Unconventional in both style and content, it shattered the myths of small town American life. A collection of epitaphs of residents of a small town, a full understanding of Spoon River requires the reader to piece together narratives from fragments contained in individual poems."

    For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

    The Book of QuestionsII. The Book of Yukel III. Return to the Book

    Pleasure Dome gathers over twenty-five years of work, including early uncollected poems and a rich selection of new poems.Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.

    R. Osgood & Co. The novel is about the deterioration of a once loving marriage under the influence of capitalistic greed. It is the first American novel by a canonical author to seriously consider divorce as a realistic outcome of marriage.

    Its subject is the cultural poverty and frustration of a generation of young people on the dole and living on council estates. The play was first staged privately in November 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, before members of the English Stage Society in a time when plays were still censored. With its scenes of violence, including the stoning of a baby, Saved became a notorious play and a cause celebre. In a letter to the Observer, Sir Laurence Olivier wrote: 'Saved is not a play for children but it is for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it.' Saved has had a marked influence on a whole new generation writing in the 1990s.Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

    Michael Palmer has been hailed by John Ashbery as "exemplarily radical" and by The Village Voice as "the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation." His new book, Company of Mothsa collection in four parts, "Stone," "Scale," "Company of Moths," and "Dream"is beautiful, and fierce: "bright archive, sad merriment," "question pursuing question." Palmer, in this new volume for our darkest times, asks, "How will you now read in the dark?"

    The wildly inventive imagery in these cinematic pieces lodges them somewhere between the surreal and the pure symbol, colorful and smooth like the lyrics of John Ashbery or Linda Pastan. In Chelotti’s poems, diamonds talk and sheriffs balance frogs on the tips of pens.The rain says, Listen to Debussy,go ahead, Debussy will fix you.—From “Migraine Cure”The secret to including everythingis to intricately divide your mindand then, all of a sudden,undivide it.—From “Still Life on a Scrolling Background”

    This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930.It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

    An invalid from infancy, he devoted his energies towards literature and achieved remarkable success with his first published work at the age of twenty-one. A succession of brilliant poems followed, including An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor Forest (1715), and his masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock. A second period of great poetry was begun in 1728 with the appearance of the first Dunciad. All these works--which exhibit Pope's astonishing human insight, his wide sympathies, and powers of social observation (displayed to greatest effect in his talent for satire)--are included in this selection of his poetry. It has been compiled by the distinguished Pope scholar and editor Pat Rodgers, who also provides an indispensable introduction that offers a new interpretation of Pope's poetry, and the philosophical ideas behind it.

    Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

    A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of thought: what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?

    New RSC Classics series highlights rarely performed Tudor and Jacobean plays.

    The School for Husbands is a comedy in three acts and in verse.The intrigue of this comedy is the radical contrast between the ideas of two brothers about educating their children: one of them is very strict while the other is indulgent.This was the first play in the title of which the word "School" was employed, to imply that the author not only had the intention of amusing but also intended to convey a special lesson to his hearers.

    He saw it as the cornerstone of his entire dramatic output. This book will be my masterpiece, he declared. He had completed the two great poetic dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt and was about to embark on the Cycle of twelve modern plays, beginning with Pillars of Society and concluding with When We Dead Awaken which were to establish his unrivaled international fame. While the plays of the Realist Cycle are well known, Emperor and Galilean still awaits discovery by modern readers, actors and directors. The major Shakespearean scholar, G. Wilson Knight has written of the play, it is certainly the greatest dramatic document of its century..it is stageworthy...(it is) conceived dramatically, even theatrically... under a spectacular production the result could be triumphant. Dramatizing the tragic career of Julian the Apostate, the play presents Western Civilzation itself at a most crucial point. It is indispensable for understanding the later plays: themes, situations, and characters from Emperor and Galilean continually reappear in the modern realist plays.