Book picks similar to
Practical Gods by Carl Dennis


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Black Zodiac


Charles Wright - 1997
    The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."

Cornhuskers


Carl Sandburg - 1918
    Includes "Grass," "Prayers of Steel," "Flanders," "Prairie," "Shenandoah," many more. Introduction. Index of First Words.

Lord Weary's Castle: The Mills of the Kavanaughs


Robert Lowell - 1968
    A combined edition of the poet's early work, including Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of forty-two short poems, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, a narrative poem of six hundred lines, and five other long poems.

Selected Poems


Conrad Aiken - 1928
    With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence upon modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.Selected Poems contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of his work. Harold Bloom has contributed a new Foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The inclusion of several pivotal poems from previous editions broadens the scope of the work to represent Aiken's legacy.

The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994


Jorie Graham - 1995
    The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

Failure


Philip Schultz - 2007
    He evokes other lives, too--family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"--and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America's great poets.One called him a nobody.No, I said, he was a failure.You can't remembera nobody's name, that's whythey're called nobodies.Failures are unforgettable.--from "FAILURE"

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems


William Carlos Williams - 1962
    The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House. In these books, Dr. Williams perfected his "variable foot" metric and achieved full mastery of the "American idiom" which was his lifelong first concern. Among the poems of this period is the long "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" which W. H. Auden has called "one of the most beautiful love poems in the language." Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry only two months after William Carlos Williams' death on March 4, 1963.

Love Songs


Sara Teasdale - 1917
    In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (which became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the Poetry Society of America Prize for Love Songs. She later committed suicide. In addition to new poems, this book contains lyrics taken from Rivers to the Sea, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, and one or two from an earlier volume.

Alive Together


Lisel Mueller - 1996
    In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass." To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert," Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes," the crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own.

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems


Kay Ryan - 2010
    She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The two hundred poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

Foreign Affairs


Alison Lurie - 1984
    Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.Also in London is Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.

Walking to Martha's Vineyard


Franz Wright - 2003
    As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide,” and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods.From the Hardcover edition.

Arrowsmith


Sinclair Lewis - 1925
    The books explores medical and scientific themes in a fictional way and it is difficult to think of an earlier book that does this. Although he was not a doctor, Sinclair Lewis's father was and he was greatly helped in the preparation of the manuscript by the science writer Paul de Kruif. It was de Kruif who brings a reality to the book that is almost biographical.This reality means that the books heralds the real impact of advances in drugs, public health, and immunology that were about to change the world. It also satirises those medical and scientific practitioners whose pursuit of fame and fortune, at the expense of truth, remains just as pertinent today.The book was first published in 1925 and was a popular and commercial success. It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 which was refused by Sinclair Lewis. He was later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—which he accepted.

John Brown's Body


Stephen Vincent Benét - 1928
    A book of great energy and sweep, it swings into view the entire course of that terrible and decisive war, lighting up the lives of soldiers, leaders, and civilians, North and South, amidst the conflict. Generations of readers have found the book a compelling and moving experience.

Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems


Yusef Komunyakaa - 1993
    An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.