I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmont to bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach." Prentice McHoan has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring Scottish family. Full of questions about the McHoan past, present and future, he is also deeply preoccupied: mainly with death, sex, drink, God and illegal substances...

    This landmark collection brings together the best of his verse, including many pieces that have never before appeared in English.   These poems span the whole of Nabokov’s career, from the newly discovered “Music,” written in 1914, to the short, playful “To Véra,” composed in 1974. Many are newly translated by Dmitri Nabokov, including The University Poem, a sparkling novel in verse modeled on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that constitutes a significant new addition to Nabokov’s oeuvre. Included too are such poems as “Lilith”, an early work which broaches the taboo theme revisited nearly forty years later in Lolita, and “An Evening of Russian Poetry”, a masterpiece in which Nabokov movingly mourns his lost language in the guise of a versified lecture on Russian delivered to college girls. The subjects range from the Russian Revolution to the American refrigerator, taking in on the way motel rooms, butterflies, ice-skating, love, desire, exile, loneliness, language, and poetry itself; and the poet whirls swiftly between the brilliantly painted facets of his genius, wearing masks that are, by turns, tender, demonic, sincere, self-parodying, shamanic, visionary, and ingeniously domestic.

    tr Rosmarie Waldrop, second of 2-vol set

    Known as one of the greatest poets of the Restoration, he wrote and published popular satirical and bawdy poetry. This complete collection of his poetry presented in this paperback edition by Filiquarian Publishing, is a classic and should be read by those interested in the writings of John Wilmot, and satire writings throughout history. You can't go wrong with classic poems such as, "Signior Dildo," "By All Love's Soft, Yet Mighty Powers," and "A Satyre Against Mankind."

    The author's second collection of poems which prints some of his most revered work including Pike, Hawk Roosting, and November.

    A neglected child, she's still looking for love as an adult; and so she finds herself married to Daniel. How could she know that he would misbehave?Cora O'Brien is the total opposite; outrageous and outspoken, she inspires the children she teaches with her enthusiasm. The city can't soften her Highland lilt but her lifestyle would raise a few eyebrows back home. But her vividness is a fa�ade: most of her secrets she's still keeping to herself.Fast friends from the start, Ellen and Cora may have plenty to learn about life, but they always have vodka and each other to talk to when the unexpected happens...

    . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour.

    L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death-and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

    Included are both the familiar favorites and Kipling's lesser-known works. This is the only complete collection of Kipling's poems available in paperback.

    Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator, takes us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. There, as a fat and much admired young war widow, she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovered evil: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide. With aplomb, however, Mrs. Hawkins confidently set about putting things to order, little imagining the mayhem that would ensue. Now decades older, thin, successful, and delighted with life in Italy--quite a far cry from Kensington--Mrs. Hawkins looks back to all those dark doings and recounts how her own life changed forever. She still, however, loves to give advice: "It's easy to get thin. You eat and drink the same as always, only half...I offer this advice without fee; it is included in the price of this book."

    It contains his earliest poems - in nazm, ghazal and qita form - that set him on course to becoming the greatest and most-read Urdu poet of the 20th century.

    This book was then and remained, for all practical purposes, Thomas's "collected" poems and in that sense complete. However, with the 1971 publication of the 192 poems in The Poems of Dylan Thomas (also now available in a revised edition), Thomas's Collected Poems has naturally evolved to become Thomas's Selected Poems.Thomas wrote his last poem, "Prologue," especially to begin this collection, and addressed it to "my readers, the strangers." Two unfinished poems are included in this edition: "Elegy," prepared by Vernon Watkins, and "In Country Heaven," prepared by Daniel Jones—both Welsh poets were life-long friends of Dylan Thomas. Textual corrections discovered over the course of forty years have now been incorporated, and a complete index of titles and first lines, as well as a brief chronology of the author's life, have been added.As it has for half a century, this book includes the best of Dylan Thomas's poetry—"Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines," "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," "Poem in October," "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," "The Hunchback in the Park," "In My Craft or Sullen Art," "In Country Sleep," and Thomas's poignant reflection on his youth, "Fern Hill."

    Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best known poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.

    The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful and deeply serious, this is a novel of great warmth and energy: it's the wit and irony found in moments of despair that prove to be Joy's salvation. First published by Polygon in 1989 and Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

    He concentrated on writing short stories and novels, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1956. But his poetry deserves close attention, if only because it is so revealing. Through verse he expressed anger and disgust—at Dorothy Parker and Edmund Wilson, among others. He parodied the poems and sensibilities of Rudyard Kipling, Joyce Kilmer, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gertrude Stein. He recast parts of poems by the likes of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, giving them his own twist. And he invested these poems with the preoccupations of his novels: sex and desire, battle and aftermath, cats, gin, and bullfights. Nowhere is his delight in drubbing snobs and overrefined writers more apparent. In this revised edition of the Complete Poems, the editor, Nicholas Gerogiannis, offers here an afterword assessing the influence of the collection, first published in 1979, and an updated bibliography. Readers will be particularly interested in the addition of "Critical Intelligence," a poem written soon after Hemingway's divorce from his first wife in 1927. Also available as a Bison Book: Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny by Mark Spilka.