Good Poems


Garrison Keillor - 2002
    And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." Good Poems includes verse about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

Best Remembered Poems


Martin Gardner - 1992
    Vincent Millay to Edward Lear's whimsical "The Owl and the Pussycat" and James Whitcomb Riley’s homespun "When the Frost Is on the Punkin." Famous poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Frost are well-represented, as are less well-known poets such as John McCrae ("In Flanders Fields") and Ernest Thayer ("Casey at the Bat"). Includes 10 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Casey at the Bat," "Jabberwocky," "O Captain! My Captain!," "Paul Revere's Ride," "Ozymandias," "The Raven," "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "Mending Wall," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Girly Man


Charles Bernstein - 2006
    Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China


David Hinton - 2002
    China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The "rivers-and-mountains" tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.

The Best American Poetry 2000


Rita Dove - 1990
    Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979


Susan Howe - 1996
    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

Collected Poems, 1909-1962


T.S. Eliot - 1963
    Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost


Harold Bloom - 2004
    For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry--a master critic’s distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Blooms writes “the work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves.” This essay is an invaluable guide to poetry.This edition will also include a recommended reading list of poems.

Selected Poems


Stevie Smith - 1978
    Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time


Katharine Washburn - 1998
    World Poetry encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.While World Poetry includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer—more than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right.This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.

The Penguin Book of Haiku


Adam L. Kern - 2016
    Most famously, they use natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality. However, as this anthology reveals, there’s much more to haiku than cherry blossoms and waning moons: the verse included here is frequently erotic, funny, rude, and mischievous. Adam Kern has travelled throughout Japan to gather the best and most important examples of the genre, and his vivid and engaging translations form the basis of the Penguin Book of Haiku.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Poem For The Day Two


Retta Bowen - 2003
    There are 366 poems (one for each day of the year, and one for leap years), to delight, inspire and excite. Chosen for their magic and memorability, the poems in this anthology are an exultant mix of old and new from across the world, poems to learn by heart and take to heart.

The Poets Laureate Anthology


Elizabeth Hun Schmidt - 2010
    Schmidt offers the first anthology to gather poems by the 43 poets laureate of the United States.

Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works


Virginia Woolf - 1994
    Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) The Waves (1931) The Years (1937) Between the Acts (1941) THE 'BIOGRAPHIES' Orlando: a biography (1928) Flush: a biography (1933) Roger Fry: a biography (1940) THE STORIES Two Stories (1917) Kew Gardens (1919) Monday or Tuesday (1921) A Haunted House, and other short stories (1944) Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble (1966) Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973) The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985) THE ESSAYS Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) The Common Reader I (1925) A Room of One's Own (1929) On Being Ill (1930) The London Scene (1931) A Letter to a Young Poet (1932) The Common Reader II (1932) Walter Sickert: a conversation (1934) Three Guineas (1938) Reviewing (1939) The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1942) The Moment, and other essays (1947) The Captain's Death Bed, and other essays (1950) Granite and Rainbow (1958) Books and Portraits (1978) Women And Writing (1979) 383 Essays from newspapers and magazines AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING A Writer's Diary (1953) Moments of Being (1976) The Diary Vols. 1–5 (1977-84) The Letters Vols. 1–6 (1975-80) The Letters of V.W. and Lytton Strachey (1956)  A Passionate Apprentice. The Early Journals 1887-1909 (1990)  THE PLAY Freshwater: A Comedy (both versions) (1976)

One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year


Kenneth Rexroth - 1970
    Most of the songs are simple, erotic lyrics. Some are attributed to legendary courtesans, while others may have been sung at harvest festivals or marriage celebrations. In addition to the folk songs, Rexroth offers a wide sampling of Chinese verse: works by 60 different poets, from the third century to our own time. Rexroth always translated Chinese poetry—as he said—“solely to please myself.” And he created, with remarkable success, English versions which stand as poems in their own right.