Book picks similar to
Daily Horoscope: Poems by Dana Gioia


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Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts


Jorie Graham - 1980
    Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) Mother's Sewing Box, For My Father Looking for My Uncle, and The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria. Finally, the poet's words again: . . . you get / just what you want and (just before that), Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires.--Marvin Bell

Selected Poems


James Schuyler - 1988
    One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

Itself


Rae Armantrout - 2015
    Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem Price Points where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but gets no points for originality. In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout's poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens--even when she's glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space. An online reader's companion is available at http: //raearmantrout.site.wesleyan.edu.

For the Union Dead


Robert Lowell - 1964
    In the poem, Lowell's visit to the park leads to a series of associations that the dug-up park conjures. First, watching the construction of the underground parking garage beneath the Common makes him think about his childhood and how Boston had changed; in particular, the South Boston Aquarium that he'd visited as a child had recently been demolished in 1954.This leads him to think about the Robert Gould Shaw memorial and the history associated with the memorial (including Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led). Finally, Lowell thinks of the then-controversial civil rights movement and the images of the integration of black and white schoolchildren that Lowell had recently seen on television.The final lines of the poem, which read, "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease" are particularly well-known for their rather dark description of the large American cars that were popular at the time.

Love Poems


Pablo Neruda - 1952
    Mostly written on the island paradise of Capri (the idyllic setting of the Oscar-winning movie Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet, and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.And when you appearall the rivers soundin my body, bellsshake the sky,and a hymn fills the world.        © 1973 by Neruda & Walsh

The Romance of a Busy Broker


O. Henry - 1906
    

The Clerk's Tale: Poems


Spencer Reece - 2004
    The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

A Shropshire Lad


A.E. Housman - 1896
    E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Scholars and critics have seen in these timeless poems an elegance of taste and perfection of form and feeling comparable to the greatest of the classic. Yet their simple language, strong musical cadences and direct emotional appeal have won these works a wide audience among general readers as well.This finely produced volume, reprinted from an authoritative edition of A Shropshire Lad, contains all 63 original poems along with a new Index of First Lines and a brief new section of Notes to the Text. Here are poems that deal poignantly with the changing climate of friendship, the fading of youth, the vanity of dreams — poems that are among the most read, shared, and quoted in our language.

Little Girls in Church


Kathleen Norris - 1995
    Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet.  Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.

Sorrows and Smiles


Dee Williams - 2000
    Robbie's a lovely lad, much less dangerous than Lu Cappa, who's always giving her the eye when he's out in his ice-cream van. Pam has to ask her best friend Jill to cover for her while she's out with Robbie. When Ivy finds out Pam's been lying, she makes sure the relationship with Robbie is over for good. Then Jill falls in love, and it's loneliness that makes Pam accept a date with Lu Cappa. Before she knows it, they're married. Even then, Pam knows Lu's still jealous of Robbie. And she can't help wondering what Lu's up to when he's out with his shifty brother. When Robbie comes back into their lives, it could be the last straw. One thing's for sure: until everyone starts to tell the truth, there will be as many sorrows as smiles in Pam's marriage...

A Man to Die for


Suvika - 2015
    After three broken engagements I’m not going to waste my emotional energy on something that’s not going to give me anything.” – Shikha Bose.“I think my husband is having an affair with one of his colleagues. But I’m afraid to ask. Now it’s just in my head but if I ask and he doesn’t deny, it will become a reality.” – Preeti Singh.“My boyfriend doesn’t want to acknowledge me even as his friend in front of his family, let alone the fact that we’re lovers. It’s like I’m his dirty little secret.” – Siya Grewal.So the three friends come to a unanimous conclusion. Men suck. And like the characters in a sci-fi flick, perfect men are fictitious. The discussion takes off from there and ends with a post on social media. Attributes that this fictitious man should possess; some genuine, some funny and some downright naughty. Response to that post is unexpected in more ways than one. A Man to Die for creates a sensation with countless likes, retweets and forwards. And when the identities of the post-makers are revealed, the three friends are left to face the judging looks and snide comments. But when comments escalate to threatening calls and one of the three gets brutally murdered, the other two flounder in shock, grief, fear and fury. Someone has taken the post as a personal insult and was out for retribution by killing their friend and vowing to kill them too. Now, with the help of a DCP, who, according to Shikha was a dubious combination of a jerk and a hero, the killer must be caught. As the police race to unravel the identity, the killer strikes again...

3 Summers


Lisa Robertson - 2016
    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

The Last of the Belles


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1929
    

Selected Poems 1934-1952


Dylan Thomas - 1975
    This book was then and remained, for all practical purposes, Thomas's "collected" poems and in that sense complete. However, with the 1971 publication of the 192 poems in The Poems of Dylan Thomas (also now available in a revised edition), Thomas's Collected Poems has naturally evolved to become Thomas's Selected Poems.Thomas wrote his last poem, "Prologue," especially to begin this collection, and addressed it to "my readers, the strangers." Two unfinished poems are included in this edition: "Elegy," prepared by Vernon Watkins, and "In Country Heaven," prepared by Daniel Jones—both Welsh poets were life-long friends of Dylan Thomas. Textual corrections discovered over the course of forty years have now been incorporated, and a complete index of titles and first lines, as well as a brief chronology of the author's life, have been added.As it has for half a century, this book includes the best of Dylan Thomas's poetry—"Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines," "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," "Poem in October," "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," "The Hunchback in the Park," "In My Craft or Sullen Art," "In Country Sleep," and Thomas's poignant reflection on his youth, "Fern Hill."

Tennyson: Selected Poetry


Alfred Tennyson - 1985
    This edition of his selected poems includes classics like: - " The Lady of Shalott" - " Charge of the Light Brigade" - " Maud" - " Morte d'Arthur" - " Ulysses" - " The Lotus Eaters" Elegantly packaged with a ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library.