School of Udhra puts it), within a startling progression, I find, of imageries, becomes the poem's enigmatic seductive, sometimes wavering, sliding traverse of a spiritual wilderness. I have no doubt that the book is a remarkable and daring testament that needs to be read and re-read for the unpredictable measure of involved enchantment it unfolds . . . A book of haunted pleasure." —Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock"Nathaniel Mackey has said that in language we inherit the voices of the dead. In School of Udhra he transcribes immeasurable spaces of the dispossessed who call him runaway. This writing increasingly unleashes each skittish letter into the risk of syllabic stutter 'vatic scat' stagger. How else ever re-trace or re-member the speaker of a ghost in sentences we step across. Words or segments of lines, stab, cut, rift, rend, relate, blaspheme, and bless." —Susan Howe, My Emily DickinsonNathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of Eroding Witness (1985), Whatsaid Serif (City Lights, 1998), Atet A.D. (City Lights, 2001), Bedouin Hornbook (1986), and Djbot Baghosus’s Run (1993), as well as Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993). He has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Duke University.

    A favorite book to share in schools and homes.Included in Brightly.com's 2017 list of recommended diverse poetry picture books for kids, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book."A must," according to Kirkus. "Delicately interwoven images. Laden with meaning, the poetry is significant and lovely. Cooper's paintings, with vibrant, unsentimentalized characters in earth tone illumined with gold, are warm, contemplative."Booklist commented: "Poems rooted in home, family, and the African-American experience. Highly readable and attractive."Added Brightly.com: "Each poem has a unique message and theme and is accompanied by beautiful brown and gold earth-tone illustrations related to broomwheat tea."

    Her poems of ecstatic praise to Krishna, whom she lovingly calls "The Dark One", are set to music and sung by schoolchildren, and are frequently heard as background tracks in contemporary films.As alive today as it was in the 16th century, Mirabai's poetry is about freedom, breaking with traditional stereotypes, and trusting completely in the benediction of God. It is also some of the most exalted mystical poetry in all of world literature, expressing her complete surrender to the divine, her longing, and her madness in love.This book is a revised edition of a Shambhala Centaur book that was published in 1994 and sold 10,000 copies in the two years following its release. The new edition contains the original 80 poems, a completely revised introduction, updated glossary, bibliography and discography, and additional Sanskrit notations.

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

    Beginning in 1931, the correspondence was tutelary but it quickly grew into a collaborative enterprise of emotional and artistic significance for both poets. This volume presents Niedecker's side of the correspondence. It opens with a substantial introduction tracing the life and work of Niedecker and how her relationship with Zukofsky influenced her poetry. At the same time Jenny Penberthy attempts to disengage Niedecker from her own myth of Zukofsky. She examines the emergence of Niedecker's quiet but rigorously experimental poetry: her rejection of hierarchies of genre, structure, and syntax, and her questioning of relationships among author, world, and text. Penberthy also reconstructs the early years of Niedecker's career, looking particularly at her surrealism and its impact on her poems. The book is not only about the impact Zukofsky had on Niedecker's work, it is also about a woman poet's struggle for recognition both within and without.

    With her trade-mark sagacity and vision, Graham unites the complex principles of science and philosophy with a startling array of tangible forms: a man praying in a downtown bakeshop; a crowd at an abortion rally; a survivor of the Stalinist regime alone in her dance studio.

    She has lately come to symbolize for the world even beyond Russia the power of art to survive and transcend the terrors of our century. The poems in this selection are related to the truth-telling that was Akhmatova's central purpose - individually, collectively, and spiritually.

    The famously funny and rude poems are there, as well as a number of darker poems written during the war.'Milligan is the Great God to all of us' John Cleese'The Godfather of Alternative Comedy' Eddie Izzard'That absolutely glorious way of looking at things differently. A great man' Stephen FrySpike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, before joining forces with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe to form the legendary Goon Show. Until his death in 2002, he had success as on stage and screen and as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories.

    Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an. While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and evaluate the qasidah. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych here offers the first aesthetics appropriate for this orally composed Arabic verse, an aesthetics that is built on--and tested on--close readings of a number of the poems. Drawing on the insights of contemporary literary theory, anthropology, and the history of religions, Stetkevych maintains that the poetry of the qasidah is ritualized in both form and function. She brings to bear an extensive body of lore, legend, and myth as she interprets individual themes and images with references to rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice. Her English translations of the poems under discussion convey the power and beauty of the originals, as well as a sense of their complex intertextuality and distinctive lexicon. The Mute Immortals Speak will be important for students and scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures, Islamic studies, folklore, oral literature, and literary theory, and by anthropologists, comparatists, historians of religion, and medievalists.

    

    The Possible Is Monstrous fills a crucial gap for English-speaking readers and scholars interested in the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt

    Emery George, himself a distinguished poet and translator, brings together over five hundred poems, expertly rendered into beautiful English verse by an international group of translators, often working in collaboration with the original authors. Represented are poets from many walks of life, contrasting religious and political outlooks and, most important, poets who work in a wide variety of styles--from traditional forms to the most up-to-date experimental modes. Here are tightly woven Petrarchan sonnets and elegant dramatic monologues alongside the free verse and mathematical experiments of a new generation. In these pages readers will find Nobellaureates (Czeslaw Milosz, Jaroslav Seifert), major poets (Peter Huchel, Vasko Popa), translators of global stature (Michael Hamburger, Ewald Osers), as well as poets virtually unknown in the West. And new to this edition is the work of thirty-two young poets representing eight distinct cultures anda whole new view of life in the former Easter Bloc. Also included are informative introducions to all selections and biographical sketches of each poet. A gallery of poetic images, Contemporary East European Poetry is the only volume of this scope available. For lovers of poetry and literature interested in a rich tradition so long cut off from the world at large, this rich collection offers a wealth of insights and opportunities for discoveries. Praiseworthy....Offers exciting glimpses of poetic worlds still to be fully mapped.--The Times Literary Supplement

    Gathers poems about travel, nature, daily life, friendship, and exile by the eleventh-century Chinese poet, who wrote under the name Su Tung-p'o.

    Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat presents colloquial haiku and occasional essays by an eccentric and disturbed personality who spent his last lonely years at a small Buddhist temple off the coast of Shikoku.

    poetry, w/art by Richard Tuttle

    Collected Longer Poems gathers the poet's choice of his narrative work and poems in sequence, including his epic on the nature of romance, The Sleeping Beauty, and meditative poems on the rural northeast that have made him the most accessible "regional" poet since Robert Frost. Our pre-eminent poet of improvisation within form, Carruth's renowned technical genius is perfectly matched to his ear for spoken language and narrative structure. By turns caustic and hilarious, his observations of that life, his own and his neighbors', ring as true as his ear for native speech. Collected Longer Poems completes the two-volume Collected Poems begun with the publication of Collected Shorter Poems in 1992, a volume that was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    

    Willis Barnstone’s selection of sonnets and the extensive historical and biographical background he supplies serve as a compelling survey of Spanish-language poetry that should be of interest both to lovers of poetry in general and to scholars of Spanish-language literature in particular.Following an introductory examination of the arrival of the sonnet in Spain and of that nation’s poetry up to Francisco de Quevedo, Barnstone takes up his six masters in chronological turn, preceding each with an essay that not only presents the sonneteer under discussion but also continues the carefully delineated history of Spanish-language poetry. Consistently engaging and informative and never dull or pedantic, these essays stand alone as appreciations—in the finest sense of that word—of some of the greatest poets ever to write. It is, however, Barnstone’s subtle, musical, clear, and concise translations that form the heart of this collection. As Barnstone himself says, "In many ways all my life has been some kind of preparation for this volume."

    Long-anticipated first collection capturing the faces, voices, feelings, words, and songs of the author

    Tsimmu's own vibrant line drawings illustrate the tales. 75 line drawings.

    A delightful collection of poems that capture the trials and adventures in a child's life.