Book picks similar to
The Present Hour by Yves Bonnefoy


poetry
french-literature
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Illumination: Poetry to Light Up the Darkness


Tyler Knott Gregson - 2021
    With loyal fans across the country and all over the Internet, he breathes new life into this ancient medium and delights fans with his openness and honesty alongside his beautiful photography.This new book will be his first poetry collection in four years, and he returns now with a message of hope. In his elegant and simple style, Gregson will lift your spirits, keep you going when times get tough, and remind you of the inherent inner strength you already have within you.

Altona/Men without Shadows/The Flies


Jean-Paul Sartre - 1965
    

The Sacraments of Desire: Poems


Linda Gregg - 1991
    

Between The Lines: Volumes of Words Unspoken


Céline Zabad - 2018
     Written with incredible honesty and self-knowledge, Between the Lines is a stunning collection of poems from Céline Zabad. Ranging in length from a single line to full pages, her poems mimic at once the brevity and vastness of feeling. Her verse is at times as free as a cloud, other times as solid as stone. Her words are philosophies and feelings in their own rights, on love, loss, loyalty, betrayal, hope, and disappointment—on life. Zabad encapsulates the thrill of love’s first blush and the freezing burn of heartbreak. Her feelings flow freely throughout the collection, lending her poetry uncommon authenticity and power. Nature thrives between the lines of her verse, reminding the reader that tears are as natural as raindrops. Whether you’re looking for new ways to think about your own feelings or are simply passionate about poetry, you’ll find plenty to love in this collection. To better understand the complexities of emotion in yourself and others, you must read Between the Lines.

The Things We Don't Talk About


Anthony Martinez - 2019
    26 poems: Tunnel, Dark Corners, Parallel, Press Play, Mundane, Walls, Sunbathing, Broken, Space Traveler, Brilliant, Gloom, Harbor, Fallen, Words, Stargazing, That Great Night, These Eyes, What Defines Me, Screams from Outer Space, Crosshairs, Eclipse, Peace of Mind, Drowning, Corpses, Before I Go, Journey

Amplitude: New and Selected Poems


Tess Gallagher - 1987
    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

White Knuckle


Steven Bruce - 2020
    The use of enjambment here is impeccable, giving the entire collection a cadence akin to that of a march through the author's own personal underworld."— Owen Green, The Book Nook Review"One of the most authentic autobiographies told in verse."— Steve Quade, Indies Today"This is a very powerful and inspiring book that will touch the hearts of a lot of readers."— Ria Kataria, The Online Book Club"This is an in-depth essay unravelling through complex human emotions. Their beauty lies in their unadulterated voice."— Amina Thajudeen, The Ultimate Reviewer"The true power of poetry is sharing the struggles of life and this book drives that home."— Rob Alex, Book Promotion Club

Shine, Darling


Ella Frears - 2020
    They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the reader’s ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity – ‘There was pain,’ the speaker allows, ‘but it was not new pain.’ Frears’s work is world-weathered rather than world-weary, delighted by service stations, fucking on bins in Cornwall, in constant communion with the moon. It lives for the power-play of people, of the pull of the sea, the smoky air – ‘Stormy, sticky with flies’ – and tangled underbrush where the land ends. Her characters test each other, experimenting with the boundaries of physical violence, of punishment, of traps, all the while drawing the reader into a complicity that gives these poems all their daring, electrifying muscularity. In Shine, Darling, the desire to expose and disclose wrestles with defence and defiance. The result is exhilarating, a ‘glorious full-bodied’ debut collection with the draw of an adamant tide. ‘Uncompromising, intelligent, surprising, accessible and sharp … These lyric poems have a clarity and straightforwardness that only a special kind of attention, and a certain kind of fearlessness can achieve.’ – Mark Waldron

Self-Portrait with Crayon


Allison Benis White - 2009
    "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting" Cole Swensen."

Shirt in Heaven


Jean Valentine - 2015
    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Meteoric Flowers


Elizabeth Willis - 2006
    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Red Sugar


Jan Beatty - 2008
    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

Still Life in Milford: Poems


Thomas Lynch - 1998
    "[Thomas Lynch's] poems . . . are as stark and graceful as geese lifting off backwater. The poems trace from the rural midwest to London and County Clare, a quiet elegy of loss and testament. But then Lynch is by trade a mortician, and by craft a bard."—Amazon.com "[Lynch] evinces a steady wisdom drawn from years of passionate attention to daily experience."—Seattle Weekly

In Love with You


Pierre Alex Jeanty - 2018
    Every woman should know the feelings of being loved and radiating those feelings back to her mate. This is a beautiful expression of heartfelt emotion using short, gratifying sentiments. If there is a lover in you, you will not get enough of "Her."

Light Theory


Robert M. Drake - 2018
    Something that's very hard to learn on your own. This is something about putting yourself first because it's okay to love yourself before anyone else. This is something about doing what's best for you, no matter what people say, because only you know what you deserve. This is something about being real, being real to who you are and accepting things as they come and change. This is something about your mistakes, about your flaws, and about how beautiful it is to get up and try again. This is something about being you, about using your voice when you're afraid. About building enough courage when you feel like standing up to something you don't believe in, something that's wrong. This is about you, and every day should be about you, and that's something you should always consider.