W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

    Gilroy won the Pulitzer Prize for his play "The Subject Was Roses," and 43 years since he began work on "Lake." In the vein of Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology," Gilroy tells the story of a summer vacation community in Northern New Jersey over the course of 25 years, the early 1920's through the late '40's. Each chapter is the voice of another character; some are monologues, some more interior than that. The story works its way around the lake, catching a vignette/snapshot/moment from each turn of the wheel. It's a remarkable read from an 86-year-old writer, still at the top of his game.

    Based on a host of recently available letters, memoirs, and manuscripts, it sheds new light on Proust's character, his development as an artist, and his masterpiece 'In Search of Lost Time' (long known in English as Remembrance of Things Past). The biography also sets Proust's life in the decadent artistic and social context of the French fin de sihcle and the years leading up to World War I. The glittering Parisian world of which Proust was a part was also home to such luminaries as Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, and Andri Gide. William Carter brings this vibrant social world to life while he explores the inner world of Proust's intellectual and artistic development, as well as his most intimate personal experience. Carter examines Proust's passionate attachment to his mother, his deep love for the scenes of his youth, his flirtation with Parisian high society, his complicated sexual desires, and his irrevocable commitment to literary truth and shows how all these played out in the making of his great novel. In the book's abundance of detail, its we

    At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipean experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.

    From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarme to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

    Contributors to this volume do not attempt to disguise the nature of that difficulty in the course of offering a clear exposition of the central philosophical concerns in his work.

    S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

    As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility.”

    To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

    An exploration of the ideas, groupings and the social tensions that shaped the transformation of life caused by the changes of modernity in art, science, politics and philosophy

    Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. "Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines." James Longenbach opens this provocative book with that essential statement. Through a range of examples—from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück—Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and most engaging poets.

    The greatly esteemed essayist, novelist, and philosopher reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and gives us his own translation of Rilke's masterwork.

    The force of her thought is evident everywhere in these essays, from her explorations of other poets' work to her skeptical contemplation of current literary critical notions such as "sincerity" and "courage." Here also are Glück's revealing reflections on her own education and life as a poet, and a tribute to her teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz. Proofs and Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet.

    It contains 85 black-and-white press photographs from World War II which Brecht himself cut out of newspapers and magazines. They date from his exile in Sweden and Finland in 1940 and 1941, but were mainly collected during his exile in the USA, from July 1941 till the end of the war. To each picture, Brecht added a four-line poem - poignant, angry, personal or political, or a combination of these. This book therefore constitutes an intriguing record of World War II from the viewpoint of one of the 20th-century's greatest and most politically-engaged poets.

    Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.