It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

    There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history.A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included.Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

    That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

    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.

    Based on the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, Hold Your Own is a riveting tale of youth and experience, sex and love, wealth and poverty, community and alienation. Walking in the forest one morning, a young man disturbs two copulating snakes - and is punished by the goddess Hera, who turns him into a woman. This is only the beginning of his journey . . . Weaving elements of classical myth, autobiography and social commentary, Tempest uses the story of the gender-switching, clairvoyant Tiresias to create four sequences of poems: 'childhood', 'manhood', 'womanhood' and 'blind profit'. The result is a rhythmically hypnotic tour de force - and a hugely ambitious leap forward for one of the UK's most talented and compelling young writers.

    His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."The Complete Poems is the definitive volume of Randall Jarrell's verse, including Selected Poems (1955), with notes by the author; The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and The Lost World (1965), "his last and best book," according to Robert Lowell. This volume also brings together several of Jarrell's uncollected or posthumously published poems as well as his Rilke translations.

    It offers a collection spanning 35 centuries, featuring poets from around the world including Sappho, Ovid, Rumi, Shakespeare, Whitman and Neruda.

    By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered to be the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen's papers in the British Museum and other archives.

    There may be nothing in the poem that can quite touch the first two books of Paradise Lost for magnificence; but there are several things that may fairly be set beside almost anything in the last ten. The splendid "stand at bay" of the discovered tempter -- "'Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate" -- in the first book; his rebuke of Belial in the second, and the picture of the magic banquet (it must be remembered that, though it is customary to extol Milton's asceticism, the story of his remark to his third wife, and the Lawrence and Skinner sonnets, go the other way); above all, the panoramas from the mountaintop in the third and fourth; the terrors of the night of storm; the crisis on the pinnacle of the temple -- are quite of the best Milton, which is equivalent to saying that they are of the best of one kind of poetry.-- The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

    Housman's verse as it was established in 1939, three years after his death. In contains A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems, More Poems, the Additional Poems, and the three translations from A.W. Pollard's anthology, Odes from the Greek Dramatists.

    Although short in length (the longest are 24 lines, most 16 lines or less), these poems are long on beauty, power, imagination, and originality.Included are such memorable compositions as John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," Shakespeare's "When, in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes," "On His Blindness" by John Milton, William Blake's "The Tyger," Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Shelley's "Ozymandias," as well as works by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Amy Lowell, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and many others.Attractive and inexpensive, this compilation of carefully chosen verse contains many of the most loved, most anthologized poems in the English language. Students, teachers, and any lover of great poetry will treasure this splendid collection. Includes "The Road Not Taken," "Loveliest of Trees," and "Ozymandias."

    Sin's first book of poetry.

    Author Biography: A. R. Ammons has been awarded the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

    And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." Good Poems includes verse about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

    Throughout his writing life, Levi also produced poetry and this volume collects together all his poems, including eighteen that have not previously appeared in book form. Short and spare, the poems employ the same courageous and steady gaze at the worst that can happen that illuminates his prose.