Advertising in New York Review of Books and Village Voice Literary Supplement.

    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.

    The editing, with excellent notes, excerpts from Brecht's own views about poetry and Mr. Willett's concise introduction is exemplary. Most important, the translations by 35 poets, among them H.R. Hayes, Peter Levi, Christopher Middleton, and Naomi Replansky, maintain a high standard of accuracy and often convey a very clear idea of the texture and feeling of the German." --Stephen Spender, "The New York Times Book Review"

    Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

    Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people.  Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives.  Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.

    Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

    The Woman of the Pharisees--one of Mauriac's most accomplished novels--is a penetrating evocation of the moral and religious values of a Bordeaux community. In Brigitte, we see how the ideals of love and companionship are stifled in the presence of a self-righteous woman whose austere religious principals lead her to interfere--disastrously--in the lives of others. One by one the unwitting victims fall prey to the bleakness of her "perfection." A conscientious schoolteacher, a saintly priest, her husband and stepdaughter and an innocent schoolboy are all confronted with tragedy and upheaval. But the author's extraordinary gift for psychological insight goes on to show how redeeming features inevitably surface from disaster. The unfolding drama is seen through the discerning eye of a young Louis--Brigitte's stepson--whose point of view is skillfully blended into the mature and understanding adult he later becomes.

    Doubly blessed is the English-reader, for in this volume he gets Zbigniew Herbert's work rendered by Czeslaw Milosz: like the poor, or better yet like nature herself, Polish genius takes care of its own.This collection of poems is bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate. For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor--in his case well-tempered and shining indeed--for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic norethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them frorn that poverty which every form of human eviI finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely.-- Joseph Brodsky

    Of the poet's persona Octavio Paz declares, "his words strike us as truths from another age, that age in which everything was the same." "The Keeper of Sheep" is appears here in its original Portuguese beside its first English translation.bilingual ed, poetry tr Edwin Honig & Susan Brown

    For this new paperback edition, Mr. Burke continues his "curve of development" in an Addendum which surveys the course of his though in subsequent books (up to the publication of his Collected Poems, 1915 - 1967) and work-in-progress.

    The maid comes to the bedroom to clean. She inevitably forgets something -- the soap, fresh sheets, a bucket -- or does something wrong. The master has had a nightmare he can't quite recall that had something to do with when he was in school: lectures, or was it lechers? No matter, the maid must be reprimanded for her neglect, and out comes the handy paraphernalia -- a hairbrush, a cat-o'-nine-tails, a rod, a cane -- and the spanking begins.Included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon and named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her "favorite" S/M books, Spanking the Maid is a spare, tantalizing, and perfect book by an American master.

    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

    This exceptional volume brings together the most comprehensive selection of poems by Breton available in the English language. Here, in a bilingual French-English format are 73 poems representing all styles and stages of the writer's career.

    Stephen Spender for The New York Review of Books commented: "One of the most brilliant strokes in this novel about relations in the Thirties between Italians and Germans is that Moravia never reveals whether his Italian narrator and hero is serious or not, and doubt about the seriousness lies in his being Italian. ... This is the truth of the book: that within the external situation of the Italian Fascist--German Nazi relationship it is impossible to accept as authentic virtually anything people do."Moravia is not simply painting the portrait of an age but also coming to grips through his art with the great questions of all ages - the erotic, love, death, and the purpose of life. 1934 recapitulates the major themes of his art and at the same time takes us beyond them.

    Thought-provoking stories capture the turbulent history of Cuba and the Cuban people, from the discovery of the beautiful island through the last year before Castro's revolution.