There he is drawn into the unruly world of the Carmodys, a sprawling, prosperous Irish family teeming with passion and riddled with secrets. The story of this entanglement is a beautifully rendered tale of grace and renewal, of friendship and longing, of loneliness and spiritual aridity giving way to hope.

    S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.

    Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short story. These fifty stories include two early collections -- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors -- as well as more than two dozen stories that are gathered only in The Collected Stories. In his introduction, the author explains how, at one point, he wrote no stories for almost twenty years. "But," he writes, "once I needed -- for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life -- to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance." Indeed, chances abound here in stories that will astonish even Price's most devoted readers as they travel through not only the author's native North Carolina but also Jerusalem, the American Southwest, Europe, and Asia.

    This two-volume collection of his plays includes A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The StrongBreed, The Road, and The Bacchae of Euripides in the first volume, and The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi's Harvest, The Trials of Brother Jero, Jero's Metamorphosis, and Madmen and Specialists in the second volume.

    Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

    Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s death–are gathered in one volume.Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter member–along with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation.These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time: “O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”).Here is Koch’s early work: love poems like “The Circus” and “To Marina” and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as “Fresh Air,” “Some General Instructions,” and “The Boiling Water” (“A serious moment for the water is when it boils”). And here are the brilliant later poems–“One Train May Hide Another,” the deliciously autobiographical address in New Addresses, and the stately elegy “Bel Canto”–poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit, speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most important moments in one’s existence.Charles Simic wrote in The New York Review of Books that, for Koch, poetry “has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is to do something with language that has never been done before.” In the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.

    Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.

    Jones.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.

    Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down.From “The Invention of Streetlights”Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own.There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.and light entire rooms. .Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn.and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.Notre Dame seem small. .Now the streets stand still. .By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.to photograph a midnight ball.“Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

    Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past — its ideas, its personages, its syntax — to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language — whiplike — casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

    A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

    Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is possible with most writers; and there are times during the period of his greatest creativity when his personal as well as his artistic life can be followed week by week.The development of Keats's poetic craftsmanship proceeds simultaneously with the steady growth of qualities of mind and character. Mr. Bate has been concerned to show the organic relationship between the poet's art and his larger, more broadly humane development. Keats's great personal appeal--his spontaneity, vigor, playfulness, and affection--are movingly recreated; at the same time, his valiant attempt to solve the problem faced by all modern poets when they attempt to achieve originality and amplitude in the presence of their great artistic heritage is perceptively presented.In discussing this matter, Mr. Bate says, "The pressure of this anxiety and the variety of reactions to it constitute one of the great unexplored factors in the history of the arts since 1750. And in no major poet, near the beginning of the modern era, is this problem met more directly than it is in Keats. The way in which Keats was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to transcend it, has fascinated every major poet who has used the English language since Keats's death and also every major critic since the Victorian era."Mr. Bate has availed himself of all new biographical materials, published and unpublished, and has used them selectively and without ostentation, concentrating on the things that were meaningful to Keats. Similarly, his discussions of the poetry are not buried beneath the controversies of previous critics. He approaches the poems freshly and directly, showing their relation to Keats's experience and emotions, to premises and values already explored in the biographical narrative. The result is a book of many dimensions, not a restricted critical or biographical study but a fully integrated whole.,

    H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

    Broken up into four chapters, she holds your hand and takes you inward with her, from skin to flesh, to flesh to bones, from bones to all that lies within. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, The Anatomy of Being marks a very distinct time in a young girl's life, and aches and aches to be heard and devoured. 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards Poetry Finalist

    His celebration of all forms of natural life and his laments for the death of rural England grew directly out of his intimate knowledge of the labourer's life, the wheatfields and hedgerows of his village in Northamptonshire.This authoritative and engaging selection includes poems from every stage of Clare's poetic career, organised by theme, from 'Birds and Beasts' to 'Madhouses, Prisons and Whorehouses'.