In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.   Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

    Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

    Provides glimpses into the origins of Charles Simic's poetry

    Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

    His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times, as well as the creator of a poetry which has had a profound and lasting impact on the modern imagination itself.Stevens established his career as an executive even as he wrote his poetry, becoming a vice president with an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. His first and most influential book, Harmonium, was not published until he was forty-four years old. In these poems, Stevens drew on his interest in and understanding of modernism. Over time he became acquainted with the most accomplished of his contemporaries, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams among them, but his personal style remained unique. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, losing himself by writing poetry in his study. Yet he had a witty, comic, and Dionysian side to his personality, including long fishing (and drinking) trips to Florida with his pals and a fascination with the sun-drenched tropics.People generally know two things about Wallace Stevens: that he is a “difficult” poet and that he was an insurance executive for most of his life. Stevens may be challenging to understand, but he is also greatly rewarding to read. Now, sixty years after Stevens’s death, biographer and poet Paul Mariani shows how over the course of his life, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime.

    Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her.Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.

    He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.

    What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work--at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan's quest toward a new poetics--is at last complete and available to a wide audience.

    We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.

    Hargrove* A Long Hiss of Distress : Plath's Elegy on the Beach at Berck / Sandra M. Gilbert* Transitional Poetry / Caroline King Barnard Hall* Gothic Subjectivity / Christina Britzolakis* From the Bottom of the Pool : Sylvia Plath's Last Poems / Tim Kendall* Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English : Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries / Susan Gubar* Plath's Triumphant Women Poems / Linda Wagner-Martin* Poetry and Survival / Susan Bassnett* Chronology

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    The poet's imagination of romanticism is captured in the vividly described poems. The poems are written in Hindi and the poet not only narrates the poems in the book but has also sung it in tune. The poems are appealing to the young generation and have been read widely by people in India and abroad

    Now I hear since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are in fact becoming a bourgeois nation, with the Church supplying our aristocracy, and I do not see much hope for us intellectually. Once the Church is in command she will devour everything.’ -James Joyce in conversation with Arthur Power. This is the first paperback edition of Arthur Power’s unique and fascinating account of his friendship with James Joyce during the 1920s. Power, a young Irishman working as an art critic in Paris, first met Joyce in a Montparnasse dancehall, and the two men maintained a prickly friendship for several years. Power re-creates his conversations with the master, on a remarkable range of topics, literary and otherwise. We read of Joyce’s thoughts on writers past and present: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Joyce also speaks of the looming might of America (‘Political influence, yes, but not cultural’); of religion (‘Do you believe in a next life?’ ‘I don’t think much of this life’); and of his own work.

    Table of Contents: List of Works by Collection and TitleList of Works in Alphabetical OrderRobert Frost BiographyA Boy's Will :: North of Boston :: Mountain Interval :: Miscellaneous PoemsA Boy's Will (1913)Into My OwnGhost HouseMy November GuestLove and a QuestionA Late WalkStarsStorm FearWind and Window FlowerTo the Thawing WindA Prayer in SpringFlower-gatheringRose PogoniaAsking for RosesWaiting--Afield at DuskIn a ValeA Dream PangIn NeglectThe Vantage PointMowingGoing for WaterRevelationThe Trial by ExistenceIn Equal SacrificeThe Tuft of FlowersSpoils of the DeadPan with UsThe Demiurge's LaughNow Close the WindowsA Line-storm SongOctoberMy ButterflyReluctanceNorth of Boston (1914)The Pasture Mending WallThe Death of the Hired ManThe MountainA Hundred CollarsHome BurialThe Black CottageBlueberriesA Servant to ServantsAfter Apple-pickingThe CodeThe Generations of MenThe HousekeeperThe FearThe Self-seekerThe Wood-pileGood HoursMountain Interval (1916; revised 1920)The Road Not Taken Christmas Trees An Old Man's Winter Night The Exposed Nest A Patch of Old Snow In the Home Stretch The Telephone Meeting and Passing Hyla Brook The Oven Bird Bond and Free Birches Pea BrushPutting in the Seed A Time to Talk The Cow in Apple Time An Encounter Range-finding The Hill Wife The Bonfire A Girl's Garden Locked Out The Last Word of a Bluebird "Out, Out—" Brown's Descent, or the Willy-nilly Slide The Gum-gatherer The Line-gang The Vanishing Red Snow The Sound of the Trees Miscellaneous Poems to 1920 "The Ax-Helve" "Fire and Ice" "The Flower Boat" "For Once, Then, Something" "Fragmentary Blue""Good-by and Keep Cold" "The Lockless Door""The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" "Not to Keep""Place for a Third" "Plowmen""The Runaway""To E.T.""The Valley's Singing Day""Wild Grapes"