Poems To Live By in Uncertain Times


Joan Murray - 2001
    In the wake of our nation's tragedy, poetry has taken on a new relevance in people's lives. As Dinitia Smith noted in The New York Times, "In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves-and one another-with poetry in an almost unprecedented way."Poems to Live By features sixty of the finest poems by an international group of distinguished writers, including W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Yehuda Amichai, Mary Oliver, Miguel de Unamuno, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds. Agreeing with Kenneth Burke that literature is equipment for living, Murray has arranged the anthology in six sections that address our most urgent concerns: death and remembrance, fear and suffering, affirmations and rejoicings, warnings and instructions, war and rumors of war, meditations and conversations.Beginning with Faiz Ahmed Faiz's somber remembrance ('This is the way that autumn came to the trees: / it stripped them down to the skin') and concluding with D. H. Lawrence's simple and deep-felt "Pax," Poems to Live By addresses our need for wisdom in dark times, whether those times are personal or the ones we live through together.

Nature and Selected Essays


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1836
    His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for a reliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism.Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years.

Selected Writings


Gérard de Nerval - 1855
    "This selection of writings - the first such comprehensive gathering to appear in English - provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belletrist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to 'Aurelia', the memoir of his madness, 'Sylvie' (considered a 'masterpiece' by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras', this volume includes Nerval's Doppelganger tales and experimental fictions. Selections from his correspondence demonstrate a lucid awareness of the strategies by which nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his visionary imagination to the purgatory of mental illness.

World Heritage Sites: A Complete Guide to 890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites


UNESCO - 2009
    In response, UNESCO launched an international safeguarding campaign, which ultimately led to the list of World Heritage sites. In clear text that highlights all the fascinating facts, World Heritage Sites details all 878 properties, including the 20 American and 15 Canadian sites. Covering 141 countries, the World Heritage List has proved to be a valuable tool in the battle to preserve much of the world's cultural and natural heritage. Its strict criteria result in only the world's most spectacular and extraordinary sites making it onto the list, including: The Acropolis in Athens, The Statue of Liberty in New York, The Rideau Canal in eastern Ontario, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, the world's first international peace park, which straddles the US-Canada border, The ancient Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan, The remarkable Dazu Rock Carvings in China, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Missouri, the largest pre- Columbian settlement north of Mexico, The unique ecosystem of the Serengeti in Tanzania, And 870 more. Featuring gorgeous photographs and a location map for every site, World Heritage Sites is uniquely comprehensive. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 with the ambitious goal to build peace in the minds of men and women through education, social and natural science, culture and communication.

A Year with G. K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit, and Wonder


Kevin Belmonte - 2012
    . . . Chesterton’s talent for paradox, and his ability to embodyprofound truth in simple images, makes him as compelling now as he was ahundred years ago. . . . He was a prophet in his own time and a prophet forours, speaking out against insidious evils and kindling us all again to acommon love of the common good.” —The Reverend Dr. Malcolm Guite, chaplain of Girton College,Cambridge University “This world of ours has some purpose; and if there is apurpose, there is a Person. I had always felt life first as a story: and ifthere is a story, there is a Storyteller.” —G. K. Chesterton A Year with G. K. Chesterton daily brings this truth to life. And we areheir to the winsome, arresting, utterly original outpouring of Chesterton’sreasons for hope. During his lifetime, a host of perspectives clamored for hisattention, but he saw nothing as vital and alive as Christianity. Readers ofthis book will find their faith strengthened and enriched, even as they see themany reasons why George Bernard Shaw called Chesterton “a colossal genius.” A true anthology,the best of Chesterton’s many works are presented in concise, memorableselections. From New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve, each page contains a passageof Scripture and myriad moments for reflection, appreciation, and laughter. “Chesterton once aday? Well, that’s a start. It is good to see that someone is finallyrecognizing the need for a daily minimum requirement of mirth and meditationfrom GKC.”—Dale Ahlquist, President, AmericanChesterton Society“Kevin Belmonte writes in the preface to this excellent bookthat his editing of it has been a gift. As an author who has written regularlyon Chesterton I can understand his sense of gratitude at having been able tospend so much time with a genius as genial as the great GKC. Thanks toBelmonte's labor of love we can all spend a few moments of every day of the yearin Chesterton's inimitable company. All admirers of Chesterton and theChristian truth he explicates so sublimely will be grateful to Kevin Belmontefor this gem of a gift.”—Joseph Pearce, author of Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K.Chesterton"Who could not be grateful for a year spent with GKC?The great subverter of everything taken for granted, he stretches and deepensus with his insights, shakes us with his startling paradoxes and delights uswith his wit. Thank God there is no getting to the end of Chesterton." —Os Guinness, author of A Free People's Suicide

Book of Longing


Leonard Cohen - 2006
    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

A Sor Juana Anthology


Juana Inés de la Cruz - 1988
    Sor (Sister) Juana Ines de la Cruz was acclaimed in her time as "Phoenix of Mexico, America's Tenth Muse"; a generation later she was forgotten. In our century she was rediscovered, her works were reissued, and she is now considered one of the finest Hispanic poets of the seventeenth century. She deserves to be known to English-speaking readers for another reason as well: she speaks directly to our concern for the freedom of women to realize themselves artistically and intellectually.Her poetry is surprising in its scope and variety. She handled with ease the intricate verse forms of her day and wrote in a wide range of genres. Many of her lyrics reflect the worldliness and wit of the courtly society she moved in before becoming a nun; some, composed to be sung, offer charming glimpses of the native people, their festivities and colorful diversity. Alan Trueblood has chosen, in consultation with Octavio Paz, a generous selection of Sor Juana's writings and has provided an introductory overview of her life and work. The short poems, and excerpts from her play The Divine Narcissus, are accompanied by the Spanish texts on facing pages. Her long philosophical poem, First Dream, is translated in its entirety, as is her famous autobiographical letter to the Bishop of Puebla, which is both a self-defense and a vindication of the right of women to cultivate their minds.The Anthology was conceived as a companion to the English-language edition of Octavio Paz's magisterial study of Sor Juana. On its own, it will be welcomed as the first representative selection in English of her verse and prose.

The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert


George Herbert - 1633
    This collection contains a mild modernization of Herbert's complete poems.

The Eclogues


Virgil
    For despite their rustic setting and the beauty of their phrasing, the poems in Virgil's first collection are also grounded in reality. Shepherds are overwhelmed by the torments of poetic love - but they must also endure such real-life events as the tragic consequences of Julius Caesar's murder in 44 bc and a civil war. In giving unforgettable expression to the disasters of the day through poetry, the Eclogues paved the way for the Georgics and the Aeneid, the two greatest works of Latin literature, and are also a major masterpiece in their own right.

Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Corduroy Kid


Simon Armitage - 2006
    Man versus monster; conflict versus conversation; age versus youth; humanity versus its environment; utopia versus what we're living through now. This is a combative and moving book and an answer to anyone who's ever accused poetry of receding into irrelevance.

Don't Tell Me to Be Quiet


Christina Hart - 2019
    You never mourned loudly, in the streets. You never stopped (couldn’t stop) to wonder if drowning parts ofyourself was a mistake. You never kissed them goodbye.Why didn’t you kiss them goodbye?Was it too hard?Were you ashamed?Of them, or of you?Don’t tell me to be quiet.You need to hear this. Christina Hart, bestselling author of Empty Hotel Rooms Meant for Us, Letting Go Is an Acquired Taste, and There Is Beauty In the Bleeding releases her new poetry chapbook, written in second person POV, which focuses on love, loss, and hope.

One Hundred and One Famous Poems: With a Prose Supplement


Roy Jay CookJames Russell Lowell - 1916
    Nature, man and human history are reflected on in the verse of English and American poets and such prose works as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence.

Death and Taxes


Dorothy Parker - 1931
    

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience


Unknown
    SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT is one of the most important alliterative poems of Medieval literature

To a Fault


Nick Laird - 2005
    Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.