Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's SSelected Poems, is "bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate." He continues, "For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor—in his case well-tempered and shining indeed—for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic nor ethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them frorn that poverty which every form of human evil finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely."

    With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this is the essential volume of Brodsky's work.

    A collection of poetry by Ted Kooser.

    S. Eliot, Daniel Albright, Douglas Archibald, Harold Bloom, George Bornstein, Elizabeth Cullingford, Paul de Man, Richard Ellman, R. F. Foster, Stephen Gwynn, Seamus Heaney, Marjorie Howes, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Lucy McDiarmid, Michael North, Thomas Parkinson, Marjorie Perloff, James Pethica, Jahan Ramazani, Ronald Schuchard, Michael J. Sidnell, Anita Sokolsky, and Helen Vendler. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

    JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he 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. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.”  Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). “It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”—from the Afterword, by David St. John

    Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues."Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak." —Web Del Sol Review of Books

    As Stanley Kunitz has said: "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."

    Eminescu (1850-1889) was a complex personality; at once a philosopher, politician, journalist, and prose writer, but above all a poet -- he is 'an expression of the Romanian soul'. The selection in this volume includes English language versions of some of Eminescu's best-known poems and is illustrated with original drawings by the Romanian artist A Bordenache and graphics from the princeps edition of Eminescu's poems published in 1883.

    In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted—poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter’s Wife," a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day:Then I’d open his clothes and takethe whole day inside me—the ship’sgray sides, the miles of copper pipe,the voice of the foreman clangingoff the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of leadkissing metal. The clamp, the winch,the white fire of the torch, the whistle,and the long drive home.And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures:Who would want to give it up, the coala cat’s eye in the dark room, no one therebut you and your smoke, the windowcracked to street sounds, the distant criesof living things. Alone, you are almostsafe . . .With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.

    Basho (1644–1694)—who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty—is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of linked prose and haiku that recounts his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. This volume includes a masterful translation of this celebrated work along with three other less well-known but important works by Basho: Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, The Knapsack Notebook, and Sarashina Travelogue. There is also a selection of over two hundred fifty of Basho's finest haiku. In addition, the translator has provided an introduction detailing Basho's life and work and an essay on the art of haiku.

     A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

    The haiku is one of the most popular and widely recognized poetic forms in the world. In just three lines a great haiku presents a crystalline moment of image, emotion, and awareness. This illustrated collection includes haiku by the great masters from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.

    It is futile to resist her brutal accounts of obsession and beauty. So give in.

    Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

    Although his private life shocked his contemporaries his poetry was immensely popular and influential, especially in Europe. This comprehensive edition includes the complete texts of his two poetic masterpieces Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain. There are many other shorter poems and part of the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In addition there is a selection from Byron's inimitable letters, extracts from his journals and conversations, as well as more formal writings.

    But despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz remains ardent in celebrating life. He fully lives up to his own advice to younger poets "to persevere, then explore. Be explorers all your life."

    The song-poems of this undisputed "bluesologist" triumphantly stand on their own, evoking the rhythm and urgency which have distinguished Gil Scott-Heron's career. This collection carries the reader from the global topics of political hypocrisy and the dangers posed by capitalist culture to painfully personal themes and the realities of modern day life. His message is black, political, historically accurate, urgent, uncompromising, and mature, and as relevant now as it was in the early 1970s.

    In her fifth book, Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America’s brutal history into a poetic whole.

    As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

    This book brings together his finest poems of the last ten years. Walker coined the word "Affrilachia" to help make visible the experience of African-Americans living in rural areas like Appalachia. The book is a high-quality, smyth-sewn paperbook, printed on 70-lb vellum, with a tritone photograph on the cover. Kentucky author Gurney Norman writes: "The poems in Affrilachia are funny and sad, tragic and hopeful, angry and determined, and as filled with generosity and love as poetry by any American writer in a generation. This book is powerful and beautiful. It is honest and true."

    Native American Studies. "Whether slyly identifying irony as a white man's invention, or deftly moving from prose-like multilayered narratives to formal poetry and song structures, this fifth collection from poet, novelist, and screenwriter Alexie demonstrates many of his skills. Most prominent perhaps is his ability to handle multiple perspectives and complex psychological subject matter with a humor that feeds readability: 'Successful non-Indian writers are viewed as well-informed about Indian life. Successful mixed-blood writers are viewed as wonderful translators of Indian life. Successful Indian writers are viewed as traditional storytellers of Indian life.' Poems such as the title one, a haunting chant for lost family, and 'The Theology of Cockroaches, ' do some vivid scene setting: '...never/woke to a wall filled with cockroaches/spelling out my name, never/stepped into a dark room and heard/the cockroaches baying at the moon.' At times Alexie allows his language, within the lineated poems almost exclusively, to slacken into cliche. The opening, multipart prose piece 'The Unauthorized Biography of Me' is arguably the strongest in the book, juxtaposing roughly chronological anecdotes with 'An Incomplete List of People I Wish Were Indian' and the formula 'Poetry = anger x imagination.' Other poems tell of 'Migration, 1902' and 'Sex in Motel Rooms'; describe 'How It Happens' and 'Second Grief'; and develop 'The Anatomy of Mushrooms.' Alexie's latest is as powerful and challenging as his previous excellent books, and should only add readers to his ever-widening audience" Publishers Weekly."

    Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.

    Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable verse--reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

    Grab your umbrella—and make sure it's a big one!It's raining pigs and noodles,it's pouring frogs and hats,chrysanthemums and poodles,bananas, brooms, and cats.Assorted prunes and parrotsare dropping from the sky,here comes a bunch of carrots,some hippopotami.

    Lying still in snow,not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willingnot to meet until heaven, but here and theretreading slubby kissing stops, our trackswobble across the snow their long scratch.So many things that happen here are really little more,if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,are almost ready, already, to bandage the onewhom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how whenwe might lose each other, scratches scratches scratchesfrom this moment to that. Then I will go backto that silent evening, when the past just managedto overlap the future, if only by a trace,and the light doubles and caststhrough the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.

    Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

    Orphaned by the age of two, he was brought up by foster-parents, Following his expulsion from both the University of Virginia and West Point, he led a precarious existence as an editor, critic and writer. In 1844 his poem 'The Raven' caused a sensation, but after his wife's death in 1847 he drank heavily and died mysteriously in Baltimore.

    The first volume, Groundwork I: Before the War, was published in 1984, after a fifteen-year publishing silence, and received immediate acclaim: it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the first National Poetry Award for Duncan's "lifetime devotion to the art of poetry and his grand achievement...." The second volume, Groundwork II: In the Dark, was published in February 1988, the month of Duncan's death. The internationally renowned poet Michael Palmer has written a marvelous introduction for this new edition, where "the singlemindedness of [Duncan's] life's work shows itself in the confident energy of every line" (Voice Literary Supplement).

    Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation. Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems. The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul: Zero built a nest in my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too— From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its own—from The Quietist

    He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought. This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most significant critical work, Biographia Literaria, and reproduces it in full. It provides a vital background for both the poetry section which precedes it and for the shorter prose works which follow. There is also a generous sample of his letters, notebooks, and marginalia, some recently discovered, which show a different, more spontaneous side to his fascinating and complex personality.

    There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

    (Kansas City Star, Sunday, October 8, 2000 by John Mark Eberhart)

    Each starter activity consists of a simple effective activity involving minimal preparation, with answers and suggestions for differentiation. This book allows teachers to: target objectives that can be broken down into short, simple steps; introduce framework objectives in a clear and engaging manner; and cover framework requirements for each year group at Key Stage 3. This book can be used alongside the QCA Scheme of Work. The starters are all stand-alone and allow at-a-glance assessment by means of whole-class, interactive activities that take 10-15 minutes.

    The text appears on each left hand page in English, on each right hand page translated into Greek. There's a closing essay by the translator Katerina Golem, in Greek.

    The wonderful writings in Thalia Field's long-awaited new book Point and Line deny categorization, they are "nicheless." Perhaps describable as "epic poetries," these riveting pieces represent a confluence of genres in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career: fiction, theater, and poetry. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, they elude classification, and present the author's concern with clarity in a world that resists it. For instance, in "Hours" and "Setting, the Table," Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Other pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing the author's need for shapes and colors in her work, her fascination with the contours of speech.

    Chinese, tr David Hinton

    How accurate, we think as we read her. In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, she brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.

    His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over 25 years. Poems and Other Writings offers a full-scale literary portrait of America's greatest popular poet. Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitchee Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden; verses, like "A Psalm of Life" and the "The Children's Hour", whose phrases and characters have become part of the culture. Erudite and fluent in many languages, Longfellow was endlessly fascinated with the byways of history and the curiosities of legend. His many poems on literary themes, such as his moving homages to Dante and Chaucer, his verse translations from Lope de Vega, Heinrich Heine, and Michelangelo, and his ambitious verse dramas, notably The New England Tragedies (also complete), are remarkable in their range and ambition. As a special feature, this volume restores to print Longfellow's novel Kavanagh, a study of small-town life and literary ambition that was praised by Emerson as an important contribution to the development of American fiction. A selection of essays rounds out of the volume and provides testimony to Longfellow's concern with creating an American national literature.

    More than sixty poems, some with Spanish translations, include such titles as The Young Sor Juana, Graduation Morning, Border Town 1938, Legal Alien, Abuelita Magic, and In the Blood.

    Deftly combining toughboy wit with a kind of hyper-awareness of language usually only found in Language poets, Kevin Davies' COMP. is a brilliant and hilarious read. Quoth the man himself--I learned the year after kindergarten that sentences are linguistic artifacts with regulations that fill themselves out, and that for the purposes of our circus-cannon ambitions the most important part of the war they enact is the full-stopping dots that divide the booty amongst camp-following berzerkers of the sub-syllabic frontier. Word.

    Across several decades, Lyn Hejinian has been constructing an exemplary and profoundly influential body of exploratory work, work of a discrepant lucidity that undermines commonplace assumptions of the permissible and the possible. Her poetry and her prose, as well as her frequent artistic collaborations, probe with incisive wit and formal invention fundamental questions of subjectivity and community, content and communication, gender and expressivity. THE BEGINNER was originally published in a limited edition in 2001 by Spectacular Books, and is now being reprinted by Tuumba Press. "I'm beginning, and thinking that I think myself launched into something, but the actual beginning has occurred long before and as a result the thought that "I'm beginning" is not a beginning but a pause, a phrase, though one incorporated into a beginning (the beginning concealed around it)."

    This powerful collection of poems details the harrowing experiences endured by Abani and other political prisoners at the hands of Nigeria’s military regime in the late 1980s.

    A collection of poetry by the German poet whose parents were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and who eventually committed suicide features essays on Jewish heritage and alienation.

    Invented words and sounds and their visual counterparts create both an audible and a visual feast. This is the kind of silliness children (and many adults) relish.

    Hejinian's characteristic linguistic intensity and philosophical approach are present in this book- length poem. "Reading Lyn Hejinian's HAPPILY can make one imagine a second, somewhat happier Stein telling stories in single long or short lines that are aware of one another as they go about their own affairs."--Bob Perelman "HAPPILY"...is a series of aphoristic statements interrogating 'hap' or, more prosaically, one's lot in life, one's fortune. This notion of chance as it is expressed through its root form, as in to happen, happenstance, happenings, haphazard, happenchance, happily, and happy happiness, becomes the generator that enlivens this ontological exploration of language's relationship to experience."--Claudia Rankine

    The poems span the entire range of verse from high drama to stuff-and-nonsense and are presented in nine sections: Poems of Childhood and Youth; Poems of Love and Marriage; Poems of Life; Poems of Loss and Comfort; Poems of War and Peace; Poems to Read Aloud; Poems to Read Quietly; Poems of Animals and Nature and Poems of Magic and Mystery.The anthology includes works by William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Robert Burns, T S Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, W B Yeats and many, many more. The poems have all been chosen and arranged by Neil Philip and the volume is illustrated throughout with watercolour borders and decorative motifs by Isabelle Brent, glowing with her trademark gold leaf.

    His poems weave a rich fabric of personal history using diverse materials drawn from African, Native American, and European sources. Scholarly, historical, intuitive, and emotional, his work explores territories in which rituals of psychological and spiritual individuation find a new synthesis in the construction of cultural values. Never an ideologue but always a poet of vision, his imagination shows us a way to rejoice and strengthen ourselves in our common humanity.Here, together for the first time, are Wright's previously published collections--The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), and Boleros (1991)--along with the new poems of Transformations (1997). By presenting Wright's work as a whole, this collection reveals the powerful consistency of his theme--a spiritual or intellectual quest for personal development--as each book builds solidly upon the previous one.Wright examines history from a multicultural perspective, attempting to conquer a sense of exclusion--from society and his own cultural identity--and find solace and accord by linking American society to African traditions. He believes that a poem must articulate the vital rhythms of the culture it depicts and is dedicated to a pursuit of poetic forms that embody the cadence of African American culture.Defying characterization, Wright has experimented with voices, languages, cultures, and forms not normally associated with African American literature. He is well schooled in the cultures of West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and--true to his New Mexican birth--he is a powerful synthesizer of human experience.Transfigurations reveals Wright to be a man of profound knowledge and a poet of exalted verbal intensity.

    Shakespeare's glorious works have even inspired animated films--like Disney's The Lion King. Introduce children to the Bard with this wonderful, fully annotated collection of sonnets and soliloquies, enhanced with beautiful, highly realistic color paintings that bring each excerpt to vivid life. Here are Shakespeare's most famous speeches: "To be or not to be" from Hamlet, with the melancholy Dane pictured in front of the castle, his face pensive and gazing into the distance; Portia's gentle plea for mercy in The Merchant of Venice; Macbeth's witches' cackling "Double, double, toil and trouble"; and Marc Antony's sarcastic address to "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," in Julius Caesar. A golden-robed Henry V, kneeling and bowed from the weight of the world, ponders how rulers must bear the burden of their subjects' needs. Mercutio, seen here in a bright red background as fiery and explosive as his personality, gently teases his lovesick friend Romeo. From the tender sonnets (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) to the humorous songs sung by his jesters in comedies such as Twelfth Night, every page contains pure verbal and visual magic."...the most delicate challenge in introducing poetry to children [is]...making all the necessary allowances for accessibility without completely throwing felicity and mystery to the winds. In this respect...it is particularly heartening to come upon...The Poetry for Young People Series [which] should be commended for recognizing that secure stepping stones hold infinitely more hope than forced marches."--Washington Post Book World.

    Latino/Latina Studies. The late AndrA[a�As Montoya's THE ICEWORKER SINGS AND OTHER POEMS evokes a world of machines and violence as it confronts a culture that has abandoned hope. His poems are stories, prayers, and letters that foster a spiritual resolve in the midst of a chaotic and concrete reality that denies the holy. Primarily urban and intensely personal, his poetry is nonetheless universal in dealing with issues of the day: race, faith, urban decay, poverty, police brutality, and the individual search for hope in the midst of despair. Winner of the 1997 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize.

    Rash's ancestry goes back for at least five generations. These skillfully crafted and highly compact poems capture the spirit and feeling, the beauty and cruelty, of a place and time which has now largely faded from the American Landscape.

    In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Order of Canada. A hands-on writer who delighted in co-producing specialty publications and small press titles in addition to his major collections with leading publishers, Purdy left a massive and diverse body of work, much of it long unavailable to the public.The Collected Poems, edited by Purdy critic Sam Solecki with the full participation of the author, for the first time brings all of Purdy's poetic writings together in one volume, including all his later books, work previously uncollected from earlier periods as well as several excellent new poems he completed in the months before his death. It is, as he said, everything he wished to be remembered for.

    Despite cultural maxims encouraging them to be silent, women continue to speak, often through the language of poetry, where there is an abundance of intuition and the possibility of reclaiming power through language. In the work included here, we see how the common threads of courage and inventiveness can be woven into a bright tapestry of women’s voices that presents a true picture of a culture that must create its own history. Over fifty poets, including those well-known, such as Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, and Cristina Peri Rossi, and those just emerging are included.Marjorie Agosín, editor of the Secret Weavers series, is well-known as a poet, writer, and human rights activist. She is a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

    Langley's work is demanding, but rewarding to. Longer poems such as "Juan Fernandez" and "Matthew Glover" are mixed with shorter pieces, but all are carried by the playful, sometimes terse but never self-ragarding language of a confidant and assured poet. A friend of J.H. Prynne, Langley's work has a more playful, accessible and humerous edge which gives the reader a more immediate reward.

    This collection contains most of the work from Selected Poems from 1985, together with later material, such as the complete sequence of Sonnets from Scotland, and Planet Wave, a suite of ten poems covering the history of the earth from the Big Bang to the time of Copernicus.

    This landmark anthology, part of a series that will eventually cover the entire century, gathers nearly 1500 poems by over 200 poets to restore American poetry's most brilliant era in all its beauty, explosive energy, and extraordinary diversity.Included are generous selections of the century's great poets -- Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes; and undervalued poets like Witter Bynner, Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Robert Johnson; and a wealth of talented and overlooked poets, experimentalists, formal innovators, popular and humorous versifiers, poets of social protest, and accomplished songwriters.

    In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.

    The poetic and cultural tradition forged by the Symbolist poets -- Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Appollinaire, and others -- reverberated throughout the avant garde and counter-cultures of the twentieth century. Modernism, surrealism, abstract impressionism, and the Beat movement are unthinkable without the example of these poets and their theories of art, making this reissue possibly the hippest "dead white European male" anthology ever published.Including translations by Richmond Lattimore, W. S. Merwin, Dudley Fitts, and Richard Wilbur, this anthology has stood the test of time in terms of its selection and scholarly apparatus. Now back in print after twenty years in a fresh new edition, the book features an introduction by Patti Smith that testifies to its epochal impact on her own career, as well as those of other influential latter-day poets, including Lou Reed and Jim Carroll. This rediscovered gem is sure to inspire a new generation.

    A new collection from Armantrout continues to reveal the wit and intelligence of the increasingly popular author.

    The Works contains every kind of poem you will ever need for the Literacy Hour but it is also a book packed with brilliant poems that will delight any reader. It's got chants, action verses, riddles, tongue twisters, shape poems, puns, acrostics, haikus, cinquains, kennings, couplets, thin poems, lists, conversations, monologues, epitaphs, songs, limericks, tankas, nonsense poems, raps, narrative verse, and performance poetry - that's just for starters. It features poems from the very best classic and modern poets, for example: William Blake, Michael Rosen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Allan Ahlberg, W.H. Auden, Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Roald Dahl, Charles Causley, Eleanor Farjeon, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and William Shakespeare to name but a few.

    She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse.Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love, show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.

    ") -- A Dream -- The Happiest Day -- The Lake -- Sonnet -- to Science -- Al Aaraaf -- Romance -- To -- ("Should my Early Life Seem") -- To [Elmira] ("The Bowers") -- To the River [PO] -- To M -- ("I Heed Not") -- Fairyland [I] -- Alone -- To Isaac Lea -- Elizabeth [Rebecca] -- An Acrostic ("Elizabeth, It Is in Vain") -- Lines on Joe Locke -- Introduction -- Mysterious Star! (A New Introduction to "Al Aaraaf") -- Fairy Land [II] -- To Helen -- Israfel -- Irene and the Sleeper -- The Valley of Unrest -- The City in the Sea -- A Paean -- Epigram from Pulci -- To One in Paradise -- Hymn -- Latin Hymn -- Song of Triumph -- Enigma [On Shakespeare] -- Serenade -- To -- ("Sleep on") -- Fanny -- The Coliseum -- To Mary Starr -- To Frances S. Osgood -- To Frances -- Politian -- Parody on Drake -- May Queen Ode -- Spiritual Song -- Bridal Ballad -- To Zante -- The Haunted Palace -- Couplet from "the Fall of the House of Usher" -- Motto for "William Wilson" -- Sonnet -- Silence -- The Conqueror Worm -- Motto for the Stylus -- Motto for "The Gold-Bug" -- Lenore -- Hexameter -- To Elizabeth Winchester -- Impromptu -- Fragment of a Campaign Song -- Dream-Land -- Eulalie -- The Raven -- Lines After Elizabeth Barrett -- Epigram for Wall Street -- Impromptu: To Kate Carol -- To [Violet Vane] -- The Divine Right of Kings -- Stanzas [to F.S.O.] -- A Valentine -- Model Verses -- Deep in Earth -- To Miss Louise Olivia Hunter -- To Marie Louise Shew -- The Beloved Physician -- Holy Eyes -- To Marie Louise -- Ulalume -- An Enigma [Sarah Anna Lewis] -- The Bells -- To Helen [Whitman] -- Lines on Ale -- A Dream Within a Dream -- For Annie -- Eldorado -- To My Mother -- Annabel Lee -- App. I. Serious Rhymes in Prose -- App. II. Comic Rhymes -- App. III. Collaborations -- App. IV. Apocrypha -- App. V. Verses by Members of Poe's Family -- Annals of Poe's Life.

    In seven sections this gorgeous book explores language and the "salt sea of autobiographies." His work also examines what Marjorie Perloff has described as "the absurdist 'displacement by degrees' one experiences in the post-urban wold of late twentieth-century America."

    What the Ice Gets is an adventure story, a requiem, and a love poem written to twenty-eight heroes and the mythic landscape they set out to explore but that instead explored them.

    Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese represents a lifetime's devotion to the classic originals, in the words of W. S. Merwin, begun when Hamill was introduced to classical Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth and the Beat poets of the late 1950s. Unlike earlier translators of Chinese and Japanese poetry, Hamill attempts to bring the poems into English with their directness and simplicity intact, at the same time attempting to remain true to the poet's orginal message. Hamill includes the rarely-translated social poems of Tu Fu, the poems and songs of Tzu Yeh and Li Ch'ing-Chao, and lyrical selections from Li Po, Shih Ching, Wang Wei, Su Tung-p'o and others. Hamill's introduction provides the most definitive overview to date of aesthetic impulses propelling Chinese poetry and reveals his own reasons for his lifetime's devotion. I sit at the feet of the great old masters of my tradition not only to be in a position to pass on their many wonderful gifts, Hamill says, but to pay homage while in the very act of nourishing, sustaining and enhancing my own life. Sam Hamill's celebrated translations include The Art of Writing: Lu Chi's Wen Fu; The Essential Chuang Tza; The Essential Basho; The Spring of My Life & Selected Haiku by Kobayashii Issa and Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love & Longing. He is the author of a dozen volumes of original poety and three collections of essays. He is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference and contributing editor at The American Poetry Review. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

    Her poems speak of unsure faith, the theology of doubt, and the uncertainty of anything divine, placed against a background of skeptical yet fervent hope that God is, despite such disbelief.

    This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.

    From one of Canada’s most acclaimed poets and the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.This book, Don McKay’s ninth collection, practises "the dark art of reflection" – which, as one of the poems tells us, whether boldly or capriciously, could not have existed without the moon – as it moves ever more deeply into ideas of home.

    A box of prosodic bonbons with exploding centers, offering the burst of intensity only artificial flavors can provide. Shimmering with assonances and anagrams, Stacy Doris's latest technical marvel comes stacked with Warnings to Daughters, battle scenes, a Pull-Out Bonus for girls, and truly excellent gore -- yielding remarkable new insights into our culture's fascination with the perpetual interplays between aggression and love. PARAMOUR works like the best of highly-engineered lipsticks: compact, sexy, and always a little scary, it encourages kissing but won't kiss off. I'm completely besotted! -- Sianne Ngai.

    The lion represents the fierce intensity that recognizes no authority except the highest truth. At the same time, Rumi's lion is full of heart and devotion. Through these poems the reader will explore the qualities that are vital to the spiritual aspirant who seeks to overcome the imprisonment of ego.

    Whereas the scope of each -- a full overview of Afrikaans poetry -- is the same, the two vary considerably in approach.

    Written between the ages of 13 and 18, Emilie Autumn's debut poetry book quickly sold out amongst her followers upon its release back in 2000, and the audio version has since become a sought after collector's item.Now, through the magic of digital downloads, this unique spoken word book/album with EA's original musical accompaniment is available again.This edition contains 48 poems, including the well-known "How To Break A Heart," from which New York's Rochester Ballet Company created an original ballet.

    This deeply rooted American book homesteads memories, harvests the present, and radiates a rare heart knowledge."-Edward Hirsch"Joyce Sutphen is a modern metaphysical poet. The elegance and originality of her wit recall Marvell, Donne, Shakespeare, through her subjects-memory, love, family, death-are timeless. Her poems are like still lifes that refuse to be still. One is charmed. One is hypnotized. The poems in Coming Back to the Body are so various that whatever we seek we will find: consolation, enlightenment, undiluted delight."-Connie WanekPhotosynthesisMorning falls out of its orbit and swims up through the blue. Last night, when I heard the news, I forgot my human hunger.Now I am making calculations with a row of ivy and old hibiscus. I am silent as a shadow in the ferns, I am frond green and curled.It may be necessary to drink through the roots; I could eat sunlight and air, start a green factory in each finger; I could make each arm a branch.Let me begin as stem and leaf. I'll make something you can breathe.

    In forms ranging from the sonnet to the lyric to the narrative, Frost's poems are fiery, passionate meditations on experience and consciousness.

    Emerging out oa a life in shich, the poet's words, "each day was the only day", Menasches work has a mysterious simplicity, a religious intensity, and a lingering emotional force.

    These poems explore the Rwandan holocaust through the culture, myths and customs that Derick Burleson absorbed whilst living there.

    The book was awarded the Eminescu Gold Medal' in 2000, when Eminescu was declared 'UNESCO-Year-2000-Poet-Of-The-Year'. The volume includes some the 'national' poet's time-honored gems like Luceafarul/The Evening Star, Glossa, Scrisoarea I / First Epistle Satire, Stelele-n Cer/Stars in the Sky, La Steaua/Onto the Star, among others.

    There are 100 poems in this book by 100 poets who wrote their poems when they were in grades one through twelve. These poets are not famous. You have not read their poems before. These poets live anywhere. They are now dentists and dancers and teachers and students and construction workers. They write with fire. They could be you.

    

    As Luis read each line, an image clicked in José's memory, and he knew that he had already taken that photograph. The result of that experience is this remarkable book.A unique collaboration of two acclaimed artists, Vatos is a tribute to Latino men who are too often forgotten, ignored and misrepresented by the larger culture-children playing in the streets, migrant workers toiling for a better life, homeboys in the barrio, young men with their girlfriends and their mothers, blue collar workers, activists on the streets, sons, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers. Vatos recognizes their joys, their sorrows, their tenderness and their strength. Through Galvez' photographs and Urrea's words, they will not be forgotten.The word "vato," by the way, is Mexican-American slang, a word that means "dude" or "guy," but here it carries more soul than either of these.José Galvez was lead photographer of a L.A. Times team that received a Pulitzer Prize for a stunning portrayal about Latinos in Southern California. José and his colleagues were the first Hispanics to receive a Pulitzer. For over 30 years, Galvez has been documenting his Mexican-American culture, through photographs. He has done much freelance photojournalism and has contributed photos to the book Americanos produced by Edward James Olmos.Bloomsbury Review named Luis Alberto Urrea as one of its "10 Young Writers to Watch." His book Across the Wire, which depicts life at the edges of the dumps in Nogales, is in its 10th printing. A novelist, essayist and poet, he has received the Christopher Award, the Colorado Center for the Book Award, the Western States Book Award for Poetry, and the American Book Award.

    Among the Monarchs is filled with unforgettable metaphors, unconventional and unpredictable juxtapositions, turns and angles of perception, and seductive free verse rhythms. Through all of this, Garren captivates readers in a unique exploration of the nature of desire, the raptures and burdens of love and loss, the peculiarities of family life and, perhaps most compelling, the power of poetic imagination to shape what we see and feel. At once engaging and disquieting, Among the Monarchs attests to the inexhaustible possibilities of lyric poetry.

    Utopic sings the blues for those unacknowledged.

    McClatchy.

    Shiva's versions are based on his own carefully documented translation from the Farsi (Persian), the language in which Rumi wrote. Drawing from his study of more than 2000 of Rumi's poems, the translator has chosen his own favorites, presenting a faithful cross-section of the poet's many moods3/4from passion to adoration. The result is a text to delight, intrigue and inspire. This volume is excerpted from Shiva's masterwork, Rending the Veil (Hohm Press, 1995).The scholarly nature of his previous book prompted Hohm Press to present this condensed volume in a format that is economical and more accessible to the growing public of Rumi lovers, especially those who demand authentic translations.

    First published in 1971, this volume brings together a selection of Rothenberg's early groundbreaking work: a wide range of experimental forms, both written and oral, set beside renderings of Native American, Australian, and other primitive songs, as well as the ancestral poems exploring his own origins that look forward to his later poetry.

    The poems range from dreamy reflections to bitter longings for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was created in 1948.

    This book organizes the best moments from Rumi's poetry into distinct themes, allowing the reader to dip into these words at leisure.

    Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriya, he fled to Lebanon, together with most of the inhabitants of his village, during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later he slipped across the border with his family and settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. The Saffuriya of his childhood has served as the nexus of his poetry and fiction, which is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller's vivid imagination. Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and unflinching, at times painful, honesty--the poetry's apparent simplicity and homespun truths concealing the subtle grafting of classical Arabic and colloquial forms of expression. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe, audiences have been powerfully moved by Taha Muhammad Ali's poems of political complexity and humanity. Never Mind is the poet's first collection to appear in English.

    By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work.

    

    Poetics. There are conversations embedded in these pages, a kind of cross-talk through time and space. Texts, interviews, critical pieces, journal entries, letters, worknotes and at least one simple list make visible and audible an openwork of embodied voices in conversation... (Introduction by the editor). Work by Anne-Marie Albiach, Joe Bousquet, Danielle Collobert, Edith Dahan, Andre du Bouchet, Dominique Fourcade, Liliane Giraudon, Joseph Guglielmi, Emmanuel Hocquard, Roger Laporte, Roger Lewinter, Raquel, Mitsou Ronat, Jacques Roubaud, Agnes Rouzier and Claude Royet-Journoud. There is also a useful section of biographical notes at the end. Recent books by Norma Cole available from SPD are MARS, MOIRA, and CONTRAFACT.

    It went into its thirdprinting in less than a year and has been used as a text in seven colleges and universities."A landmark in West Virginia literary history (and) also a model of poetic celebration." -- Gordon Simmons, Coordinator, Artists Services, West Virginia Cultural Center, Charleston, WV"An ode to West Virginia. . . . A wealthof knowledge, compassion, and inspiration." -- Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail"Clear and bright, enough light to read by. This is what we've been waiting for." -- Grace Cavalieri, Producer, "The Poet and the Poem" on National Public Radio

    These are poems that ask forgiveness, offer praise, and carry enough irony never to seek redemption. They are, at heart, love poems. According to the late William Matthews, Jackson's poems tell us "what it means to belong in history.... The wonderful amplitude ... testifies that we can live with such chaos and not lie about it or ignore it: indeed the poems are a demonstration of how we might do such a thing".

    Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air."   The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.

    Long recognized as one of America’s liveliest poetic in-novators, he has said in a recent interview, "I want to do something beyond convention, beyond accepted levels of skill, beyond the expected, beyond the predictable, beyond the wholly welcome."Nightworks is truly beyond the usual fare, and critics have praised it as "a major event," "long overdue,"and "essential." As the definitive collection of Bell’s 40-year career, it combines new poems with choice selections from all of his previous books, including the now-infamous voice of the Dead Man:I am the poet of skulls without why or wherefore. I didn’t ask to be this or that, one way or another, just a young man of words. Words that grew in sandy soil, words that fit scrub trees and beach grass. Sentenced to work alone where there is often no one to talk to. The poetry of skulls demands complicity of the reader, that the reader put words in the skull’s mouth. The reader must put water and beer in the mouth, and music in the ears, and fan the air for aromas to enter the nostrils. The reader must take these lost heads to heart…—from "Skulls""Marvin Bell’s career has been substantial [and] Nightworks reminds us just how distinctive his voice has been all along—how prophetic, how candid, how rigorously philosophical. He enlarges our understanding of what poetry can do."—The Georgia ReviewMarvin Bell has taught for nearly 40 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the first and current Poet Laureate of Iowa.

    The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, "Tenebrae" and "Buddy's Monologue," have been recently performed.As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay, although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his understanding that a "black" experience should not particularize the presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context of his own words.Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.

    Eliot Prize.Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum Dance are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own; a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the somewhere in between of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are.Using the framework of four long poems, 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads', the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond the thrilling expectancy of fairground or a dancehall, the possibilities of the open road. With a confident open line and command of the language, John Burnside writes with grace, agility and profound philosophical purpose, confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary poetry.

    Presented in both the original Chinese and Mike O'Connor's beautifully crafted English translation, When I Find You Again, It Will Be in Mountains brings to life this preeminent poet and his glorious religious tradition, offering the fullest translation of Chia Tao's poems to date.

    In her later books, she almost reverses this process to show life as veiled and inconclusive, suggestive rather than definitive. The elliptical yet lucid craft of her poems presents experience as only imperfectly graspable. The poems ride lightly on the waves of thought, more textures than statements. Some readers have characterized Valentine as a "deep image" writer, but syntactically her work is more akin to the work of Mandelstam and Paul Celan than to that of Lorca and Neruda.The Cradle of the Real Life is divided into two sections, the shorter first section dealing with loss and death and the longer second section, entitled "Her Lost Book," which weaves memories with various metaphors for writing, and deals specifically with the "problem" of women's writing. These finely wrought pieces take stark subject matter and make it shimmer; the poems take their shape as much from the absences as from the words, just as life is given meaning by the losses we survive.

    His works remain widely popular in Japan today, with their celebrations of everyday joys and sadness. This edition presents Ryokan's poetry in English alongside the original Chinese and Japanese versions, notes and a biographical essay.

    An icon in the Canadian literary scene, Lane has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1979 for "Poems, New and Selected," the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Poetry in 1988 for "Selected Poems" and the Dorothy Livesay Prize for poetry in 1996 for "Too Spare, Too Fierce." Gathering together the last five years' worth of work, "The Bare Plum of Winter Rain" is an evocative collection, boldly exploring themes that range from meditations on the death of a mother, to love, sex and poverty, all with the craft and success of a master poet. From the stunning title poem, "The Bare Plum of Winter Rain," to the spirited love poems "Cunt" and "Vulva," Lane has created an exciting mix of style, voice and rhythm - reaffirming his place among the top poets in Canada and the world.