Book picks similar to
Venus and the Rain by Medbh McGuckian


poetry
uni
feminist
less-than-1-000-reviews

Contract Law


Ewan McKendrick - 2000
    McKendrick explores the underlying themes and explains the basic rules of English contract law, introducing the current debates about the nature, scope and functions of this law and discussing some of the wider controversies surrounding basic doctrines.

Unveiled: Voices of Women in Afghanistan


Harriet Logan - 2002
    This book seeks to tell the personal stories, through photographs and short anecdotes, of several women in Afghanistan who spent years depersonalised behind their veils. In 1997, Harriet Logan went to Afghanistan and met a phenomenal group of women with strong personalities and great dreams for their lives. Despite the peril to her life and theirs, she photographed them.From November to December 2001, Logan returned to Afghanistan to find these women again, and to learn how their situation had evolved since the first time she met them, under the repressive rule of the Taliban. In so doing, Harriet also met more outstanding women, and recorded the womens' existing doubts and enduring hopes for a better future.

Quicksand


Nella Larsen - 1928
    As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence. Quicksand , Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.

The Scarlet Ibis: Poems


Susan Hahn - 2007
    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

Pandemonium


Armando Iannucci - 2021
    It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.

Declaration of Sentiments


Elizabeth Cady Stanton - 1848
    The next day, July 20th, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration. Most of the resolutions won unanimous approval. However, the suffrage resolution only passed by the narrowest of margins. This edition contains the complete text of the Declaration, along with brief biographies of the signers.

Where the Words End and My Body Begins


Amber Dawn - 2015
    By doing so, Dawn delves deeper into the themes of trauma, memory, and unblushing sexuality that define her work.Amber Dawn is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa and the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (winner of the Vancouver Book Award). Her other awards include the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize.

The Rape of the Lock


Alexander Pope - 1717
    A satirical poem that intentionally over-dramatizes an incident in which a lock of a woman's hair is cut without her permission.

Pearl: A New Verse Translation


Unknown - 2016
    A perfect complement to his historic translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl reanimates another beloved Medieval English masterpiece thought to be by the same anonymous author and housed in the same original fourteenth-century manuscript. Honoring the rhythms and alliterative music of the original, Armitage’s virtuosic translation describes a man mourning the loss of his Pearl—something that has “slipped away.” What follows is a tense, fascinating, and tender dialogue weaving through the throes of grief toward divine redemption. Intricate and endlessly connected, Armitage’s lyrical translation is a circular and perfected whole, much like the pearl itself.

Questions of Travel


Elizabeth Bishop - 1965
    It is Miss Bishop's first volume of verse since Poems, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.  This new collection consists of two parts. Under the general heading "Brazil" are grouped eleven poems including "Manuelzinho," "The Armadillo," "Twelfth Morning, or What You Will," "The Riverman," "Brazil, January 1, 1502" and the title poem. The second section, entitled "Elsewhere," includes others "First Death in Nova Scotia," "Manners," "Sandpiper," "From Trollope's Journal," and "Visits to St. Elizabeths." In addition to the poems there is an extraordinary story of a Nova Scotia childhood, "In the Village." Robert Lowell has recently written, "I am sure no living poet is as curious and observant as Miss Bishop. What cuts so deep is that each poem is inspired by her own tone, a tone of large, grave tenderness and sorrowing amusement. She is too sure of herself for empty mastery and breezy plagiarism, too interested for confession and musical monotony, too powerful for mismanaged fire, and too civilized for idiosyncratic incoherence. She has a humorous, commanding genius for picking up the unnoticed, now making something sprightly and right, and now a great monument. Once her poems, each shining, were too few. Now they are many. When we read her, we enter the classical serenity of a new country."

The Eternal City: Poems


Kathleen Graber - 2010
    Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.______From The Eternal City WHAT I MEANT TO SAY Kathleen Graber ?In three weeks I will be gone. Already my suitcase standsoverloaded at the door. I've packed, unpacked, & repacked it, making it tell me again & again what it couldn't hold.Some days it's easy to see the signifi cant insignificanceof everything, but today I wept all morning over the swollen, optimistic heart of my mother's favorite newscaster, which suddenly blew itself to stillness. I have tried for weeksto predict the weather on the other side of the world: I don't wantto be wet or overheated. I've taken out The Complete Shakespeare to make room for a slicker. And I've changed my mind& put it back. Soon no one will know what I mean when I speak.Last month, after graduation, a student stopped me just outsidethe University gates despite a downpour. He wanted to tell methat he loved best James Schuyler's poem for Auden.So much to remember, he recited in the rain, as the shopsbegan to close their doors around us. I thought he would livea long time. He did not. Then, a car loaded with his friendspulled up honking & he hopped in. There was no chance to linger& talk. Today I slipped into the bag between two shoes that bookwhich begins with a father digging--even though my fatherwas no farmer & planted ever only one myrtle late in his life& sat in the yard all that summer watching it grow as he died, a green tank of oxygen suspirating behind him. If the suitcasewere any larger, no one could lift it. I'm going away for a long time, but it may not be forever. There are tragedies I haven't read.Kyle, bundle up. You're right. It's hard to say simply what is true.For Kyle Booten ?

Lightduress


Paul Celan - 1970
    Once again this bilingual volume, translated in this edition for the first time in English, reveals the importance of the great Romanian-German poet, who lived for most of his life in France. Translator Pierre Joris has achieved a great feat in bringing these three volumes into the English language.

Black Cat Bone: Poems


John Burnside - 2011
    These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth / and muzzle / coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why / they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find — in the forest or in our own hearts — ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there.Full of risk and wonder, Black Cat Bone shows the range of Burnside's abilities, but also strikes out for new territories. He remains consistently, though, one of our finest living lyric poets and each of these astonishing poems is as clear and memorable as 'a silver bracelet // falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.

Fireflies at 3 am


Danni Thomas - 2020
    It’s a book with the flow of poetry but the ebb of short stories – rightfully called “Shoetry”. This creation takes you to the roots of humanity - stripping back the veneers of life, society and interaction to see people and their ways in an entirely new light.

The Abridged History of Rainfall


Jay Hopler - 2016
    In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.