Book picks similar to
White Egrets by Derek Walcott


poetry
caribbean
nobel-laureates
favorites

Selected Poems


Boris Pasternak - 1960
    Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

Snow


Orhan Pamuk - 2002
    Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

Bloom


Beau Taplin - 2016
    Beautifully designed with several pieces to a page, Bloom offers a unique twist on age-old topics: love, grief, and learning from them.

House of Lords and Commons: Poems


Ishion Hutchinson - 2016
    Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

The Complete Poetry


Edgar Allan Poe - 1831
    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve


Adrienne Rich - 2011
    Adrienne Rich has said, "I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book."from "Ballade of the Poverties" There's the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you Can't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburiedThere's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curbThe poverty of yard sale scrapings spread And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on streetPrince let me tell you who will never learn through wordsThere are poverties and there are poverties.

Bright Dead Things


Ada Limon - 2015
    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

In My Head


J.M. Storm - 2017
    Who feel everything and everything has feeling."In My Head, the debut release of one of Instagram's most popular poets whose writing has been liked by millions, dives below the surface of love, loss, and life.J.M. Storm has crafted a haunting yet hopeful poetry collection that is meant to be felt as much as it is read.

Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957


W.H. Auden - 1966
    H. Auden was once described as the Picasso of modern poetry - a tribute to his ceaseless experimentation with form and subject matter. Beginning with Anglo-Saxon poetry and ending with an Horatian expansiveness and conversational sweep, this volume is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in modern poetry after T. S. Eliot.In his lifetime a controversial, outspoken, yet enigmatic, writer, Auden has gradually come to seem an intimate poet, as we have learned to read him correctly. This volume is the best possible introduction to his consummate craftsmanship and his unparalleled originality which made him the master-poet of his generation.

Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution


Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin - 1936
    A harrowing description of the forerunners of the concentration camps and the Gulag.

Red Bird


Mary Oliver - 2008
    So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart."This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.

Please Don't Go Before I Get Better


Madisen Kuhn - 2018
    Chronicling the complexities, joys, and challenges of this transitional phase of life, Please Don’t Go Before I Get Better is a powerful, deeply affecting work that pierces your heart with its refreshing candor and vulnerability. A poignant exploration of self-image, self-discovery, and self-reflection, this anthology brilliantly captures the universal experience of growing up, and you are bound to find yourself reflected in these glimmering pages.

Collected Poems, 1920-1954


Eugenio Montale - 1987
    Montale is a love poet, whose deeply beautiful, individual work confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith with courage and subtlety; he has been widely translated into English, and his work has influenced two generations of American and British poets. Jonathan Galassi's versions of Montale's major works--Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La bufera e altro--are the clearest and most convincing yet, and his extensive notes discuss in depth the sources and difficulties of this dense, allusive poetry. This book offers English-language readers uniquely informed and readable access to the work of one of the greatest of all modern poets.

Diary of a Bad Year


J.M. Coetzee - 2007
    The latest by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace is an utterly contemporary work of fiction that addresses the profound unease of countless people in democracies across the world.

Independent People


Halldór Laxness - 1934
    Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is simply a masterpiece