Here you will also meet Allison Beals and her twenty-five eels; Danny O'Dare, the dancin' bear; the Human Balloon; and Headphone Harold.So come, wander through the Nose Garden, ride the Little Hoarse, eat in the Strange Restaurant, and let the magic of Shel Silverstein open your eyes and tickle your mind.

    With uncanny insight, Hafiz captures the many forms and stages of love. His poetry outlines the stages of the mystic's "path of love"-a journey in which love dissolves personal boundaries and limitations to join larger processes of growth and transformation. With this stunning collection, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in translating the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and spiritual voices. BACKCOVER: "If you haven't yet had the delight of dining with Daniel Ladinsky's sweet, playful renderings of the musings of the great saints, I Heard God Laughing is a perfect appetizer. . . . This newly released edition of his first playful foray into Hafiz's divinely inspired poetry is essential reading . . . . Ladinsky is a master who will be remembered for finally bringing Hafiz alive in the West." -Alexandra Marks, The Christian Science Monitor

    Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written.This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed, masterly engravings from a rare 19th-century edition of the poem. Relevant lines from the poem are printed on facing pages and the complete text is also included. Admirers of Doré will find ample evidence here of his characteristic ability to capture the mood and meaning of a work of literature in striking imagery; lovers of The Raven will delight in seeing its mournful musing on love and loss given dramatic pictorial form.

    Perhaps, more than any other Persian poet, it is Hafiz who most fully accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Daniel Ladinsky has made it his life's work to create modern, inspired translations of the world's most profound spiritual poetry. Through Ladinsky's translations, Hafiz's voice comes alive across the centuries singing his message of love.

    The House of Belonging has sold over 50,000 copies and contains some of his most beloved poems, such as The Truelove, The Journey, and Sweet Darkness. The deeply moving title poem reads as balm and benediction to wherever one finds one's home in the world, and taken together, the collection illuminates the myriad ways we belong - to others, to ourselves, and to the world.

    Opening with twenty new poems and including generous selections from Jane Kenyon's four previous books—From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance—this collection was selected and arranged by Kenyon herself—alongside her husband, the esteemed poet Donald Hall—shortly before her death in April 1995.This extensive gathering reveals a scrupulously crafted body of work in which poem after poem achieves a rare and somber grace. Light and shade are never far apart in these telling narratives of life and love and work at the poet's rural New Hampshire home. The shadow of depression in Kenyon's verse, which grew much darker and longer at certain intervals, has the force and heft of a spiritual presence—a god, demon, angel. Yet her work emphasizes the constant effort of her imagination to confront and even find redemption in suffering. However quiet or domesticated or subtle in her moods and methods, Kenyon was a poet who sought to discover the extraordinary within the ordinary, and her poems continue to make this discovery. As Hall writes in the afterword to Otherwise, we share "her joy in the body and the creation, in flowers, music, and paintings, in hayfields and a dog."

    L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

    This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please.  It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

    Finally, here is the first compilation of Nikki Giovanni's poetry. It is the testimony of a life's work from one of the commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century.From the revolutionary "The Great Pax Whitie" and "Poem for Aretha" to the sublime "Ego Tripping" and the tender "My House," these 150 mind-speaking, truth-telling poems are at once powerful yet sensual, angry yet affirming. Arranged chronologically, they reflect the changes Giovanni has endured as a Black woman, lover, mother, teacher, and poet. Here is the evocation of a nation's past and present — intensely personal and fiercely political — from one of our most compassionate, outspoken observers.

    Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotation marks, Notley has created a "spoken" text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

    In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass." To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert," Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes," the crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own.

    But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to have: only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings.

    But during this period he was writing verse continually, often prolifically--in letters, in guest books, in presentation copies, and chiefly in the pocket-books he always carried with him. This body of uncollected work exceeds five hundred pieces: finished poems of great poise and brilliance, headlong statements that hurtle through their subjects, haunting "fragments," and short bursts that arc into the unpursuable. A remarkable number of them are among Rilke's finest poems.Snow's selection of more than a hundred of these little-known works distills the best of the uncollected poetry while offering a wide enough choice to convey Rilke's variety and industry during the years he wrote them. Uncollected Poems will lead students, scholars, and other readers to a fresh--and more accurate--understanding of this great poet's life and work.

    This special edition, sensitively illustrated with delicate drawings by Paul Saunders, is intended as a lasting keepsake for those mourning a loved one.

    A book that keeps your attention the whole time, switching from sooth-saying stories like Trusting the Universe & Status to the breath-taking Almost Beyond.

    Her exuberant, critically acclaimed teaching guide takes instructors, writers, and general readers into the very heart and intensity of life and the craft of expressing what one feels through the written word.

    Publishers Weekly named Mountains and Rivers Without End one of the best books of 1996. On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rives Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within a chaotic universe where everything is in place, Snyders vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and a small bound collection, Snyders ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary m

    Here is the voice of one woman who has not forgotten the plight of her people. Born Black is about culture, conflict, and consciousness.

    Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, "Stepping Stones "retraces the poet's steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his "moon-walk" to the podium to receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster Troubles. Combining the spontaneity of animated conversation with the considered qualities of the best autobiographical writing, "Stepping Stones "provides an original, diverting, and absorbing store of reflections and recollections. Scholars and general readers alike are brought closer to the work, life, and creative development of a charismatic and lavishly gifted poet whose latest collection, "District and Circle," was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007.

    Native American Studies. THE SUMMER OF BLACK WIDOWS presents poetry that has continued to grow in power, complexity, and vision. According to reviewer James R. Kincaid, "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time," and the many honors and an international following of readers from his poems, stories, and novels proves the claim. Chris Faatz from The Nation agrees, calling Alexie "a young writer who is taking the literary world by storm...a superb chronicler of the Native American experience...he is a master of language, writing beautifully, unsparingly and straight to the heart."

    Fortunately, "Buk" left plenty of unpublished manuscript behind that, judging from this culling from it, is of a piece with the published stuff. That is, it consists of quasi-autobiographical poems and stories. The poems' lines are only one to six words long, and the stories' sentences aren't much longer. Poems and stories relay the adventures and attitudes, at all stages of his life, of loafer and lumpen intellectual Henry Chinaski. They are occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally laughable because Henry and his women and pals are such a bunch of slobs, and occasionally as boring as Henry and company claim their lives are. And, to tell the truth, they are effortlessly, magnetically readable, especially if you are susceptible to their bargain-basement existentialist charm. Plenty are. Ray Olson

    A large and important collection by one of Eastern Europe's major contemporary poets.

    The New York Times wrote that Swir's poetry pointed toward a "ferocious internal life."A member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation and a military nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, Swir once waited an hour fully expecting to be executed. Affected deeply by her experience, she wrote a poetry which rejected the grand gestures of war in favor of a world cast in miniature, a world in which the body and individual survive.Co-translated by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, with an introduction by Milosz, who writes: “What is the central theme of these poems? Answer: Flesh. Flesh in love and ecstasy, in pain, in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, giving birth, resting, feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant. By such a clear delineation of her subject matter, Anna Swir achieves in her sensual, fierce poetry a nearly calligraphic neatness.”Reviews:“The poems delight in all things physical, painting a passionate picture of the soul as a reified, pulsating entity that argues with the body.”—San Francisco Review“Talking to My Body is an extremely rewarding book... Her best poems are so original as to deliver that mild shock we've come to recognize as real poetry.”—Boston Book Review

    It takes its legitimate place with the great works of the century of like kind, Ezra Pound's "Cantos," Louis Zukofsky's "A," Charles Olson's "Maximus," and Robert Duncan's "Passages." Its own specific character is, however, brilliantly singular."Robert Creeley"A late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."Guy Davenport

    Other poets include Sandburg, Frost, Ginsburg, Browning, Sexton, Yeats, Lowell, Levertov & more.

    What is at stake, in poem after poem, is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and political. Private memories, classical scenes, humble domestic objects - a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing - are endowed with talismanic significance, while friends and relatives are invoked for their promise and steadfastness. Throughout the collection, Heaney addresses his concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert and completely truthful.

    All the poems are in William Stafford's familiar, reflective voice, and some had been freshly typed at the time of Stafford's death in August of 1993. The book is hospitable to a full range of experiences, moods, stunts with language, tones, expressive landmarks, and intimacies with the universe. Long considered a major voice in twentieth century American poetry, William Stafford is also one of our nation's most popular poets.

    As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima NasrinChile--Pablo NerudaChina--Bei Dao, Shu TingEl Salvador--Claribel AlegriaFrance--Yves BonnefoyGreece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis RitsosIndia--A.K. RamanujanIsrael--Yehuda AmichaiJapan--Shuntaro TanikawaMexico--Octavio PazNicaragua--Ernesto CardenalNigeria--Wole SoyinkaNorway--Tomas TranstromerPalestine--Mahmoud DarwishPoland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw MiloszRussia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny YevtushenkoSenegal--Leopold Sedar SenghorSouth Africa--Breyten BreytenbachSt. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott

    "The work is deeply felt...Bernstein has been there and brought it back. Bernstein is a writer." [William S. Burroughs]

    Meet Miss Misinformation, Swami Gourami, and Gladiola Gloppe (and her Soup Shoppe), and delight in a backwards poem, a poem that ever ends, and scores of others that will be changed, read, and loved by readers of every age. Whether you begin at the beginning or just open the book at random, you won't stop smiling.“Prelutsky’s a natural rhymester. He has a keen sense of what tickles kids.”—Kirkus Reviews

    His innovative verse and provocative attitudes of spiritual, political, and sexual liberation inspired countless poets, musicians, and visual and performance artists worldwide, and helped shape several generations' views of the world.Selected Poems 1947-1995 commemorates Ginsberg's brilliant career as one of America's most distinguished poets. Here are well-known masterpieces such as the lyric "Howl" and the narrative "Kaddish" -- classic works of American literature -- as well as more recent gems, including the long dream poem "White Shroud," the visionary "After Lalon," and the political rock lyric "The Ballad of the Skeletons," a song he recorded in 1996 with a stellar band that included Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye, and Paul McCartney.

    Between 1926 and 1933 she collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. The remaining poems and verses from America's most renowned cynic make up this collection. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture. With an authoritative, immensely entertaining, and critically acclaimed introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun is an essential addition to the Dorothy Parker library and a welcome gift to her many admirers and devoted fans.

    Here Hass extends and deepens his ongoing explorations of nature and human history, solitude, and the bonds of children, parents, and lovers. Here his passion for apprehending experience with language--for creating experience with language--finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy. Sun Under Wood is the most impressive collection yet from one of our most accomplished poets.

    Yet this rich literary production has never been gathered into a single volume that attempts to represent the full range and the most important writers-until now. Here, under one cover, are the major poets and their major works, which appear both in the original language (Spanish or Portuguese) and in excellent English translations.The poems selected include the most famous representative poems of each poetic tradition, accompanied by other poems that represent the best of that tradition and of each poet's work within it. Tapscott's selections cover the full range, from the Modernist generation though the Mexican Revolutionary post-Moderns and the Vanguardist poets to very contemporary younger writers of political and experimental commitments. In all, eighty-five poets, including Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral, Nicolás Guillén, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Carlos Pellicer, César Vallejo, and Cecília Meireles, and over 400 poems are included, often in translations by some of North America's most esteemed poets.

    . . his details are fantastically clear. His clear direct language is no transformative--it's not about one thing changing another--but a descriptive language, about the way things are".--Robert Bly.

    Despite his religious and artistic sophistication (he excelled in scriptural studies, in calligraphy, and in poetry), Ryokan referred to himself as "Great Fool, " refusing to place himself within any established religious institution. In contrast to Zen masters of his time who presided over large monasteries, trained students, or produced recondite treatises, Ryokan followed a life of mendicancy in the countryside. Instead of delivering sermons, he expressed himself through kanshi (poems composed in classical Chinese) and waka (poems in Japanese syllabary) and could typically be found playing with the village children in the course of his daily rounds of begging. Great Fool is the first study in a Western language to offer a comprehensive picture of the legendary poet-monk and his oeuvre. It includes not only an extensive collection of the master's kanshi, topically arranged to facilitate an appreciation of Ryokan's colorful world, but selections of his waka, essays, and letters. The volume also presents for the first time in English the Ryokan zenji kiwa (Curious Accounts of the Zen Master Ryokan), a firsthand source composed by a former student less than sixteen years after Ryokan's death. Consisting of anecdotes and episodes, sketches from Ryokan's everyday life, the Curious Accounts is invaluable for showing how Ryokan was understood and remembered by his contemporaries. To further assist the reader, three introductory essays approach Ryokan from the diverse perspectives of his personal history and literary work.

    SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY JOYCE CAROL OATESBetween them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche....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.

    Free online poetry.A Raymond Carver poetry selection from Random House's Boldtype.

    Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness, more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship, and white condescension and ignorance. She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian poems; Canadian poems: human poems.

    The long-awaited tenth collection of poetry from the Shelley Memorial Prize-winning poet Lucille Clifton.

    Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

    The well-loved verses that fill these pages cover such universal topics as Aging, Beauty, Bereavement, Brotherhood, Celebration, Courage, Greed, Faith, Farewells, Friendship, Fun, and of course, Love. Here are such favorites as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” with its haunting verbal images, captures the emptiness of disillusionment, while Alexander Pope’s “Epigram” (“You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come: / Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home”) offers pure, wry amusement. Everyone who appreciates the power of words to reaffirm the soul and express the deepest and most intimate of feelings will treasure these masterpieces.

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    A wonderful new translation of the poetry of Basho Zen monk, poet of nature, and master of the haiku form.

    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

    "Alvin's poems are naked depictions of lonely souls, dreamers, losers, heroes, and villains. A powerful overview of his literary vision". -- L.A. Reader

    The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love.Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poets writing today.

    Illuminated Poems contains two never-before-published works, an introduction by Ginsberg and thirty-four poems from 1948 through the present day, including the poem "Howl" in its entirety. "Howl," perhaps the single poem that best captures the anguish and aspirations of the Beat Generation, was originally published forty years ago and is one of the most widely read poems of the century.

    The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine "Le Grand Jeu", the essence of which he defined as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness". "The glimpse of eternity in the void", writes Rattray in the Introduction, "was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a metaphysics of absence". Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte's work.

    One hundred and fifty-eight poets celebrate the sacredness of women's lives: the experiences that have shaped them; the relationships that sustain them; the gift they give to others; the legacy they leave for the future; relationships with parents and siblings; the self and the body: conception, miscarriage and birth, and much, much more.

    This unique anthology brings together the results of the poll in a collection of the nation's 100 best loved poems. Among the selection are popular classics such as Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallott' and Wordsworth's 'The Daffodils' alongside contemporary poetry such as Allan Ahlberg's 'Please Mrs Butler' and Jenny Joseph's 'Warning'. Also included is the poignant 'Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep'.

    They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.

    Also known as the "tenth muse," she wrote with wit and intelligence about love, freedom and women's rights. The precise meaning of many of her poems is still debated, but her literary work is crucial for a comprehension of the Baroque period which so defined New Spain in the seventeenth century. Sor Juana Ines died while taking care of her sisters during an outbreak of plague.

    This book assembles poems from his most recognized books, such as Horal (1950), Tarumba (1956), Yuria (1967) or Other Collected Poems (1950-1995), titles which earned Sabines many devoted readers and enthusiastic critics. The anthology has been translated into English by American poet W.S. Merwin. In Merwins words, what captured him of Sabines poetry was the jarring authenticity of passion in [the] tone, a great cracked bell note of craving and frustration, irony and anger, outrage and black humor all jangled at once, unabashed, unsweetened, unappeased, and all of it essential to the rest. These same features still remain in Sabines poetry for the new readers who will immerse in the literary work of a classic of modern Mexican literature.

    Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English.Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde.Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the hisotry of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.Tracing the contemporary tanka tradition from Yosana Tekkan in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century poetry of such writers as Taware Machi, Modern Japanese Tankselegantly conveys an authentic sense of Japanese lyric to a Western audience.

    The probing fierceness of Adrienne Rich's "Love Poem," the stirring sensual incantation of Ellen Bass's "Praise," the intensely felt tenderness of Dorothy Allison's "Reason Enough to Love You," are just a few examples of the rich talent displayed in this volume.These poets have written daring confessions of love, sorrow, anger, and joy. Each poem is an elaborate confirmation of the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability to transform experience--including the struggle against the societal taboo of same-sex love--into brilliant poetry.

    Hejinian's important collection of poetry from 1978, available again.

    Varying in tone from the sensuous and erotic to the profoundly spiritual, each poem captures a sense of the poignant beauty and longing known only in the fleeting experience of the moment. The translator has selected these five-line tanka—one of the great traditional verse forms of Japanese literature—from sources ranging from the classical imperial anthologies of the eighth and tenth centuries to works of the early twentieth century.

    The poems zing back and forth as the verses alternate between man and woman. "Flaubert had more friends and Flaubert was a recluse" says he, followed by her response, "Flaubert was crazy; he lived with his mother," In one scene they argue over dead French writers; later they discuss football. Yet Glück's work is more than a series of barbs. She writes in the nuances and language of a marriage, laid out against the voices of Odysseus and Penelope.

    After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, she retreated to her house, vowing to never write poetry again and refusing to leave the island of her birth. Like a Cuban Emily Dickinson, she lived out the -remainder of her life in seclusion. In 1992, she received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious writing award in the Spanish language. She died in 1997. A Woman in Her Garden presents a bilingual selection of work from all phases of her career. Judith Kerman is professor of humanities at Saginaw Valley State College in Michigan. Her books of poetry include Mothering and The Jacoba Poems.

    The same drama of obscurity and nuance that attended the discovery of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens is suggested by the career of Robert Lax. An expatriate American whose work to date — more than forty books — has been published mostly in Europe, this 85-year-old poet built a following in the U.S. among figures as widespread as Mark Van Doren, e. e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, and Sun Ra. The works in Love Had a Compass represent every stage of Lax's development as a poet, from his early years in the 1940s as a staff writer for The New Yorker to his present life on the Greek Island of Patmos. An inveterate wanderer, Lax's own sense of himself as both exile and pilgrim is carefully evoked in his prose journals and informs the pages of the Marseille Diaries, published here for the first time. Together with the poems, they provide the best portrait available to date of one of the most striking and original poets of our age.

    Brawling, street-wise prose poems push the boundaries of narrative form, taking the reader through the physical and psychological landscapes of East Los Angeles.

    After Ikkyu is the first collection of Harrison's poems that are directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice.

    Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.

    Uncovered in his personal papers, 707 Scott Street represents the poet at the height of his powers, and in this important work he alternates between the personal and the general, between prose observations and diaristic entries ("Sur-real is the only way to endure the real we find heaped up in our cities".) and some of the very best of his poetic lyrics. In fact, 707 Scott Street might be best described as a series of poems in the form of a journal, which, given Wieners' belief in living as a form of poetry itself, should come as no surprise to his readers.

    His poem “Traveling at High Speeds” opens with the lines, “Some night my body takes the shape of this city.” That urban shape is the shape of John Rybicki’s poetry as well. The city in question is, of course, Detroit, but whether Detroit itself is the subject—as it is in many of his poems—or not, the cadence of its streets informs the slashing attack of Rybicki’s vivid language.

    Most of the poems included in this book were originally published in English in the following collections of Amichai's poetry; Amen, Poems, Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Time, Selelcted Poems, Great Tranquilitry: Questions and Answers and Even the Fist Was Once An Open Hand and Fingers.

    Gerald's faith was well founded. Pearson's accessible, profound poems have moved millions -- in particular the countless women who have found in her their voice. Carol Lynn deals with universal themes in honest and compelling ways, and while her poetry is not esoteric, neither is it thin or light. Picture Window offers a compilation of Pearson's best-loved poems from four previously published volumes. In addition to the table of contents, where her poems are for the first time grouped categorically, Picture Window also offers alphabetical indexes by title, by first line, and by key words and topics.

    Poems: Bronte contains poems that demonstrate a sensibility elemental in its force with an imaginative discipline and flexibility of the highest order. Also included are an Editor's Note and an index of first lines.

    Hummer presents us with a hectoring witness compelled to translate the banal urban atrocities of our current civilization into complex testimonies and transcendent prophecies.

    Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.

    poetry & collage poems

    Devotional, even celebratory in their cadence, they move with the gravity of high art.

    Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, complicit. And as he navigates through each paradox of his moral and aesthetic and erotic selves, this poet, described by Sydney Lea as one "who remains open to contradictions," travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.

    Asian American Studies. THE BOUNTY, by the Korean American Kim, has become an acknowledged classic of Asian American literature of the past decade. More than that, it is one of the best books of poetry of the 1990s, now in a new edition to bring it into the next millenium."The tesserae Myung Mi Kim so remarkably fashions here come gradually to form an articulate and coherent pattern, but a pattern in constant process of renewal and reorganization."--Michael Palmer

    It demonstrates how a tradition begun hundreds of years ago in Japan has now become international. These highly condensed poems often hinge on words or phrases connected with nature; Japanese anthologies have traditionally been arranged by these seasonal themes and included explanations of them. Haiku World is the first book in another language to follow this structure--with explanations of seasonal phenomena from countries, cultures, and environments on every inhabited continent. The companion volume, The Haiku Seasons, gives an overview of the whole tradition of the haiku genre, including haiku, senryu, and linked poetry. Haiku World gives us the world today--in the most generous international collection of such poems ever published--and demonstrates our common experience, beyond cultural and geographical boundaries.

    Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award. "Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

    YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGET OFF, GET OFF, GET OFF!Well what would you say if your brother kept whacking you with a spoon, or the spider made it all the way up the toilet bowl or your mum made you wear that horrible shirt?Find out in this fantastically funny collection of poems all about growing up from the brilliant Michael Rosen, Children's Laureate 2007 - 2009.

    The special disaster in which the name originated had long been lost from memory when the poet Longfellow chose the spot as a background for his description of the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” and gave it an association that it will scarcely lose while the English language endures. Nor does it matter to the legend lover that the ill-fated schooner was not “gored” by the “cruel rocks” just at this point, but nearer to the Gloucester coast.

    Individual, lyrical, charming, he is a nature poet and elegist of passion and rare expression. His poems are closely observed, each word weighed and in its correct place, their rich visual quality underlaid by a metaphysical element which reminds one of the best of Thomas Hardy. This collection also includes some new poems as well as translations from the Welsh.

    Tom Raworth is a native of London, England, however during the seventies he traveled and worked in the United States and Mexico. He returned to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College in Cambridge where he still resides. Since 1966 he has published more than forty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose, and translation in several countries. His graphic work has been shown in France and Italy and he has collaborated performed with musicians like Steve Lacy and Joelle Leandre, painters like Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaela Henich, and other poets like Franco Beltrametti, Corrado Costa, and Dario Villa. Fellow poet Charles Bernstein stated that "For more than thirty years, Tom Raworth has been at the forefront of English language writing. With the fastest line in the west, Raworth's flickering, disconsolate, syntactically restless, lifting, often angry, almost balletic poems resist habitual thought at every break, rekindling animate social consciousness. There is no better

    This book is a collection of prose pieces, the line between fact and fancy, between actuality and invention is constantly blurred.

    Now, in Spring Comes to Chicago, McGrath pushes deeper into the jungle of American culture, exposing and celebrating our native hungers and dreams. In the centerpiece of the book, "The Bob Hope Poem," McGrath confronts the paradoxes that energize and confound us--examining his own avid affection for People magazine and contemplating such diverse subjects as Wittgenstein, meat packers, money, and, of course, Bob Hope himself. Whether viewing this life with existential gravity or consumerist glee, McGarth creates poetry that is at once public and profoundly personal.

    In these poems written since publication of his Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, he speaks with intimate and urgent clarity of love late in life, and in heartrending poems addresses his daughter's struggle against cancer. In others he engages the loves, friendships, and social concerns of a lifetime. With passion and pathos and great good humor, in poems that could only be written by a mature poet at the height of his powers, Carruth achieves a nobility of vision that is rare in any age.

    . . . Becker is acutely aware of, and devastated by, her many losses, but emerges defiant and admirably without regret or shame.”—Boston Review

    Whether composing lamentations to the terrible beauty of human love, or writing his outstanding popular verse for children, he has continued to articulate and illuminate the joys and sorrows of the everyday world.His reputation has been enhanced progressively by each of his collections, and now with translations into numerous languages including Italian, Spanish, German and Polish he is acknowledged as one of Europe's foremost contemporary poets. Through his performance work he is certainly one of Britain's most popular poets.This new book of poems is Patten's eighth for adults. With its powerful opening section interweaving poems about the death of his mother and memories of his childhood with her, it is at one and the same time his most personal and universal collection. It is a book of remarkable poems offering sharp insights into life and the human condition.

    With the publication of the new poems, McMichael surpasses even the formally daring and psychologically penetrating poetry that has characterized his work thus far.

    Includes an introduction, a glossary of important names and places and a list of sources of the poems.

    

    In this collection, he returns not only to Vietnam but to the Lorain, Ohio, of his youth. In his continued quest for emotional and spiritual enlightenment, Weigl writes about the connections between his childhood in a working-class world and the powerful effects of the American war in Vietnam on all of us.

    In these highly original poems, the young American Chinese poet, Tan Lin, "sets tooth on the treetops" as language twists and tumbles over itself like a "Chickory Lickery Bock." In this marvelous celebration of language, Tan Lin explores "a meditation backwards," inventing new poetic structures and forms as he creates a dialogue between himself and the significant other Reader.

    Higginson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America and the author of numerous haiku collections.

    from Introduction by author: "These poems are prayer flags starched in buttermilk, ghost tattoos, gravel in the wound, what I found after the city drained lake, arguments against common sense, arrows from the stinking bowman, angel hair on the world tree, chatter from the hanged man, christmas cards to Buddha, quarrels with the mountain named Time, slash marks on the willow tree, music to cauterize sour mouths, a small text of praise, a three wheeled truck, a graveyard full of trash, a case of wobble pop, a clothesline for the naked swarmis painted with blue mud, a broken paddle, a ripped sail, a thermos for hot tears..." Collected Poems

    Translated from the Norwegian by Rebecca Wadlinger. The book-length poem A HUNDRED THOUSAND HOURS is both one of the most celebrated and controversial volumes published in Norway in the past couple decades. A HUNDRED THOUSAND HOURS revolves around a mother-daughter relationship that exists between alternating forces of harmony and hysteria. Dahle's stanzas showcase multiple voices and surprise readers as a home becomes a museum, a cemetery, and a place where furniture comes to life. Dahle's work is fragmentary and eerie--an illustrious example of Scandinavian surrealism.

    Gift set includes Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

    Written in a deceptively simple and richly perceptive style, the poems will amuse and delight the reader.

    Today, only a fraction of their work survives. It is lyrical, witty, innovative, and inspiring, offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships, through love affairs and marriage, to motherhood and bereavement. In addition to the ancient poems, Balmer has translated some inscriptions, folk-songs, and even graffiti, into English.

    226 copies of this edition have been numbered & lettered & handbound in boards.

    751--814) developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This is truly major work-- work that may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition. And though written more than a thousand years ago, it is remarkably fresh and contemporary. But, in spite of Meng's significance, this is the first volume of his poetry to appear in English.Until the age of forty, Meng Chiao lived as a poet-recluse associated with Ch'an (Zen) poet-monks in south China. He then embarked on a rather unsuccessful career as a government official. Throughout this time, his poetry was decidedly mediocre, conventional verse inevitably undone by his penchant for the strange and surprising. After his retirement, Meng developed the innovative poetry translated in this book. His late work is singular not only for its bleak introspection and avant-garde methods, but also for its dimensions: in a tradition typified by the short lyric poem, this work is made up entirely of large poetic sequences.

    Using the long lines and narrative style that have been identified with some of the finest male poets of our times, Perillo tells the stories of female experience with a grim eye for the comic and an ear turned to language's highest pitch.