With acute irony tempered by a generous curiousity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

    Translated from the Swedish by Anthony Barnett. P"r Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was one of Sweden's greatest, most prolific, twentieth-century novelists and short story writers. EVENING LAND is the first complete translation of Lagerkvist's ninth and final volume of poetry, the deceptively simple Aftonland (1953). An intensely private man who refused to court publicity, the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951. Barnett's translation (his translation of Robert Giroux's BLANK from the French is also available at SPD) sets straight an earlier, unfinished and otherwise compromised version by W. H. Auden and Leif Sj"berg. "All things exist, only I exist no more, / everything remains, the fragrance of rain in the grass/ as I remember it and the sough of the wind through the trees, / the flight of clouds and the human heart's disquiet.// Only my heart's disquiet no longer exists"-(from "The Dead")

    The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise Glück teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Bachmann is considered one of the most important poets to emerge in postwar German letters, and this volume represents the largest collection available in English translation. Influencing numerous writers from Thomas Bernhard to Christa Wolf to Elfriede Jelinek (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature), Bachmann’s poetic investigation into the nature and limits of language in the face of historical violence remains unmatched in its ability to combine philosophical insight with haunting lyricism.Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1953 she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit). Her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären), appeared in 1956. Her various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for Literature. Writing and publishing essays, opera libretti, short stories, and novels as well, she divided her time between Munich, Zurich, Berlin, and Rome, where she died from a fire in her apartment in 1973.Peter Filkins has published two volumes of poetry, What She Knew (1998) and After Homer (2002), and has translated Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

    Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalised into a 'poetess' of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendour of her Hymns of America. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. These are included in the 'Complete' Nobel edition published in Madrid; the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation wil

    Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer's poems to create this cherished and invaluable collection. Contents Introduction: "Upward into the Depths" by Robert Bly1From17 Poems (1954)Secrets on the Road (1958)The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)Evening—MorningStormThe Man Awakened by a Song above His RoofTrackKyrieAfter the AttackBalakirev's Dream (1905)The CoupleAllegroLamentoThe Tree and the SkyA Winter NightDark Shape SwimmingThe Half-Finished HeavenNocturne2FromResonance and Footprints (1966)Night Vision (1970)Open and Closed SpaceFrom an African DiaryMorning Bird SongsSummer GrassAbout HistoryAfter a DeathUnder PressureSlow MusicOut in the OpenSolitudeBreathing Space JulyThe Open Windows26PreludesThe BookcaseOutskirtsGoing with the CurrentTrafficNight DutyA Few MomentsThe NameStanding Up3FromPathways (1973)Truth Barriers (1978)ElegyThe Scattered CongregationSnow-Melting Time, '66Further InLate MayDecember Evening, '72Seeing through the GroundGuard DutyAlong the Lines (Far North)At Funchal (Island of Madeira)Calling HomeCitoyensFor Mats and LailaAfter a Long Dry SpellA Place in the WoodsStreet CrossingBelow FreezingStart of a Late Autumn NovelFrom the Winter of 1947The ClearingSchubertiana4FromThe Wild Market Square (1983)For the Living and the Dead (1989)Grief Gondola (1996)From March '79Fire ScriptBlack PostcardsRomanesque ArchesThe Forgotten CommanderVermeerThe CuckooThe Kingdom of UncertaintyThree StanzasTwo CitiesIsland Life, 1860April and SilenceGrief Gondola #2

    Stone's poems blend the personal with dimensions of the larger world in a manner reminiscent of the late William Stafford. Few poets have this gift for taking the workings of ordinary life and fusing them with a poetic process that sustains intense emotion, allowing human experience to be felt through the mysteries of language.... Ruth Stone belongs to every generation of poets who have taken the responsibility to give back to the world." —The Bloomsbury Review"This volume rightly secures (Stone's) status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three." —Harvard ReviewWhat Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief. . . . Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.When I forget to weep,I hear the peeping tree toadscreeping up the bark.Love lies asleepand dreams that everythingis in its golden net;and I am caught there, too,when I forget.A recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ruth Stone has taught at numerous American universities. The author of eleven books of poetry, she has lived in Vermont since 1957.

    As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and its rich linguistic gifts.

    To Rilke himself the Sonnets to Orpheus were "perhaps the most mysterious in the way they came up and entrusted themselves to me, the most enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and achieved; the whole first part was written down in a single breathless act of obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February, without one word being doubtful or having to be changed." With facing-page German.

    The Axion Esti [is] the work on which Elytis's reputation rests, and which almost certainly won him the Nobel Prize."New York Review of Books

    It is a profound and powerful look at a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, even the most strongest, must either bend to the oppressors, or resist them and perish.

    S. Eliot. In this definitive edition, French and English texts appear on facing pages. Preface by T. S. Eliot.

    The revision covers all the poems published in Princeton's earlier bilingual edition, "George Seferis: Collected Poems" (expanded edition, 1981). Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, George Seferis (1900-71) has long been recognized as a major international figure, and Keeley and Sherrard are his ideal translators. They create, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, a "translation worthy of Seferis, which is to praise it as highly as it could be praised."Although Seferis was preoccupied with his tradition as few other poets of the same generation were with theirs, and although he was actively engaged in the immediate political aspirations of his nation, his value for readers lies in what he made of this preoccupation and this engagement in fashioning a broad poetic vision. He is also known for his stylistic purity, which allows no embellishment beyond that necessary for precise yet rich poetic statement.

    Published in 1988, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, this collection features pieces translated by the poet himself and others, as well as poems written originally in English.Auden once characterized Brodsky as "a traditionalist . . . interested in what lyric poets of all ages have been interested in . . . encounters with nature . . . reflections upon the human condition, death, and the meaning of existence." Reading the poems in To Urania--by turns cerebral, caustic, comic, and celebratory--we appreciate firsthand a great lyric poet's variety and achievement.

    He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history, from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The ’Canticles of Night’, by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an unprecedented style, which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Together the works collected here show Hölderlin’s use of Classical and Christian imagery and his exploration of cosmology and history in an attempt to find meaning in an uncertain world.