Bloch dared to do this and was successful; therein lies the enduring achievement of Feudal Society."—Charles Garside, Yale Review

    The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.

    Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, explosive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

    Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, this volume forges a new path for him, as a poet of light verse. He writes—with his characteristic combination of humor and insight—on love, modernity, nostalgia, politics, religion, and other facets of daily life. Keillor’s verses are charming and playful, locating sublime song within the humdrum of being human.

    It is based primarily on the 538-line Middle English poem Sir Landevale, which in turn was based on Marie de France's lai Lanval, written in a form of French understood in the courts of both England and France in the 12th century. Sir Launfal retains the basic story told by Marie de France and retold in Sir Landevale, augmented with material from an Old French lai Graelent and a lost romance that possibly featured a giant named Sir Valentyne. This is in line with Thomas Chestre's eclectic way of creating his poetry.In the tale, Sir Launfal is propelled from wealth and status – the steward at King Arthur's court – to being a pauper and a social outcast. He is not even invited to a feast in his home town of Caerleon in South Wales when the king visits, although Arthur knows nothing of this. Out in the forest alone, he meets with two damsels who take him to their mistress, the daughter of the King of Faerie. She gives him untold wealth and a magic bag in which money can always be found, on the condition that he becomes her lover. She will visit him whenever he wants and nobody will see her or hear her. But he must tell nobody about her, or her love will vanish at that instant.The story of a powerful (fairy) woman who takes a lover on condition that he obey a particular prohibition is common in medieval poetry: the French lais of Desiré, Graelant, and Guingamor, and Chrétien de Troyes's romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, all share similar plot elements. The presence of a Land of Faerie, or an Otherworld, betrays the story's Celtic roots. A final court scene may be intended by Chestre as criticism of the contemporary legal and judicial framework in late-fourteenth century England.[4] The equation of money with worth in the tale may satirize a late-fourteenth century bourgeois mentality.

    The Nobel-laureate Chilean wrote The Captain's Verses and One Hundred Love Sonnets—two of the most celebrated volumes of love lyrics in modern Spanish letters—for her. In My Life with Pablo Neruda, Urrutia reveals her side of their famed romance. But her book is not simply a love story told by a muse; it is also a document of her life as the persecuted widow of a national hero. Her voice lifts out of the sorrow and violence of the military dictatorship that precipitated her beloved's death in 1973, to reaffirm the power of Neruda's own passionate voice.My Life with Pablo Neruda opens with the dramatic events of September 11, 1973, with Augusto Pinochet's overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Devastated by the coup, the sixty-nine-year-old Neruda dies a few days later of a heart attack. Grief-stricken, Urrutia takes refuge in her memories, reeling back through time to recount the heady early days of her twenty-two-year romance with Neruda. Here, she reveals the birth of The Captain's Verses and divulges the secrets of their illicit marriage in Italy. Urrutia then returns to the grim reality she faces in Santiago in the mid-1970s, to describe life under the dictatorship. Harassed by Pinochet's henchmen, she becomes an exile within her own country, mourns the torture and disappearance of loved ones, and finally awakes from the stupor of sorrow and commits herself to using Neruda's words to lash out against the bloody regime.Reading My Life with Pablo Neruda is like spending a long afternoon with Matilde Urrutia. In a conversational style, she brings Neruda to life, and he emerges as a vibrant, playful, and impatient man driven by unbounded appetites. At once humorous and heart-breaking, Urrutia's story makes for a fine domestic complement to Neruda's own lush memoirs.

    Their story is one of hardship, violence, and cautious, heartbreaking attempts toward compassion. Lesley's fearless journey through his family history provides a remarkable portrait of hard living in the Western states, and confirms his place as one of the region's very best storytellers.

    Now you can experience this major work of world literature in a simplified adaptation. This graphic novel pulls no punches. Dante’s harrowing journey through Hell is not for the squeamish. It is a powerful, but ultimately inspiring story of sin, punishment, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

    His marriage is over and he is alone, teaching poetry as a visiting professor in Montana and continuing to avoid actually writing himself. He drinks to oblivion every night.At this freezing college, in the dead of winter, Winslow meets Erika, one of his poetry students. What begins with office hours and Jim Beam in paper cups becomes a road trip as they travel through Utah and Arizona. Long haunted by thoughts of death, both Erika and Winslow begin to glimpse the power life can hold if they will only open up to the shame, beauty, and heartbreak of it all.

    Virginia Brown’s acclaimed translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic work, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, is the first English edition based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

    By building a rude home in the forest and eliminating desire, poet and Buddhist priest Chomei believed he would be spared the anguish that had befallen the townspeople. Yet at the end we find the author consumed with self-doubt, questioning his own sanity and the integrity of his purpose. His voice reaches out from the distant past and speaks directly to our hearts, surprisingly modern and intensely human.Author Biography: Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins are writers, teachers, and translators living in Kyoto. Stone Bridge Press is a leading English-language publisher of Japanese literature in translation. Our ROCK SPRING COLLECTION OF JAPANESE LITERATURE features absorbing and important translations of classical and contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry. We believe that literature is a window into culture and society, and an expression of what is most peculiarly, and universally, human.

    Definitive and lively articles focus on the great tales and traditions of the age and includes information on daily and nightly customs andactivities; religious beliefs of the pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jew; key works of oral and written literature; traditional music and art; holidays and feasts; food and drink; and plants and animals, both real and fantastical.While most books on medieval folklore focus primarily on the West, this unique volume brings together an eclectic range of experts to treat the subject from a global perspective. Especially remarkable are the surveys of the major medieval traditions including Arab-Islamic, Baltic, English, Finno-Ugric, French, Hispanic, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Scandinavian, Scottish, Slavic, and Welsh.For anyone who has ever wanted a path through the tangle of Arthurian legends, or the real lowdown on St. Patrick, or the last word on wolf lore--this is the place to look.The contributors:Ulrich Marzolph -- Arab-IslamicThomas A. DuBois -- BalticJohn McNamara & Carl Lindahl -- EnglishThomas A. DuBois -- Finno-UgricFrancesca Canad� Sautman -- FrenchSamuel G. Armistead -- Hispanic�va P�cs -- HungarianJoseph Falaky Nagy -- IrishGiuseppe C. Di Scipio -- ItalianEli Yassif -- JewishStephen A. Mitchell -- ScandinavianJohn McNamara -- ScottishEve Levin -- SlavicElissa R. Henken & Brynley F. Roberts -- Welsh

    Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

    Aneirin's poem is a universal celebration of the undying theme of the ideal hero. O'Grady's belief that what Aneirin wrote of his war is true of all wars informs the purpose of his version, which is to give a `reading' of the poem as one way in which it might have been written today. With magnificent brush drawings by Louis Le Brocquy.

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.