Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him.Young's poetic channeling of Basquiat--a jostling, poignant brand of downtownspeak--makes for an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred." To Repel Ghosts, along with Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues and Black Maria, his recent book of film noir verse, forms an American trilogy--Devil's Music--that explores other art forms through poetry. In its creation, Yound has become a poet whose work speaks both for and beyond his genre, with a music all its own.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    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.

    Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.Before becoming a poet, Brenda Coultas was a farmer, a carny, a taffy maker, a park ranger, a waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence, and Open City. She lives one block from the Bowery in New York City.

    Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, Iron John -- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1999 reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.

    Edited by one of our most respected contemporary poets, Robert Creeley, who provides an informative introduction, George Oppen's Selected Poems includes Oppen's only known essay, "A Mind's Own Place," as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments" which Oppen wrote on envelopes and scraps of paper and posted to his wall, edited by Stephen Cope. Also incorporated is a helpful chronology and bibliography of his writings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, celebrated editor of Oppen's letters. On his death, Hugh Kenner wrote, "George Oppen, gentlest of men...prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy." Oppen's Selected Poems is the perfect text for teaching and a remarkable window into a world of lasting light and clarity.

    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

    This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.“Living Room Altar”Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean,except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt,except for her body, which once held their bodies,my sister wants everything back now—If there were a god who could out of empty shellscarried by waves to shoremake amends—If the ocean saved in a jarcould keep from turning to salt—She’s hearing things:bird calling to bird,cat outside the door,thorn of the blackberry against the trellis."These heart-breaking poems of an all-too-human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so." —Robert Creeley

    Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange."This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald JusticeIn Tennessee I Found a FireflyFlashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clungto the dark of it: the legs of the spiderheld the tucked wings close,held the abdomen still in the midst of callingwith thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to rememberthe two stuck together like burrs. I try to place themcentral in my mind where everything else mustsurround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.There is courtship, and there is hunger. I supposethere are grips from which even angels cannot fly.Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.When I am tired of only touching,I have my mouth to try to tell youwhat, in your arms, is not erased"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald Justice

    Where Many Rivers Meet: Poems

    His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

    E. Cummings' most experimental poems as well as some of his most memorable. The volume includes such no-famous celebrations as "i sing of Olaf glad and big" and "if there are any heavens my mother will (all be herself) have," along with such favorites as "Space being (don't forget to remember) Curved," "a clown's smirk in the skull of a baboon," and "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond."

    Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."