Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.

    As a poet, he founded the Imagist movement (c. 1909–17), which advocated the use of precise, concrete images in a free-verse setting. As an editor, he fostered the careers of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. As a force in the literary world, he championed James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Pound also helped to create a modern movement in poetry in which, in T. S. Eliot's words, "English and American poets collaborated, knew each other's works, and influenced each other."Long an expatriate, Pound's questionable political activities during World War II distracted many from the value of his literary work. Nevertheless, his status as a major American poet has never been in doubt, as this choice collection of fifty-seven early poems amply proves. Here are poems — including a number not found in other anthologies — from Personae (1909), Exultations (1909), Ripostes (1912), and Cathay (1915) as well as selections from his major sequence "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920).

    Drawing on themes that are similar to the ones in his novels, these poems are a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions.Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe, dedication, and--ultimately--redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transportation, indifferent landscapes and lonely nights, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos.Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Unreconciled stands in the tradition of Baudelaire while making a bold new claim on contemporary verse. It reveals that in addition to his work as an incisive novelist, Houellebecq is one of our most perceptive poets with a vision of our era that brims with tensions that cannot--and will not--be reconciled.

    Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them.Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.

    A child prodigy as a pianist and a virtuoso conductor of symphonics and operas, Barenhoim has known and worked with many of the most distinguished and exciting musicians of the 20th century, including Rubinstein, Furtwangler, Zubin Meta, Pierre Boulez, Fisher-Diskau, Pablo Casals, and not least his wife, Jacqueline du Pre. Recent years have included his work at the annual Wagner festival Bayreuth; in Berlin at the rebirth of the State Opera House; taking over from George Solti's 22-year regin in Chicago; his summer festival in Weimar, Germany, where young Arabs and Israelis can play music together; and his worldwide travels. Barenboim has revised and updated his memoir, giving us trenchant thoughts on Israel today, the problems facing young musicians, and the changing world of music at the beginning of the 21st century.-One of the world's greatest musicians, Barenboim has a dedicated following who will be interested in reading about his life in his own words.-Barenboim was married to celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pre, the subject of the controversial film Hilary and Jackie.-His championship of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians is highly controversial, as is his insistence on playing Wagner in Israel.

    From his earliest years, he writes in “Will,” he had “the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong / . . . and that I too was worthy of love.” This rage comes coupled with the poet’s own brand of love, what he calls “one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts.” Poetry is indeed Wright’s help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden Pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the great Ohio River, where “Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee” and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, “examining the tear on a dead face.”Here, in Wheeling Motel, Wright’s poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, and with his own combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.

    His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

    Here in this exciting and totally original book of poems the narrator corresponds with L. about her hidden passions, her relationship with her husband and adolescent daughters, lost loves, and erotic fantasies. Kimiko Hahn's collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful. Borrowing from both Japanese and Chinese traditions, Hahn offers us an authentic and complex narrator struggling with the sorrows and pleasures of being a woman against the backdrop of her Japanese-American roots.

    These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable career and appear here for the first time with his illustrations. With its lyrical intensity and sensual immediacy, Fifteen Poems offers a potent distillation of the genre-crossing genius of one of the most admired artists of our time.

    Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.

    As Louise Glück observes in her foreword, “Green Squall begins and ends in the garden”; however, Hopler’s gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyric—his gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler’s work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens’s tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath Green Squall’s lush tropical surfaces a terrifying world in which nightmare and celebration are indistinguishable, and hope is synonymous with despair.

    Trained in classical Greek and Latin, Phillips seems to excavate as he forms words into lines, breaking images into tiny parts of thought as he digs for meaning and accuracy. As part of this excavation, Pastoral explores what flesh, wanting, and belief are made of. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips has produced four collections of accomplished verse in the past few years. In each book, the influence of classical syntax and rhythm can be heard. And with each book, Phillips refines his poetic voice, combining the prayerlike and the erotic, and often elegantly swooping from a whisper to a scream in the space of a few stanzas.This time, the poems fall along a wide range of tones, from italicized commands like "Let me" and "Now" in the poem "Lay Me Down" to a hesitant question, or a deepening well of self-doubt. Phillips is always original, and he's always remembering, even when a poem is firmly written in present tense. He is hyperaware not only of the ancient poets, but also of history, especially the great destructions.In the ominously titled "The Kill," he remembers a familiar daily scene. The speaker analyzes his own love for another in clinical detail that suddenly veers into longing. The way these lines break adds to the sense of tragic fragment, of an ache:      The last time I gave my body up,      to you, I was minded       briefly what it is made of,       what yours is, that      I'd forgotten, the flesh      which always       I hold in plenty no       little sorrow for because -- oh, do      but think on its predicament,      and weep.In just four stanzas, Phillips moves from an image of both love and surrender to a consideration of temporality -- the bald fact that his lover is mortal. This thought of "its predicament" makes him weep, even though death is not a stated issue here.In "The Kill," the last poem in the volume, the speaker anticipates the need to remember. The second poem in the book referred to Pompeii, and the shadow of Pompeii is still resonant as the speaker describes his lover's body, still current and alive despite the title's warning.He remembers a body he has felt before, and probably will feel again -- judging by the present tense of "what yours is." And yet, the speaker here feels the need to freeze that body in time, to memorialize it. The next stanza explains this strong urge to hold on:      We cleave most entirely      to what most we fear      losing. We fear loss      because we understand       the fact of it, its largeness, its      utter indifference to whether      we do, or don't,       ignore it. The "largeness" of loss is what these poems are loath to accept, even as they seek to understand. Each poem tries to break loss down into questions, confessions, prayers, or simple expressions of doubt. While the poems fight against death and inevitable loss, they also seem to seek moral guidance to help with these losses.Nowhere is the search for answers and guidance more apparent than at the endings of these poems, which are frequently questions. Phillips is fond of abrupt, mysterious dashes as conclusions. In his quest for a moral compass, he also quotes from "Lamentations" and draws on familiar Biblical stories. The wanderings of Cain, for example, seem to appear in the backgrounds of poems where man seeks. What's more, the epigraph is from George Herbert, the great poet of faith and the war between faith and flesh. The sense of struggle between opposing ideas is something Phillips incorporates and modernizes into a contemporary parable of carnal love and constant questioning of that love. There's a frequent seesawing in the book, a back-and-forth on the big questions that permeates even the simplest narrative. For example, in "Favor," the second section of a five-part poem called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips sees a man in the distance:      Even from a distance, I can tell:       a man, clearly.       Gods cast no shadow. The struggle between man and God, between flesh and faith, is hinted at in the first stanza. Man, for Phillips, is an instrument of struggle, a tortured wanderer. The poem continues:      Also, that he tires,       stops to rest, looks like      sleeping, or could use some.       How long he has been,       coming, how long it takes, just      to cross it, the lush      measure that -- all summer -- has      been these well-groomed,       well-fed grounds, the lake      unswum and gleaming, the light      catching, losing      the useless extravagancePhillips basically forms the scene of a man walking into a discussion of man's temporality, the fact that man tires. While what God makes -- "the lake unswum and gleaming" -- needs to make no effort to be beautiful, man exhausts himself just surviving. By the last two stanzas, the speaker concludes that the body must make bets with itself:      Always, the body      wagering --      up, through itself --       Give. What he wants, he shall have.In Phillips's work, man -- though mortal -- still has great power. Man can demand, man can inspire love, and man can pray. In the struggle between man and God, in that constant "wagering," man sometimes wins.&3151;Aviya Kushner

    Her notes cover a period of just under three months, during which time she witnessed and experienced all aspects of the German occupation of the city and the repression of the Jews there. One of a very few diaries written by young people in this region of Europe during the war, Eva's diary offers a close-up contemporaneous view of the decimation of a fragment of Hungary's Jewish community.

    Part 1, Life and Times, traces Larkin’s early years and follows his development, within his career as a university librarian, into one of the most important and popular voices in twentieth-century poetry. Part 2, Artistic Strategies, explores a range of methodologies and aesthetic influences by which Larkin was able to create poetry at once both accessible and profound. Part 3, Reading Larkin, provides detailed critical commentary on many of the poems from his three major collections, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Part 4, Reception, outlines the history of Larkin’s reputation from the mid-1950s to the present, examining the debates and ideological confrontations to which his poetry has given rise.BEWARE FAKE REVIEWS ON AMAZON.COM. ****Five Star Reviews on Amazon UK*****Insightful Assessment of a still under-rated Poet. I found this book gripped me from the start. Confirming some things I though I knew, illuminating areas I knew little about and flatly contradicting some misconceptions, the book is insightful, sympathetic and, of course, literate. Here is the real Larkin - a poet I admired more than liked, revealed to be more interesting and accomplished than I knew. By RoyAn Excellent Larkin Teacher provides a great insight into the Poet and his Times. This book reflects great scholarship. Mr Gilroy is a dedicated and insightful reader of Larkin and I recommend this book simply because it has made Larkin one of my favorite poets. By Alexandros Alexandropoulos

    In his second collection of poetry, The Dark Between Stars, he turns his attention to the dualities of our lived experiences—the inescapable connections between our highest highs and lowest lows. He captures the infectious energy of starting a relationship, the tumultuous realities of commitment, and the agonizing nostalgia of being alone again. While grappling with the question of how to live with purpose and find meaning in the journey, these poems offer both honest explorations of loneliness and our search for connection, as well as light-hearted, humorous observations. As Atticus writes poignantly about dancing, Paris, jazz clubs, sunsets, sharing a bottle of wine on the river, rainy days, creating, and destroying, he illustrates that we need moments of both beauty and pain—the darkness and the stars—to fully appreciate all that life and love have to offer.