Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

    Yeats laid the foundations for an Irish literary revival, drawing inspiration from his country's folklore, the occult, and Celtic philosophy. A writer of both poems and plays, he helped found Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre. The poems here provide an example of his life's work and artistry, beginning with verses such as "The Stolen Child" from his debut collection "Crossways "(written when he was 24) through "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" from "On the Boiler," published a year prior to his death.

    

    Chamber Music is a collection of poems by James Joyce.The collection originally comprised thirty-four love poems, but two further poems were added before publication ("All day I hear the noise of waters" and "I hear an army charging upon the land").

    One hundred years after his release from Reading Gaol, the life and work of Oscar Wilde has lost none of its fascination. In his day, his wit and writings enchanted and scandalized society in equal measure; his downfall came at the height of his powers. Devastated by his notorious trial for indecency, imprisoned for ``homosexual offenses,'' he was to spend two ruinous years in solitary confinement. As he was later to tell Andre Gide, Reading Gaol ``was not fit for dogs. I thought I would go mad.'' The Ballad was written from personal experience, and there was to be no more writing after this. As Wilde observed: ``Something is killed in me.'' Bankrupt, disgraced, and in exile, Wilde was to die not long after his release at the age of 46. His final resting place is the cemetery of Pere Lachaise in Paris. His tomb bears an inscription from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: ``And alien tears will fill for him/Pity's long broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn.'' This commemorative edition of the poem is illustrated with the powerfully moving wood engravings of Garrick Palmer. 48 pp 5 x 8 8 wood engravings

    P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.Here is an extensively revised edition of the acclaimed translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, which capture Cavafy's mixture of formal and idiomatic use of language and preserve the immediacy of his frank treatment of homosexual themes, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. The resetting of the entire edition has permitted the translators to review each poem and to make alterations where appropriate. George Savidis has revised the notes according to his latest edition of the Greek text.About the first edition: The best [English version] we are likely to see for some time.--James Merrill, The New York Review of Books [Keeley and Sherrard] have managed the miracle of capturing this elusive, inimitable, unforgettable voice. It is the most haunting voice I know in modern poetry.--Walter Kaiser, The New Republic ?

    Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

    Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection, which has been the standard edition of Frost's work since it first appeared in 1969.

    Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention." —David Walker, Field

     Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

    Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”

    Originally published in 1996.

    Set in Londonderry in 1970, this gripping drama by the acclaimed author of Faith Healer and Translations explores the ongoing Irish "troubles" that plague the country to this day.

    . .”In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.