Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings...In the mid-thirteenth century, in a dusty marketplace in Konya, Turkey, a city where Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist travelers mingled, Jelaluddin Rumi, a popular philosopher and scholar, met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering dervish.  Their meeting forever altered the course of Rumi's life and influenced the mystical evolution of the planet.  The bond they formed was everlasting--a powerful transcendent friendship that would flow through Rumi as some of the world's best-loved ecstatic poetry.Rumi's passionate, playful poems find and celebrate sacred life in everyday existence.  They speak across all traditions, to all peoples, and today his relevance and popularity continue to grow.  In The Illuminated Rumi, Coleman Barks, widely regarded as the world's premier translator of Rumi's writings, presents some of his most brilliant work, including many new translations.  To complement Rumi's universal vision, Michael Green has worked the ancient art of illumination into a new, visually stunning form that joins typography, original art, old masters, photographs, and prints with sacred images from around the world.The Illuminated Rumi is a truly groundbreaking collaboration that interweaves word and image: a magnificent meeting of ancient tradition and modern interpretation that uniquely captures the spiritual wealth of Rumi's teachings.  Coleman Barks's wise and witty commentary, together with Michael Green's art, makes this a classic guide to the life of the soul for a whole new generation of seekers.

    Lorde published nine volumes of poetry which, in her words, detail "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the world I have inhabited." Included here are Lorde's early, previously unavailable works: The First Cities, The New York Head Shop and Museum, Cables to Rage, and From a Land Where Other People Live.

    Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative volume.

    What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

    The nearly fifty poems selected for this collection and translated by Stephen Mitchell—widely praised for his original and definitive translations of spiritual writings and poetry—focus on Neruda's mature period, when the poet was in his fifties. A bilingual volume, with Neruda's original Spanish text facing Mitchell's English translation, it will bring Neruda's sensuous work to vibrant life for a whole new generation of readers.

    With these metaphors in place, he makes clear his difficult poetic task: to delve into the past, both personal and historic, while remaining ever mindful of the potentially fatal power of language.Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom. Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words. As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past: I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields: At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full... Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano

    Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and profound optimism, Elytis's poems capture the natural wonders of Greece and give voice to the contemporary Greek—and to a more universally human—consciousness.Originally published in 1997, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated into English by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, was the first complete collection of Elytis's poems in any language. Included in this landmark volume were Elytis's early poems, influenced in equal parts by surrealism and the natural world; Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, his epic poem connecting Greece's—and his own—Second World War experience to the myth of the eternal Greek hero; his most ambitious work, The Axion Esti; and his mature poetry, from Maria Nephele to West of Sorrow.For this expanded new edition, Carson and Sarris have added sixty free verse and prose poems first published in Greek in the posthumous 1998 volume From Close By, as well as a set of song lyrics, The Rhos of Eros, and a cantata, The Sovereign Sun, previously omitted. All have been translated with the same care and elegance as the rest of Elytis's oeuvre, brilliantly rendering into English the Greek poet's lyrical voice and the richness of his diction.

    Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking -- these 130 original and inspirational stories and illustrations explore life's joys and miseries.

    Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."

    The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry; Hughes translated twenty-four of its stories with great power and directness. The result is the liveliest twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.

    in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. Nine Gates is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world -- alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.In part a primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.

    Now, she presents a stunning collection of love poems that includes more than twenty new works.From the revolutionary "Seduction" to the tender new poem, "Just a Simple Declaration of Love," from the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet" to the elegiac "All Eyez on U," written for Tupac Shakur, these poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Nikki Giovanni is beloved and revered.Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems expresses notions of love in ways that are delightfully unexpected. Articulating in sensuous verse what we know only instinctively, Nikki Giovanni once again confirms her place as one of our nations's most distinguished poets and powerful truth-tellers.In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, starting with her explosive early years in the Black Rights Movement, Nikki Giovanni has earned a reputation as one of America's most celebrated and controversial writers. Her mind-speaking work has made her a universal favorite and a number-one best-seller.The love poems-the revolutionary "Seduction," the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet," and the tender "My House" to name just a few-are among the most beloved of all Nikki Giovanni's works. Now, Love Poems brings together these and other favorites with over twenty new poems. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems will once again confirm Nikki Giovanni's place among the country's most renowned poets and truth tellers.

    Helen Vendler, widely regarded as an accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as a guide to some of the best-known poems in the English language.In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler interprets imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out new levels of import in particular lines, and the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect.

    "Translucent elegies 'for the city that is leaving forever' (Srinagar) from one of its sons, who also happens to be one of America's finest younger poets."—John Ashbery

    Finneran. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.

    And the way they remain constant. And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? On one street after another, the litter ticks in the gutter. In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. They have done all they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.

    Today's music owes much to her innovation and inspiration. This complete collection of her poetry and song lyrics reads like a poem cycle that finds unexpected meaning and beauty on the page. Mitchell expands her already remarkable talent as she continues to produce miraculous work, in words, in music, and on canvas. The importance of Joni Mitchell's entire oeuvre is unequivocal when seen as a lifetime of accomplished writing. The Complete Poems and Lyrics gives us the first opportunity to reconsider Mitchell's written work and her place among the great poets and lyricists of our time.

    Both contemporary and other-worldly, Davis's lyrical poetry is a fearless expression of the spirit which defines the very essence of our beings.

    Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.POEMS INCLUDED:ForewordThe PastureInto My OwnGhost HouseMy November GuestLove and a QuestionA Late WalkStarsStorm FearWind and Window FlowerFlower-GatheringRose PogoniasWaitingIn a ValeA Dream PangIn NeglectThe Vantage PointMowingGoing for WaterThe Trial by ExistenceThe Tuft of FlowersPan with UsA Line-Storm SongOctoberMy ButterflyReluctanceMending WallThe Death of the Hired ManThe MountainA Hundred CollarsHome BurialThe Black CottageBlueberriesA Servant to ServantsAfter Apple-PickingThe CodeThe Generations of MenThe HousekeeperThe FearThe Wood-PileGood HoursThe Road Not TakenChristmas TreesAn Old Man’s Winter NightA Patch of Old SnowIn the Home StretchThe TelephoneMeeting and PassingHyla BrookThe Oven BirdBond and FreeBirchesPea BrushPutting in the SeedA Time to TalkThe Cow in Apple TimeAn EncounterRange-FindingThe Hill WifeThe BonfireA Girl’s GardenThe Exposed Nest“Out, Out –”Brown’s DescentThe Gum-GathererThe Line-GangThe Vanishing RedSnowThe Sound of the TreesA Star in a Stone-BoatThe Census-TakerMapleThe Ax-HelveThe GrindstoneWild GrapesThe Pauper Witch of GraftonFire and IceMisgivingSnow DustFor Once, Then, SomethingThe OnsetGood-by and Keep ColdThe Need of Being Versed in Country ThingsFragmentary BlueThe Flower Boat

    It is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind to collect poetry, fiction, prayer, and memoir from Native American women. Over eighty writers are represented from nearly fifty nations, including such nationally known writers as Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lee Maracle, Janet Campbell Hale, and Luci Tapahonso; others — Wilma Mankiller, Winona LaDuke, and Bea Medicine — who are known primarily for their contributions to tribal communities; and some who are published here for the first time in this landmark volume.

    In these pages I’m picking up where I left off. After each day of sharing the instructions you should feel free to question, discuss and/or report what your mind tells you. I’m just planting the seeds. Have fun. —Yoko Ono, from the introduction to AcornIn Acorn, renowned artist and political activist Yoko Ono offers intriguing, enchanting exercises to open our eyes on better ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the planet we co-habit. Throughout the book are drawings by Yoko, many never before seen.

    The poet presents a selection of thirty-four of her own poems culled from previously published volumes, tracing her movement from agnosticism to Christian faith and her oscillation from doubt to affirmation along the way.

    Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted readers can trace his development through the first five books of his poetry, collected here in one handy volume. The Mooring of Starting Out represents Ashbery's work from 1956 through 1972, comprising Some Trees, his first book; The Tennis Court Oath, written while he was living in Paris; Rivers and Mountains; The Double Dream of Spring; and Three Poems.

    33 poems, over 70 minutes, very high quality recording on cassette or CD.

    Now he gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children – misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds. His lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and the tragedy of these dark yet simple beings – hopeful, hapless heroes who appeal to the ugly outsider in all of us, and let us laugh at a world we have long left behind (mostly anyway).

    The heart of the collection is a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, neighborhood, and work experiences-from bouncer to tenant lawyer. There are moments of revelation and political transcendence here, which culminate in an elegy for the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned for his advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.

    Denise Duhamel has apparently obsessed for months about the Barbie doll phenomenon: all the poems have to do with the "what if " of Barbie attempting to fit into the real world. For example, what if Barbie were codependent? What if Barbie were in therapy? What if she were a religious fanatic? Do you know why Barbie and Ken don't dress in underwear? Why Barbie joined a 12 Step Program? How can you sleep nights without delving into the mysteries of this pop culture darling with the plastic eyelashes?

    Although they were published separately, these two books, along with Skin Divers, a collection of Michaels's newest work, were written as companion volumes.Poems brings all three books together for the first time, creating for American readers a wonderful introduction to Anne Michaels's poetry. Meditative and insightful, powerful and heart-moving, these are poems that, as Michael Ondaatje has written, "go way beyond games or fashion or politics . . . They represent the human being entire."

    She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for her exquisite erotic poetry, Akiko's work also championed the causes of feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Akiko's poetry is profoundly direct, often passionate, exposing the complexity of everyday emotions in poetic language stripped of artifice and presenting the full breadth of her poetic vision. Included in this volume are ninety-one of Akiko's tanka (a traditional five-line form of verse) and a dozen of her longer poems written in the modern style.

    A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace.

    Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror.With Deer [Hos rådjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1997.

    The ups and downs of writing life—including self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

    Reprint.

    June Jordan's many selves, as poet, essayist, feminist, and activist come together here in a collection of poetry that is alternately lyrical, magical, shockingly spare, pungently political, yet universally resonate. Beautiful love poems are interspersed with poems about Bosnia, Africa, urban America, Clarence Thomas, affirmative action, her mother's suicide, and Jordan's bout with breast cancer.This collection of poetry will be warmly welcomed by June Jordan loyalists and new readers who will thrill to discover a voice that has been described as one of the "most gifted poets of the late twentieth century."

    This is My Letter to the World and Other Poems by Emily Dickinson is brilliantly illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. The artist's interpretation displays a rich understanding of Dickinson's poetry, which is known for its economy, unexpected imagery and hauntingly personal point of view.Arsenault has created a subtle meditation on Dickinson's life and its intersection with her verse. In the dream-like illustrations, the poet --- sometimes serene, often sad and always enigmatic --- is an omnipresent figure in her ghostly white dress. Dickinson's ?letters,? the words she left to the world, have found their ideal visual complement.

    Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbaud’s life depend on one main source for information—his own correspondence—a complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now.A moving document of decline, Rimbaud’s letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our expectations. Rimbaud—presented by many biographers as a bohemian wild man—is unveiled as “diligent in his pursuit of his goals . . . wildly, soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything.”I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud is the second and final volume in Mason’s authoritative presentation of Rimbaud’s writings. Called by Edward Hirsch “the definitive translation for our time,” Mason’s first volume, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002), brought Rimbaud’s poetry and prose into vivid focus. In I Promise to Be Good, Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of Rimbaud. “These letters,” he writes, “are proofs in all their variety—of impudence and precocity, of tenderness and rage—for the existence of Arthur Rimbaud.” I Promise to Be Good allows English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most extraordinary poets in history.From the Hardcover edition.

    Selected poems in English and Polish by Wistawa Szymborska

    In many respects, the directions followed in contemporary poetry were set out in the courses and workshops he taught at the Naropa Institute, the University of Michigan, Yale University, the City University of New York, the Stevens Institute of Technology, the University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. On the Level Everyday brings together key examples of his classroom lectures with other pieces, including two important talks delivered at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. On the Level Everyday provides an introduction not only to Berrigan's poetics but also the problems of surviving as a poet in America today.

    In a new preface, editor and translator Robert Bly explores what the poems reveal today about politics, the spirit, and the purpose of art.

    Until now his works have rarely been available in English. Now all of the hermit monk's poetry, including his major poetic works, 'Mountain Poems' and 'Gathas', as well as his most illuminating instructional talks (delivered while serving at imperial request as abbot of a Zen monastery), can be read in red Pine's superb translations.

    The complete works of an extraordinary poet who consistently refines the notion of what constitutes an American sound.

    The poems are full of melancholic beauty whether in the disturbing images of death and events beyond the grave described in 'The Raven' and 'Lenore', or in the hypnotic fantasy of works such as 'The Bells', 'The City in the Sea' and 'Annabel Lee'.Possessed of a powerful, richly inventive imagination, Edgar Allan Poe explored the darkest corners of the human psyche and is recognized as one of the first writers to offer a genuine American voice.

    The poems are about nature, history, the life of cities, the transformations of art, the spiritual essence of everyday life. Their remarkable staying power derives from the gentle meditative authority of Zagajewski's voice, here expertly rered into English by Clare Cavanagh. Zagajewski's committed, compassionate poems offer access to the mysteries at the heart of experience.

    It started as Inspiration Needed…A Book of Poems in 1997; to Heal With Me, and Our Journey Goes On in 1999, and 2001. These books have been a source of inspiration in various schools, organizations, and societies across Canada, and as well as in different households; I hope they will generate the same feelings this time around.

    Latin American Studies. Bilingual edition. Translated from the Spanish by Dave Oliphant. Renowned Chilean antipoet Nicanor Parra has delivered as a series of five verse speeches poems that eschew literary ostentation in favor of playful, conversational musings. In a language steeped in colloquialisms, Parra's declarations employ a range of discourses in order to expose the hypocrisy of human institutions and challenge those who remain satisfied with the status quo. Parra uses his linguistic brilliance to confront the most serious problems of our day: ecology, human rights, and the limits of scientific knowledge. The antipoet moves from one topic to another with inventiveness, discovers for us a wealth of political, philosophical, and literary insights, as well as connections between ideas that shape our lives.

    There is a darkness at the heart of Peter Gizzi's new collection of poems, ARTIFICIAL HEART, that is far from artificial...The title accurately locates the site of writing as the heart of artifice. In realizing emptiness, the poems start a flow of current, a darker circulation within the darkness-and in doing so, initiate a movement toward regeneration, if not redemption -Andrew Joron, HAMBONE.

    In this volume they are translated into the idiom of our own time by poets Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. Some of them are rooted in Renaissance courtly conventions; others are startlingly ahead of their time, seemingly modern in the naked power of the complex sexual feelings they address.

    As the author demonstrates, we all possess the ability to write. This gift enables us to access unlimited spiritual resources that restore our genuine voices and meaning in our lives, while healing and creatively satisfying us.Discussed are numerous stories of people from the author's workshops who exemplify how poetry has aided them I becoming more whole. Parents understand how to use poetry to foster their relationships with their children, recognizing magical bonds that they never knew existed; persons who are ill learn how to come to terms with their diseases; and those who feel helpless in the surrounding world discover the freedom to act and affect real change.With the poetic tools, instruction, and accounts the author supplies in Poetic Medicine, readers can start now to make their own poems while addressing, acknowledging, accepting, and taking charge of their lives.

    His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.

    The first comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry to be published, this volume offers a timely reassessment of a poet unfairly neglected outside Ireland.

    A Zen Buddhist monk explains the value of haiku, a three-line, seventeen-syllable poem, as a writing meditation and spiritual guide and provides exercises to help readers compose their own haiku.

    He was also a distinguished author, educator, social reformer, and philosopher. Today, Tagore along with Mahatma Gandhi is prized as the foremost intellectual and spiritual advocates of India's liberation from imperial rule. This inspiring collection of Tagore's poetry represents his "simple prayers of common life." Each of the seventy-seven prayers is an eloquent affirmation of the divine in the face of both joy and sorrow. Like the Psalms of David, they transcend time and speak directly to the human heart. The spirit of this collection may be best symbolized by a single sentence by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the renowned philosopher and statesman who served as president of India: "Rabindranath Tagore was one of the few representatives of the universal person to whom the future of the world belongs."

    In addition to all Cave's lyrics recorded with The Bad Seeds during this time, King Ink II includes several lyrics as yet unrecorded, as well as a number written for other artists and for the Wim Wenders films Faraway, So Close! and Until the End of the World. A short film treatment and a substantial essay on the subject of language and the Bible, "The Flesh Made Word, " are among further material which is not available elsewhere.

    A. Milne, Robert Frost, Dr. Seuss, and W.B. Yeats. Designed to be shared by parents and children, it is organized into appealing categories and includes 50 black-&-white illustrations.

    "I have this compulsion to live no matter what..".

    Frances Driscoll's RAPE POEMS sink into the horror and beauty of memory without attention to pretense. The poems refuse to relent from the poet's sense of unshakable reality and do not belabor themselves with the trivialities of a misunderstanding world. Described as a compelling...rare collection, THE RAPE POEMS is personal reportage in common language with alarmingly precise composition and artistry. Harrowing and obsessively skeptical, tender and private and hugely humane, these unsettling poems arrive like dispatches from the very source of our wounds --Ralph Angel.

    With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the "stuttered eloquence" of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly "coughing up light."In this postlapsarian pastoral of the modern Southeast, Andrews summons a cast of characters bound to times and places of desolation, yet unable to leave because it is that very desolation--the plagues, the scourges, the losses and heartbreak--that has defined them. Their collective cry of exultant despair is compressed in the astonishing final lines of "Plagues" "Pharaoh, Pharaoh, as if there were something keeping us, as if we could be let go."Andrews brings to these poems a vision so clear, so miraculously right, that the pages themselves seem suffused with the scents of sunlight and new-mown hay. Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a lovely, spellbinding reminder of what we discard, what we keep--and why.

    He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion," says Publishers Weekly, and Robert Hass, in the Washington Post Book World, takes special note of Lux's "bitter wit, the kind of irony that comes with a quick, impatient intelligence."

    "Hormones are molecules, material, invisible. // Their flow is random, mesh through which the body is sensed, not an image.

    Old Europe still lives in Bosselaar's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders--the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.Lyrical poetry that sings of farmers, families and nunneries in Belgium and Flanders.

    It does not require my time and labour. It does not ask me to have a science or an aesthetics or a theory. Instead it demands the entireness of my being, a consciousness running deeper than my intellect, a fidelity purer than any I cancontrol.'Greece, as much as Portugal, informs the geography, mythology and vehement light of Breyner's work. Greece also informs her sense of the achieved lyric. Even in the poems which touch most closely on personal themes of love, loss and expectation, the language remains our common language, without affectation or coy eccentricity. Her pursuit of right words and a right world is one and the same.

    20 duotone illustrations.

    Tender  probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

    A native of Yugoslavia who emigrated to America in his teens, Simic believes that tragedy, comedy, and paradox are the commonplace experiences of an exile's life. In this delightful collection of journal entries, autobiographical essays, criticism, and prose poetry, the poet reveals once again his fondness for odd juxtapositions that reveal hidden and unexpected connections.In the title essay, Simic--whom critic Helen Vendler has called "the best political poet on the American scene"--reflects on his family's experiences of their war-torn homeland during World War II and the frightening familiarity of the recent tragic events in the region. The collection has many hilarious moments, such as Simic's memoir of his first days in New York City as a young poet and painter, impressions from his poet's notebook, and first lines from his unwritten books. The book also contains reflections on dreams, insomnia, and the night sky, and considers the work of poets Jane Kenyon and Ingeborg Bachmann, and of visual artists Saul Steinberg and Holly Wright.Charles Simic's most recent poetry collections are Walking the Black Cat ( 1996), nominated for the National Book Award, and Hotel Insomnia. He has won numerous prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and a P.E.N. Translation Prize.

    The poems range from visionary apocalypse to a lyrical fusion with nature.By turns nightmarish, erotic, hermetic, they create an astonishing world charged by Lamantia’s energy and imagination.

    Her first collection of poetry, Refuge, won the Associated Writing Program's Award for Poetry in 1989, the Washington Prize in 1991, and was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1990. Her second collection Dark Blonde received the San Francisco Poetry Center Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize in 1997. It was published by Louisville's Sarabande Books."Drawing from her work as a neonatal nurse and from some more common experiences (e.g. nervous breakdowns, incest and poverty), Waring exhibits the street-smart ear and unflinching eye that made her first collection, Refuge, one of PW's Best Books of 1990. The images and headlong rhythms of these new poems exert a wide-ranging, often irresistible pull."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Waring creates a voice that we feel we can trust to lead us to the center of an experience, maybe because her language never feels artificial but seems to grow naturally out of the situation it presents. The remarkable range of subjects and characters in Waring's poems leads to an equally remarkable variety of tones and vocabularies."-Word House, Baltimore's Literary Calendar"When Belle Waring reads her poetry, the jazz-inflected words escape her mouth like a Lester Young solo: quietly, melodically, forcefully. . . . she provides weight to each short line, drawing out her words like sensuous kisses. Her work is also punctuated with politics and humor."-D.C. City Paper"Poetry, Robert Frost once said, is a way of taking life by the throat. It is in this tradition that poet and nurse Belle Waring approaches her craft-seizing difficult subjects and holding them in time. . . . "-SalonWaring has written a collection that doesn't renege on us the promise of her first book and indeed has honed her craft to include a wider range of tonal shifts and allow for a finer lyricism while not losing the syncopated snap and humor of her earlier voice."-Indiana Review

    His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and the dreaming states."

    One of the more remarkable books of poetry to appear in a long time, Lisa Robertson's DEBBIE: AN EPIC was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, DEBBIE: AN EPIC is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie

    This edition now includes eighteen new poems from Ferlinghetti's "Pictures of the Gone World" which he publishes under his City Lights imprint. A self-styled "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti has been called "the foremost chronicler of our times." If A Coney Island of the Mind was a generations vibrant eye-opener, A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a wake-up call for a new age.

    Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life.Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native -- and feminine -- language.

    When she was searching for guidance, she would often write a poem to God. When her husband was traveling or her busy children were tiring her out, writing poetry was an outlet for her feelings. Though she insists her poems were never meant for publication, people everywhere relate to the insights, struggles, and joys her poetry conveys. Now available in trade paper for the first time, Ruth Bell Graham\u2019s Collected Poems is the only comprehensive volume of her work. This inspiring collection traces her life of faith from the time she was a teenager through her roles as wife and mother. It includes poems from Sitting by My Laughing Fire and Clouds Are the Dust of My Feet, as well as some poems that were unpublished prior to the cloth edition of this book. Ruth Bell Graham\u2019s solid trust in the Lord has continued to inspire all who know her. This stirring collection of her honest and beautifully crafted poetry makes a perfect gift for someone special and will be appreciated by Mrs. Graham\u2019s many readers around the world.

    Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. For decades, Kim Hyesoon a leading figure in contemporary Korean poetry and trans-national feminist literature has represented the capabilities of a poet who works across, around, and through the borders of nations and of language itself. Many of her works have been translated, with the overwhelming support from Don Mee Choi, into English. With visceral and surreal imagery, Kim presents us her latest work in translation, Poor Love Machine, with a rippling array of pain, desire, and light."

    A passionate and subversive defense of the rights of women to study, to teach, and to write, it predates by almost a century and a half serious writings on any continent about the position and education of women. Also included in this wide-ranging selection is a new translation of Sor Juana's masterpiece, the epistemological poem "Primero Sueno, " as well as revealing autobiographical sonnets, reverential religious poetry, secular love poems (which have excited speculation through three centuries), playful verses, and lyrical tributes to New World culture that are among the earliest writings celebrating the people and the customs of this hemisphere. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    It brings together a combination of Yeats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by plays, critical writings, and letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. W. B. Yeats was born in 1865, only 38 years after the death of William Blake, and died in 1939, the contemporary of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. His career crossed two centuries, and this volume represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by Cathleen ni Houlihan and Deirdre among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occult writings, and the anthology also contains political speeches, autobiographical writings, and a selection of his letters.

    Literary Criticism. Asian American Studies. The materials of the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1907-1972) were published in Grand Street, CONJUNCTIONS, Abiko Quarterly, FIRST INTENSITY, Stand and The American Poetry Review. Gradually, the rumor began circulating that Araki Yasusada did not exist and that the poems were a hoax perpetrated by the Japanese-American author Tosa Motokiyu or by his literary executor, the American poet Kent Johnson. The 'scandal' of these poems lies not in the problematics of authorship, identity, persona, race or history. Rather, these are wonderful works of writing that also invoke all of these other issues, never relying on them to prop up a text. This book makes the argument for anti-essentialism--Ron Silliman. This is essentially a criminal act--Arthur Vogelsang.

    In "Eating Bread and Honey", she celebrates this connection in her most sensual, lucid verse to date: a hymn to the human ability to feel through both emotional and physical senses.

    (Yuba City Poems).Groups of interlinked poems divided into six sections are peopled by many of the same characters and explore varying themes. Here, Divakaruni is particularly interested in how different art forms can influence and inspire each other. One section, entitled Indian Miniatures, is based on and named after a series of paintings by Francesco Clemente. Another, called Moving Pictures, is based on Indian films, including Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay" and Satyajit Ray's "Ghare Baire." Photographs by Raghubir Singh inspired the section entitled Rajasthani. The trials and tribulations of growing up and immigration are also considered here and, as with all of Divakaruni's writing, these poems deal with the experience of women and their struggle to find identities for themselves.This collection is touched with the same magic and universal appeal that excited readers of "Arranged Marriage." In "Leaving Yuba City," Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni proves once again her remarkable literary talents.

    Amy Gertsler's latest collection engages the reader with a sensibility that is by turns extravagant, wistful, erudite, playful, and profound. Love lies in wait in these poems, populated with such as deserters from circuses, recipes, and the scent of geraniums. Gerstler twines language into sublime confections of elegance and silliness, seeking support between progress and pathology.

    Victims of the Latest Dance Craze was the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, an award given for an American poet’s second book.

    This work anthologizes poems from four of her previous volumes and adds new poems written between 1993 and 1996. Few other poets writing now show Wilner's intellectual curiosity and range: bats, goddesses, Asian art, photography, and the politics of the body all have their turns here. Her manner is conversational and digressive; the easy categories of lyric or narrative do not describe her work effectively. She invests old stories with new meaning, as in "Leda's Handmaiden" or "Iphigenia, Setting the Record Straight"; she has a profoundly nuanced sense of the poet's mission, as in "The Messenger," "running through history...[carrying] a code/ only the heart could break." She seems at her best when her manner is half-satirical, as in "How To Get in the Best Magazines," "Preferred:/ tired little poems, taut,/ world-weary," or in her portrait of the poets' Muse, "the big broad...ethereal as hell." Wilner's verse is not principally musical, pleasing the mind more than the ear, but she ought to find an audience among most readers of poetry.Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

    "Cecilia Woloch's SACRIFICE is an extraordinary debut. These powerful, tender, and compelling poems introduce us to a family album of marvelous and charming figures. And, in the poet's romance of the family, the intoxicating presence of the father is its profound center of gravity. Yet the poet's reverence and affection for the idea of family is inevitably troubled, we discover in later poems, by the unravelling of a marriage...Woloch's poems unveil the wreckage of love after what has been sacramental turns sacrificial. Her poems are by turns reverential, devotional and incantatory--they are prayers spoken to, and on behalf of, a difficult world"--David St. John.

    This book is divided into 15 sections such as: wild and free; stuff and nonsense; young and old; and love and friendship. Each section in the treasury contains approximately 20 poems.

    With The Profile Makers, Bierds reaches even further to produce a volume of stunning originality and power. Losing none of the integrity or freshness of her earlier poetry, this new work forms a complex, many-layered, and interconnected whole, a kind of double helix of poetry.

    Louis’s poems bring us to a place where ghosts hitchhike and the traditional pow-wow becomes an affirmation of bitter survival, where the lives of the young end too often in acts of meaningless self-destruction, and where his own existence becomes a daily battle with his cherished wife’s decline into the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease. Louis is a writer of extraordinary courage and skill, and these powerful, moving poems, wrested from the harsh experience of the Rez and his own lonely struggle with a merciless illness, will awe their readers with their brilliance and desperate humanity.

    He left Spain during the civil war in 1938 and never returned.Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor.

    His poems made me think of altars, the kind we sometimes make unconsciously on a side-table or dresser where we deposit sea shells, pebbles, lost buttons, and other interesting finds, arranging them just so, as if to make an offering to an unknown god.-Charles Simic, Judge, The Academy of American Poets A devout and learned exploration of the absence and silence of God.-The Philadelphia Inquirer In this deeply impressive collection, Jarman is concerned with God, His grace, and humans' relations with Him... In 20 'Unholy Sonnets, ' he takes up matters of theology directly and so appositely for these times that some of them may become pulpit as well as anthology staples.-Ray Olson, Booklist yAn A+ level candidate for glory, so peculiar in the excellence and pleasure it offers as to baffle anyone in the business of awarding laurels.-The Hudson Review Inverting Donne's 'Holy Sonnets' in his ironic 20-poem 'Unholy Sonnets' sequence, Jarman's tone is discursive instead of devotional, comic instead of firm. The sonnets...explore faith with a sense of inevitability. Yet they are less about God than about our relationship to God and our inability to understand God's judgement.-The Boston Book Review Memorable for its section 'Unholy Sonnets'...Questions for Ecclesiastes ultimately captures a poet's challenge to God: Are you there, or aren't you?-Seattle Weekly

    For the people of the Ottoman Empire, lyrical poetry was the most prized literary activity. People from all walks of life aspired to be poets. Ottoman poetry was highly complex and sophisticated and was used to express all manner of things, from feelings of love to a plea for employment.This collection offers free verse translations of 75 lyric poems from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries, along with the Ottoman Turkish texts and, new to this expanded edition, photographs of printed, lithographed, and hand-written Ottoman script versions of several of the texts--a bonus for those studying Ottoman Turkish. Biographies of the poets and background information on Ottoman history and literature complete the volume.

    

    Donald Hall has been writing poems for over fifty years and now stands as one of America's foremost poets. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire among other honors, Donald Hall gives each listener this gift of words--words painstakingly entwined with passion, energy and love. Prose & Poetry is a tour de force--an intimate convergence of poet, author, and listener.

    Words and pictures together connect readers -of all ages - to the spirit of Harlem in its music, art, literature, and everyday life, and to how it has helped shape us as a people.

    Nominated for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for PoetryRecommended Reading from EmergeAn epic poem on kin estranged, the death of a brother from AIDS, and the possibility of reconciliation and love in the face of loss.

    His work is firmly rooted in the American avant garde tradition, a generation of artists that includes John Cage, William Burroughs and the Abstract Expressionist painters. This is his first volume of all new poems to be published in America since the 60s. Much as Bowles chose Tangier, Lax chose the Greek islands. After working in the 40s and 50s as an editor for the New Yorker, a film critic for Time and a Hollywood screenwriter, Robert Lax left the United States for permanent residence abroad, where for 35 years he has written the minimalist poetry that has won him acclaim among an ever-widening circle of artists and writers around the world. An early and continuing practitioner of abstract, minimalist and experimental concrete poetry, he has not wavered in his vision of creating a body of work with a purity that is radical in its asceticism and singleness of purpose.

    Several of these poems are included in the performance script of NICE FISH, the play.

    Will Alexander's TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD is a work of vertical philosophy revealing strata of cultures and language, like geographical layers seen all at once. Simultaneous arpeggios of linguistic realms that explore language and perceiving. Elliot Weinberger has written about Alexander's writing: His work resembles no one's, and is instantly recognizable. In part, he is an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive. He is probably the only African-American poet to take Aime Cesaire as a spiritual father ... [Alexander is] a poet whose ecstasy derives from the scientific description of the stuff and the workings of the world.

    In 2000, he received the Juan Rulfo Award, one most important literary awards in the Spanish-speaking world, and in 2007, he received the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary prize. With this selection, chosen and superbly translated by Joan Lindgren, Gelman's lush and visceral poetry comes alive for an English-speaking readership.Gelman is a stark witness to the brutality of power, and his poems reflect his suffering at the hands of the Argentine military government (his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild were "disappeared"). While political idealism infuses his writing, he is not a servant of ideology. Themes of family, exile, the tango, Argentina, and Gelman's Jewish heritage resonate throughout his poems, works that celebrate life while confronting heartache and loss."remembering their little bones when it rains/ the compañerosstomp on darkness/set forth from death/wander the tender night/I hear their voices like living faces"—from Remembering Their Little Bones

    Folami Abiade, Dinah Johnson, Carole Boston Weatherford, Dakari Hru, Michael Burgess, E. Ethelbert Miller, Lenard D. Moore, David Anderson, Angela Johnson, Sonia Sanchez, and Davida Adedjouma all contribute. Javaka Steptoe, who also offers a poem, employs an inventive range of media to bring each of the poems to life. In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall testifies to the powerful bond between father and child, recognizing family as our greatest gift, and identifying fathers as being among our most influential heroes.

    Anne Caston explores the inner recesses of the human mind and body, delving into the murky shadows where individuals fear to tread. The poems consider the nature of death, love, brutality, friendship, and much more. Caston plays with different points of view and keeps readers on their toes. The physicality of these moving and disturbing poems is sure to captivate lovers of poetry.

    Since the mid-60s, she has worked with abandoned materials and rubbish to create works of art she calls "precarios"--fragile constructions of string, bark, pebbles: small boats left floating in city puddles, handwoven nets strung across rivers. In her poetry, Vicuna combines Andean vernacular with other languages to form highly condensed metaphors, puns, and anagrams, thus inventing language looms on which meaning is woven. Indeed, in the ancient language of the Inkas, "weaving" and "language" are the same word. The book's unique design incorporates an elaborately illustrated artist's book by Vicuna and a collection of critical essays that consider her work in its Latin American and global context.

    A slave destined to become a minister preaches sermons of heartrending eloquence and wisdom to a mule. An old woman scrubbing over a washtub receives a personal revelation of what Emancipation means: "So this is freedom: the peace of hours like these." Memories of the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen in the face of aerial combat abroad and virulent racism at home bring a speaker to the sudden awareness of herself as the daughter "of a thousand proud fathers."Whether evoking spiritual longing or a return to the wedding at Cana, Nelson renders the interior landscape of all her speakers with absolute precision. This is a beautiful collection indeed, and readers will come away from The Fields of Praise with a reawakened appreciation for life's minor miracles, one of them being the power of the word.

    "Rich, quarrelsome...handsome and brutish...Hill's poetry is the major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse," says The New Criterion. "Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to mark the millennium."