This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting - the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Bara«nczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.

    As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is."A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."  -- The Village VoiceA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARNational book Critics Circle Award Finalist

    While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life of the poem. These Sabbath poems were written "in silence, in solitude, and mainly out of doors," and tell us about "moments when heart and mind are open and aware."Many years of writing have won Wendell Berry the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and community. His poetry is assured and unceasingly spiritual; its power lies in the strength of the truths revealed.

    The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems gathers unpublished works from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential and wide-ranging selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, and the poet, translator, and author Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's pioneering career in modern poetry. The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings-off into emptiness.

    Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning--one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s--combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

    But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement -- his give and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

    Chosen by the author, these pieces have been selected from each of nine previously published collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development of Berry’s poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes that have occupied his work for years--land and nature, family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture-- The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry celebrates the broad range of this vital and transforming poet.

    Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation.For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.

    Instead he cooks them up in pies. He doesn't use the legs or eyes or any artificial dyes . . . Not far from a greenish town, the Bathtub Driver is selling cut-rate imported shampoo. Georgie Spider serves up award-winning pies, while overhead on Highwire 66 there's a small problem causing an acrobat traffic jam. Ed's funny smell, Eliza's special jacket - they're all part of the picture in Polkabats and Octopus Slacks, fourteen stories about pesky snails, sleeping fruit, and one funky snowman. In the tradition of Edward Lear, Calef Brown has fashioned fourteen nonsense poems so zany that both young and old will be unable to suppress their laughter. Brown's invented words and sounds and their visual counterparts create both an audible and a visual feast. This is the kind of silliness children relish.

    Daniel Simko's collection Autumn Sonata, has been lauded for the "simplicity and directness" of its translations, accomplished with out sacrificing the drama of Trakl's rich imagery. Suffering from manic depressive episodes and haunted by his experiences tending the wounded and dying during World War One, Trakl's poems reflect a sense of lostness: nightmare visions and disembodied voices provide an often eccentric perspective of reality. Though he yearns for deliverance, there poems do not anticipate it. Instead, they map the interior landscape of a brilliant, though troubled, spirit.

    Miłosz provides a preface to each of these poems, divided into thematic (and often beguiling) sections, such as “Travel,” “History,” and “The Secret of a Thing,” that make the reading as instructional as it is inspirational and remind us how powerfully poetry can touch our minds and hearts. "

    Her first album, Horses, was a landmark album of power, bravado, beauty, and grace. Its famous cover portrait, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, "was the first to claim both vision and authority," wrote Camille Paglia. "No female rocker had ever dominated an image in this aggressive, uncompromising way."Seven albums later, and a life punctuated by a long hiatus during which Smith raised her two children and suffered the tragic losses of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, her dear friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, and her beloved brother, Smith is ready to mark her first fifty years on the planet with a book her fans have long awaited: the complete lyrics. With never-before-seen photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Liebovitz, Kate Simon, and others, plus original artwork and text by Smith, Patti Smith Complete is a living commemoration of Smith's unique contribution to music and the empowerment of people through her message of work, love, and charity.

    Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

    These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This thorough documentation of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.

    Wright incorporate elements of disjunction and odd juxtaposition in their exploration of unfolding context. "In my book," she writes, "poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so."

    An omnibus edition of Margaret Atwood's poetry 1965 - 1995 including the latest collection Morning in the Burned House

    Here he tells of history, a nation, the self, love, and resurrection. Amichai’s last volume is one of medi­tation and hope, and stands as a testament to one of Israel’s greatest poets. Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is openin the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closedwithin us. And when we die, everything is open again.Open closed open. That’s all we are.—from “I WASN’T ONE OF THE SIX MILLION:   AND WHAT IS MY LIFE SPAN? OPEN CLOSED OPEN”

    In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present. In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

    6 line drawings.

    When Linda Pastan's first book was published in 1971, the Jerusalem Post wrote, she "in large measure fulfilled Emerson's dream -- the revelation of 'the miraculous in the common.'" Since then, Pastan has continued to explore the complexities, passion, and dangers under the surfaces of ordinary life. She speaks in the voices of Penelope and Eve; of daughter, mother, and wife. The new book follows work that over thirty years both darkens and deepens with time.

    If you’re sleepy in the jungleAnd you wish to find a pillow, Take a friendly word of warning:DO NOT USE AN ARMADILLO! Covering everything from centipedes to whales, from swinging on swings to ice-skating in winter, from eating applesauce to celebrating birthdays, the delightful poems in this extensive collection convey the experiences of childhood with a fresh timelessness.

    Although there is no evidence the letters were ever posted, they indicate a long relationship, geographically apart, in which correspondence would have been the primary means of communication. Dickinson did not write letters as a fictional genre, and these were surely part of a much larger correspondence yet unknown to us. In the week following Dickinson’s death on May 15, 1886, Lavinia Dickinson found what she described as a locked box containing seven hundred of her sister’s poems. The Master letters may have been among them, for they were clearly not with the correspondence, which Lavinia destroyed upon discovery. Of primary importance, the Master letters nevertheless have had an uncertain history of discovery, publication, dating, and transcription. This publication, issued at the centennial of Emily Dickinson’s death, presents the three letters in chronological order, based upon new dating of the manuscripts, and provides their texts in facsimile as well as in transcriptions that show stages in the composition of each letter.

    Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day in the Office of Dreams'.

    Originally published in 1996.

    From the boy who speaks only in "Kung Fu" dialogue to the guy who visits a lesbian bar and sees his mother, this often funny and always thoughtful book of poems offers fresh, surprisingly frank meditations on the credentials for contemporary manhood.

    "The dance," in the case of Oliver's brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."

    A powerful storyteller, Lease captures his characters' unique inner lives, in a tone at once erotic, social, and mystical. Lease's poems encompass the broad spectrum of being human with unflinching courage.

    The Seventh Octave features some of this great young poets most revered poems. From "OHM," to "Sha Clack Clack," Saul's words are breathtaking and powerful with every read. The Seventh Octave is a must-have collection for any aspiring poet or seasoned writer. Lyrical and electric, full of brilliant imagery and truth. The Seventh Octave is for lovers of language and the magic poets can create.

    Warren wrote enduring fiction as well as influential works of literary criticism and theory. Yet, as this variorum edition of his published poems suggests, it is his poetry - spanning sixty years, sixteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles - that places Warren among America's foremost men of letters. In this volume, John Burt, Warren's literary executor, has gathered together every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren's poems - in some cases, a poem appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line - as well as the author's typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in hand, Burt has referred to Warren's personal library copies. A record of Burt's comprehensive analysis is found in this edition's textual notes, list of emendations, and explanatory notes.

    Featuring the original Chinese as well as english translations and historical introductions by Burton Watson, J.P. Seaton, Paul Hansen, James Sanford, and the editors, this book provides an appreciation and understanding of this elegant and traditional expression of spirituality."So take a walk with...these cranky, melancholy, lonely, mischievous poet-ancestors. Their songs are stout as a pilgrim's stave or a pair of good shoes, and were meant to be taken on the great journey."--Andrew Schelling, from his Introduction

    This powerful and diverse, this unique collection spans three centuries of poetry in America as poets bare their souls, speak their minds, trace their roots, and proclaim their dreams in the thirty-six poems compiled here. The voices of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Dubois, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others, create an energetic blend of tone and tempo, ardor and awe. From lamentations to celebrations, these poems reveal the ironies of black America, juxtaposing themes of resistance and reconciliation, hope and despair. Each poem is further illuminated with notes, a brief biography of the poet, and stunning visual interpretations. Clinton and Alcorn have created a stirring tribute to these great poets, as well as a remarkable volume that will move any reader.

    It is an extraordinary look into the mind of an artist whose boundless creative output touches a myriad of media, from photography to painting to poetry to acting. Recent Forgeries includes a CD with music and spoken-word poetry. Introduction by Dennis Hopper.Softcover, 7 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches, 110 pages, 83 reproductionsISBN: 1-889195-32-4 7th Edition$25

    The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "sweet machine" not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing. These poems are themselves "sweet machines"--lyrical, exuberant and joyous--and they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.

    In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sonia Sanchez writes of the many forms love takes: burning, dreamy, disappointed, vulnerable. With words that revel and reveal, she shares love's painful beauty.

    World Poetry encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.While World Poetry includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer—more than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right.This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.

    With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science Steepleflower test this relationship with what Publisher's Weekly has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality", bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

    Winner of the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prize). SONGS FOR RELINQUISHING THE EARTH contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperiled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky's experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.SONGS FOR RELINQUISHING THE EARTH was first published by the author in 1996 as a handmade book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth.Part of Jan Zwicky's reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry's public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.

    With Native Son he gave us Bigger Thomas, still one of the most provocative and controversial characters in fiction. With Black Boy he offered a candid and searing depiction of racism and poverty in America. And now, forty years after his death, he has bestowed us with one of the finest collections of haiku in American literature.Wright became enamored of haiku at the end of his life, and in this strict, seventeen-syllable form he discovered another way of looking at the world. He rendered images of nature and humanity that raised questions and revealed strikingly fresh perspectives. The publication of this collection is not only one of the greatest posthumous triumphs of American letters but also a final testament to the noble spirit and enduring artistry of Richard Wright.

    Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly avant-garde, Palmer's work has a matchless beauty, difficult to describe: as Common Knowledge remarked, "Even more than its music, it emanates silence." The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. This generous chronological selection includes individual poems, selections from serial poems, and two complete serial poems. Together the poems form a bridge, a kind of work-biography which takes a long look at an extraordinary achievement and gives a new view of a body of work as the poet himself wishes it to be seen. It also rescues from limbo so much material that has gone out of print. The Lion Bridge presents work from seven of his books: Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages.

    Its language negotiates a past -- "How was it to be the first arrivals in rows and columns" -- as well as a present -- "A perceiver without a state", and has already gained Kim recognition as among the most moving and important "translators" in contemporary poetry.

    The sequence of poems is random - making it ideal for dipping into - and drawn from a number of sources, mixing both well-known and less familiar poetry.

    It is even more remarkable if the book is set where we live, a place we thought we'd been. These poems make up a dramatic and lyrical portrait of the migration of poor Buncombe County farmers to a mill village outside Chester, S.C. However, the book is much more than documentary. Rash, whose grandparents and parents worked in the Eureka Mill interweaves his family's personal history with the broader texture of mill life, giving us at once intimacy and perspective, heart and understanding.

    A comprehensive collection by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today.

    From the bestselling author of "The Basketball Diaries", "Void of Course" is a collection of poetry that vibrates with the details of everyday city life.

    This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology. As an "honored courtesan", Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers—merchants, ambassadors, even kings—who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and manners, and elegant, cultivated conversationalists. Exempt from many of the social and educational restrictions placed on women of the Venetian patrician class, Franco used her position to recast "virtue" as "intellectual integrity," offering wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life.Franco became a writer by allying herself with distinguished men at the center of her city's culture, particularly in the informal meetings of a literary salon at the home of Domenico Venier, the oldest member of a noble family and a former Venetian senator. Through Venier's protection and her own determination, Franco published work in which she defended her fellow courtesans, speaking out against their mistreatment by men and criticizing the subordination of women in general. Venier also provided literary counsel when she responded to insulting attacks written by the male Venetian poet Maffio Venier. Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries make her life and work pertinent today.

    His voice and sensibility are distinctive, and the places he goes are ones where not many writers are able or willing to venture. The dark world of his poems, which face many of the hardest truths we must learn to live with, is lit by humor, tenderness, compassion, and honesty. For this edition, the poet has selected from the best of his previous collections, in some cases making substantial revisions, and has added his newest poems. The resulting collection is exciting in its breadth, consistency, depth, and distinction.

    Asian American Studies. In this extraordinary new collection of poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, writing reflects human presence in the phenomenal world. Physical sensations of experience a horizon, moisture, a child, a piece of quartz, a loss become objects of focus and poetic elements. Her written lines, like strings of protein, both create and destroy bonds. Reading affords moments of exquisite vulnerability in which the perceived world is suddenly exposed to the quick. The pace of everday life slips into that of a waking dream. Winner of the 1998 Western States Book Award."

    "...seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."--The New York Times Book Review

    With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

    Cole Swensen's NOON is a stunning meditative mix of lyrical and prosaic poetry in constant motion. Swensen turns and returns images from our external world while exploring a spiritual landscape marked by separation and the desire for reunion. The poet leads us into NOON'S interior so that we "see the world as a single streak, something built of transparent speed; pure white of the sort they say no one person, unaided, can perceive."

    This comprehensive and engaging anthology gathers his polymathic achievement, from the extraordinary humanity of The Post Officer to memoirs, letters, essays and conversations, short stories, extracts from the celebrated novel The Home and the World, poems, songs, epigrams, and paintings. This inspired collection of works by one of this century's most profound writers in an essential guide for readers seeking to understand Indian literature, culture, and wisdom, and the perfect reintroduction of Tagore's magnificence to American readers.

    In turn compelling, lyrical, tragic, and humorous, this rich anthology opens the door to the Middle East and beckons readers to explore our common ground. The poets and artists collected in this volume range from luminaries such as Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, Chaibia Tallal, Nazim Hikmet, and Naguib Mahfouz to those whose work has never been published before. With an ear to a rich history and a vision of hope for the future, this elegant book invites readers to experience a grand mosaic of cultures and traditions. It also features forty paintings reproduced in full color, an introduction, notes on the contributors, indexes, and a map.

    Previously unpublished in book form and literally recovered from a steamer trunk by editor Jeff Adams, these stories are the product of Don Marquis, a New York columnist and raconteur who was one of America's most popular humorists during the early twentieth century. archy supposedly worked at Marquis's newsroom typewriter at night, diving headfirst onto individual keys to tap out columns; unable to use the shift key, of course, archy settled for lower-case letters and dispensed with punctuation entirely.Ungrammatical as they may be, archy's wry insights are a true delight, for, as he puts it, "one advantage of being a cockroach is that i see things from the under side." From that unique perspective we follow the continuing saga of archy, the Cockroach Detective, a spoof on the gumshoe genre in which the six-legged private eye encounters a raja, his chorus-girl harem, Bolshevist twins, an Egyptologist, seven sister manicurists, and a set of bejeweled false teeth. In other episodes archy saves the US fleet from a German U-boat attack, muses with a spider about humanity's inhumanity to insects, stows away on a freighter to London, and climbs to the top of the Washington Monument.In the Capitol building itself, archy says, "there is no attention paid to me because there are so many other insects around it gives you a great idea of the american people when you see some of the things they elect." The Ku Klux Klan, he observes elsewhere, "is going strong and the national emblem will soon be the great american kleagle." Meanwhile, mehitabel, who claims to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra, offers to hire hit-cats to clean up City Hall, not of rats but of reporters. Accompanied by the inspired drawings of cartoonist Ed Frascino, these new archy tales are, Adams writes, "classic American humor, as vivid and amusing today as they were decades ago."

    Sometimes sharply autobiographical, sometimes dizzyingly oblique, these poems trace Bretons tumultuous love affair with Suzanne Muzard, the woman who changed the course of his life in the early years of Surrealism. The volume includes an introduction by translator and Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, discussing the poems' background and history. Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, with three period photographs of Breton and Muzard. The first one hundred copies are signed by the translator.

    Sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, but always dazzlingly innovative, the 192 poems in this volume range broadly from the lyrical to the epic.One of the founders of Russian Futurism, Khlebnikov spent his entire brief life searching for a new poetic language to express his convictions about the rhythm of history and the connection between the truth of a poet's language and the cosmic truth about the universe. His poetry is characterized by often radical experimentation with language and words, a forceful utopian vision, complex theories of time and history, and multiple poetic personae: from an infantry commander to a Carthaginian war hero, from Cleopatra's paramour to the letters of the alphabet. Completing the "Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov," "Selected Poems" gives us insight into the imagination of a remarkable artist.

    His later poetry, produced after Charles II's Restoration led to the defeat of his hopes, reflects his understanding of politics and power. In this edition of Milton's poetry, John Leonard has modernized spelling, capitalization and any punctuation likely to cause confusion. He calls particular attention to words invented by Milton and provides full notes to elucidate biblical, classical and historical allusions, many of which complicate or even conflict with the plain sense or moral implications of the text.

    Few poets have so clear a demarcation in their work. In 1976, Creeley set off to visit nine countries in the Far East, to explore his sense of self in a foreign landscape. He found not only a "company" of fellow beings but also a transformed sense of life and subsequently a new family. He sees today that these three books in a single volume emphasize the "determined change in my life they are the issue of." They record a watershed period when Creeley "moved beyond his early influences to become a unique master" (Publishers Weekly, about Mirrors).

    In The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib, poet Robert Bly and Urdu scholar Sunil Dutta collaborate to bring the delicacy and intensity of Ghalib's poetry to readers of English. This collection of thirty ghazals by Ghalib also serves as an introduction to the ghazal, the elegant and amazing poetic form revered for centuries in the Muslim world.

    Women like her, girls like her, and men like her, too. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wistawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she’d be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written “the most intensely ‘ethical’ poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century.” One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, My Poems Won’t Change the World is her first substantial American anthology.      The book is made up of poems from Cavalli’s collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, now freshly translated by an illustrious group of American poets, some of them already familiar with her work: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi, Rosanna Warren, Geoffrey Brock, J. D. McClatchy, and David Shapiro. Gini Alhadeff’s translations, which make up half the book, are the result of a five-year collaboration with Cavalli.

    Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) is credited with modernizing Japan's two traditional verse forms, haiku and tanka. Born at a time of social and cultural change in Japan, Shiki welcomed the new influences from the West and responded to them by reinvigorating the native haiku and tanka forms. He freed them from outdated conventions, made them viable for artistic expression in modern Japan, and paved the way for the haiku to become one of his nation's most influential cultural exports.

    She's proud of being black, beautiful, musical, sexy and sassy. But she is most proud of what she has accomplished as a writer. Recorded in 1979.

    The first major translation of the haiku poet Chiyo-ni, this books contains over 100 haiku, presented in both Japanese script and romaji, with an English translation.

    Here, we overhear some of Wallace Stevens's late ruminations, we witness an erotic frolicking between poet and muse, and we receive an epistle on the subjects of love and the body from Mary Magdalen. The poet's richly cadenced style of story-telling allows him to offer theological poetry that leaves even the most cynical of readers nodding and grinning.

    The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.A brilliant capturing -- inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands -- of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

    The poems delve into parts of childhood more comfortably forgotten, and into the ancient stillness of the monastery (Twichell is a student of Zen Buddhism). In both realms the known self dissolves, or is intentionally dismantled, and what is left is something impossible to name, though its startling voice can be heard in the austere, near-empty rooms of these poems.

    

    The windows are open and bugs are everywhere! Children will delight in this collection of twenty-one buggy poems - just don't forget the calamine lotion.

    Accompanying each poem is a contemporary photograph, taken in such areas as the forward trenches, behind the lines and in the base camps. The anthology is arranged chronologically, beginning with the patriotic, jingoistic fervour of 1914, and then gradually charting the move to a more realistic mood, culminating in the disillusion, resignation and anger felt so strongly by the men at the front. The poets included range from A.E.Housman and Thomas Hardy, whose writing influenced the soldier poets, to those who actually fought at the front, such as Brooke, Sassoon and Owen. There are some unexpected contributions from those who volunteered, but did not see active service, such as Laurence Binyon and W.W.Gibson, and Rudyard Kipling, who had written about soldiers long before the War, and whose only son was killed in action.

    African American Studies. "The domain of poet Will Alexander's nervy curiosity ranges from the icy Himalayas, to African savannahs, from physics, astronomy, and music, to alchemy, philosophy, and painting. Orishas, angels and ghosts all sing to this poet, instructing him in their art of verbal flight. This is a poet whose lexicon, a 'glossary of vertigo, ' might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millenium" Harryette Mullen."

    . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow."--William StaffordA plain-spoken but eminently effective poet, the late William Stafford (1914-1993) has managed to shape part of the mainstream of American poetry by distancing himself from its trends and politics. Though his work has always inspired controversy, he was widely admired by students and poetry lovers as well as his own peers. His fascination with the process of writing joined with his love of the land and his faith in the teaching power of nature to produce a unique poetic voice in the last third of the twentieth century.Crossing Unmarked Snow continues--in the tradition of Stafford's well-loved collections Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life-- collecting prose and poetry on the writer's profession. The book includes reviews and reflections on poets from Theodore Roethke to Carolyn Forche, from May Sarton to Philip Levine; conversations on the making of poems; and a selection of Stafford's own poetry. The book also includes a section on the art of teaching, featuring interviews, writing exercises, and essays on the writer's vocation.William Stafford authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation and You Must Revise Your Life.

    David Shapiro writes in his foreword, “Anne Porter’s diction is as modest as that of William Carlos Williams or of a poet she nurtured as a houseguest for many years, James Schuyler. . . . She has the quality of paying attention to ultimate reality that Fairfield Porter, who painted her so often alone and with their five children, told me should be the conclusion of every sermon. . . . She is an American religious poet of stature who reminds us that the idea of the holy is still possible for us.” Living Things is a book for any lover of fine poetry, but will be particularly inspiring and meaningful to Christians whose faith is strong, and would make a beautiful gift.

    Constructing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests the maps we need may be found on our bodies.

    They encompass a wide variety of moods from gratitude and wonder at the natural world to the courage and heroism of individuals pitted agains the odds, and range from ancient Egypt to modern times.Works by well-known poets -- Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning -- are found together with the refreshingly unfamiliar.Sections on alliterative verse, riddles, tongue-twisters, action verses and the seasons of the year provide a stimulus for practical activities in the classroom. Also included are meditative verses for teachers to help them deepen their understanding of the children in their care.A resource book to treasure, it will awaken a love of poetry in both young and old.

    In New York City, black males have long been considered expendable. Young men who feel they have run out of options, whose bravado indicates they are no longer afraid to die, wear baseball caps emblazoned with "C2D," for close to death. This chilling cry comes from those who expect to lose their lives violently without ever having a chance to live. Close to Death, a book of poems amplifying the voices and souls of black men at various stages of their lives, is a poetic requiem for those who struggle against the odds, for those who have resigned themselves to death, and for those already gone.

    . . . The poems are deft and sure, there is a sense of vision in them, and I have the feeling that this is the start of something significant."-from the Foreword by Charles WrightIn his debut collection (selected by Charles Wright as the 1997 winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), Kimbrell revisits the mysterious landscapes of childhood and returns with poems that fathom meaning yet retain a sense of awe. The book's title section, a poignant ten-part poem, portrays a son's lifelong struggle to connect with a father made absent by mental and physical illness: "It's quite/The wonder, what madness can do for a man,//Much more than me far below the harsh light of heaven/Down here, in the make-shift center of this world." The Gatehouse Heaven serves as testament and guide to the kind of love that lies beyond anger.James Kimbrell has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Hoynes Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He was twice winner of the Academy of American Poet's Prize and also received the "Discovery"/The Nation Award and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. His poems and co-translations (with Jung Yul Yu) have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Quarterly, and Field. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

    Olsen place the oldest English writings in an entirely different perspective. Keeping the classroom teacher’s needs foremost in mind, Raffel and Olsen organize the major old English poems (except Beowulf) and new prose selections so as to facilitate both reading and studying. A general introduction provides an up-to-date and detailed historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period, and concise introductions open the literature sections of the book and many of the translations. Raffel’s masterly translations of Old English poetry, praised as fine poems in their own right, reproduce much of the flavor as well as the sense of the originals. With more than 1800 newly translated lines and many revised older translations, the poems in this volume are organized into four genres—elegies, heroic poems, religious poems, and wisdom poetry. Raffel’s new translations include more than twenty poem-riddles, with proposed solutions in a separate section. Prose translations—grouped in historical, testamentary and legal, religious, social and instructional, and medical and magical categories—feature writings by King Alfred, Aelfric, and Wulfstan, among others.

    Renaissance, Ruth Forman's second collection, speaks of the timeless themes of family, death, love, and rebirth in the inimitable voice Booklist called 'sexy, bittersweet, funny, feisty, and real.' With poetry that conveys a defiant, enlivened spirit and has won her acclaim, Ruth Forman measures the losses and celebrates the future of a generation.

    But shortly thereafter, the genius of her work was recognized and it has since received wide and consistent acclaim. Her verse - noted for its style, wit and bold and startling imagery - has greatly influenced the direction of 20th-century poetry. The 112 poems in this collection are taken from the definitive Johnson edition of her work and are accompanied by 65 pencil drawings, created especially for the book by Ferris Cook.

    This volume, collected by award-winning author Michael Rosen, presents a glorious selection of classic poetry, chronologically arranged from the seventeenth century to modern day—poems by such celebrated poets as William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes— complete with biographical sketches of the poets, information on individual poems, and notes on poetic forms. Paul Howard's full-color illustrations illuminate some of the most brilliant poems of the English-speaking world with stunning breadth and beauty. A book to be treasured, Classic Poetry belongs on every shelf—every child should know these poems and keep this book with them as they grow.

    TERRA LUCIDA, Joseph Donahue's ongoing magnum opus, is an astonishing work in which psychopompic dispatch and apocalyptic portent, by turns audacious and distraught, mix worldly exactitude with vatic unrest. Striking in its range and compression, its culling of contemporary grist and archaic light, its reportorial tone's melodic reach, it allies an unforced, unforeclosed spirituality with sifting intelligence of the severest kind. Long awaited, volume one is a beautiful, bracing, desert island book.--Nathaniel Mackey

    The matching folio to the debut album by the 1998 Grammy Award-winner for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Includes the hit single "Criminal" and nine more: Carrion * The Child Is Gone * The First Taste * Never Is a Promise * Pale September * Shadowboxer * Sleep to Dream * Slow Like Honey * Sullen Girl.

    Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon.A comprehensive guided tour that is lively and always accessible, Lives of the Poets illuminates our most transcendent literary tradition.

    

    

    Is death ever entirely unexpected? Not, perhaps, by a collector of experience, a gourmet of language, who can refer to "death flickering in you like a pilot light." In AFTER ALL, Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things lovely: music, food and wine, love. In the stunning central poem, "Dire Cure," which forms a kind of spine to the book, he describes the remarkable implications of the "heroic measures" that saved the life and restored the health of his wife from "a children's cancer (doesn't that possessive break your heart?)." He evokes the death of his favorite jazz musician, Charles Mingus. He speaks of cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, of the past, of history, of joys proposed, but especially, with his characteristic relaxed wit, of language and its quiddities: "My love says I think too damn much and maybe she's right." After All is the last word from one of the most pensive and delicious of all our poets.

    Chronologically arranged to mirror the progression of the war, From Both Sides Now brings together a wide variety of opposing views, with poetry by American and Vietnamese soldiers, orphans, widows, priests, monks, political figures, and antiwar protesters. In addition to including extraordinary works from well-known poets such as Bruce Weigl, Margaret Atwood, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley, Philip Levine, and W. S. Merwin, editor Phillip Mahony has scoured the globe to find amazing and, in some cases, never-before-published poetry by North and South Vietnamese soldiers and poets and the first postwar generation of Vietnamese-Americans. Together the words of these poets cohere to a modern, many-voiced epic about the most important event in recent American history. Poignant and accessible, the poems collected here will leave an indelible impact on all readers -- not only poetry lovers but everyone who lived through, and those who want to learn about, the Vietnam War.

    Now, for the first time in print, the SPAM Haiku Archive Master (or S.H.A.M.) offers more than 150 of the most delectible SPAM-ku ever prepared--selected from his collection of thousands. Anyone who likes to eat SPAM luncheon meat, sing about SPAM with Monty Python, or simply relish the poetry that is SPAM's very existence will love sinking his or her teeth into SPAM-ku.

    for reviving the tradition of English lyric children's poetry. Now he makes his U.S. collection debut with poems for every mood -- thoughtful, funny, silly, fantastical -- all perfectly accompanied by the wondrous pastels of Mary GrandPre. Together they reveal the story of St. Brigid and the baker ... the mysteries that lie down Green Man Lane ... the pleasure of a special hat ... the joys of the Elegant Elephant Delicatessen and the talents of Mrs. Bhattacharya's Chapati Zap Machine. Like plums and poems, this book holds beauty inside.

    Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire's personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.

    

    From beginning to end some of these poems chart the journey that is life and one woman's cycle of dependency as she recovers her lost identity. Thematically, it is bound by a writer's search for love and fight for freedom, drawing on the spirit and will of Harriet Tubman, the image of the bloated body of Emmett Till, the bombing of Philadelphia Move, and lesbian love. In the tradition of June Jordan and Sapphire, Pamela Sneed presents an in-your-face, powerful, and stirring debut.

    Typed out in cramped tenements or scrawled on bits of paper, Koon Woon's impulsive startling poetry probes the lonely world of itinerants and the dispossed found in the shadows of immigrant life in the United States.

    From the classic subjects of "My Lemonade Stand" and "Jacks" to the jazzy rhythms of "Jump Rope Talk" to the lyrical beauty of "Backyard Bubbles," this stunning collection from Rebecca Kai Dotlich is drenched in summer colors and pleasures. Color illustrations by award-winning artist Jan Spivey Gilchrist add an edgy charm.

    It brings together fourteen of the country's most distinguished poets, chosen on the basis of artistic merit alone, but drawn from all creeds - Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic - and none, and from all three jurisdictions of the new federation.

    Contents: The man who loves salmon --At the diabetic river --Reunion --Toward conception --Salmon, sea lion, ladder --Communion --The indigenous hunger artist --Elegy --Apocalypse --Creation story --Prophecy.

    Remember when you spilled that scalding coffee in your lap at the drive-thru? L.A.'s scrappy young poetry mag Caffeine has packaged that wonderful feeling in a steaming anthology that features over fifty contributors and five unpublished poems by Charles Bukowski.

    Now, edited by Eigner's long-time friend Robert Grenier, this new book has been long awaited by the growing readership of Eigner's poetry. It is a work that gracefully accepts death and, by virture of its very testament to the life around, reiterates Eigner's continual engagement with the world—despite a lifetime spent in a wheel chair.Larry Eigner was the author of over 40 books of poetry and critical writing. Among his books are windows / walls / yard / way, The World and Its Streets, and Things Stirring Together or Far Apart.

    . . the only critical book on prose poetry that not only provides a historical background for the prose poem in English, but also focuses on contemporary American prose poets."--Peter Johnson, Providence College The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s. Delville reassesses the work of established prose poets in relation to the history of modern poetry and introduces writings by some whose work in the form has so far escaped mainstream critical attention (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, Russell Edson). He describes the genre's European origins and the work of several early representatives of a modern tradition of the prose lyric (Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce). By applying a broad range of theory to the history of the prose poem, Delville adds evidence to its reputation as a norm-breaking form by writing within, against, and across existing genres and traditions. He shows that the history of the contemporary prose poem is, in many respects, the record of its efforts to question both the nature of the "poetic" or "lyric" mode and the aesthetic and ideological foundations of a variety of other genres and subgenres.Michel Delville teaches at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a senior research assistant at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels. He is author of a study of J. G. Ballard and of articles on contemporary English and American literature.

    The metaphors used to describe their lives are mysterious and frightening, and they accumulate in this collection as a full expression of the awe that makes us all live.

    In these poems, Madhubuti gives us essential meditations on commitment and caring. He offers honest and sometimes cutting criticism that is expected from a true friend or lover. And he gives us poetry -- constant reminders of our wholeness and humanity. "Some of the finest human poems in English are in this book" (Robert Bly).