Book picks similar to
Parts of a World by Wallace Stevens
poetry
classics
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Frail-Craft
Jessica Fisher - 2007
The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”
Speak to Us of Love: Reflections on Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
Osho - 1987
The famous verse that gives the title to this book is about “love”—but not the ordinary love we know from novels and movies.Speak to us of Love gives a taste of a contemporary mystic at work, trying to disrupt our dreams, illusions, and the state of unconsciousness that prevents us from enjoying life to the fullest.This is about and for the millions of people in the world who have killed their love with their own hands, and who are now miserable. They never wanted to kill it, there was no intention to kill their love, but in their unconsciousness they started possessing. Husbands possess their wives, wives possess their husbands, and parents possess their children. Teachers are trying in every possible way to possess their students. Politicians are trying to possess countries. Religions are trying to possess millions of people and control every aspect their lives.This book shows that life can only thrive in freedom. Love never allows anyone to possess it, because love is our very soul.For Osho, the basis of all our neuroses or psychoses is simple: our souls are not nourished. Love, the basic nourishment, is missing. Osho comprehensively trounces the so-called religious and philosophical approaches to life. All that is of worth is to be found, not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary; not in fantastical ideas of the “other world” beyond death, but in this very world that we find ourselves in here and now. In short, this book shows that making a simple yet utterly basic shift in our lives will awaken the silence in our beings and bring joy into our every moment.
Little Boat
Jean Valentine - 2007
In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet's extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine's quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.
Poems 1962-2012
Louise Glück - 2012
With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape—Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain—persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, while at the same time are shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made. From the outset (“Come here / Come here, little one”), Gluck’s voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we “do not see the intervening fathoms.” From within the earth’sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.
Raptus
Joanna Klink - 2010
The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.
Your Time Has Come
Joshua Beckman - 2004
This new collection showcases Beckman’s ability, even within the confines of a few brief lines, to suggest and sustain emotions, landscapes, humor and desire.
The Glass Age
Cole Swensen - 2007
Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
Holding Company: Poems
Major Jackson - 2010
In an effort to understand desire, beauty, and love as transient anodynes to metaphysical loneliness, he invokes Constantine Cavafy, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, and Dante Rossetti.from “Jewel-Tongued” The stillness of a lover’s mouth assaulted me. I never wearied of anecdotes on the Commons, gesturing until I scattered myself into a luminance, shining over a city of women. Was I less human or more? I hear still my breathing echoing off their pillows. So many eyes like crushed flowers. Our fingers splayed over a bed’s edge. We were blown away.
Poems 4 A.M.
Susan Minot - 2002
We find her awake in the middle of the night, contemplating love and heartbreak in all their exhilarating and anguished specifics. With astonishing openness, in language both passionate and enchanting, she offers us an intimate map of a troubled and far-flung heart: “Can you believe I thought that?” she asks, “That we would always go/roaming brave and dangerous/on wild unlit roads?”At once witty and tender, with Dorothy Parker–like turns of the knife and memorable partings from lovers in New York, London, Rome and beyond, these poems capture a restless movement through loves and locales, and charm us at every turn with their forthrightness.From the Hardcover edition.
A Hummock in the Malookas
Matthew Rohrer - 1991
In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006
Donald Hall - 2006
White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall's celebrated career, with new poems recently published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. Greatly anticipated, this is Hall's first selected volume in fifteen years, and also the first to include poems from his seminal bestseller, Without.The bound-in audio CD was specially recorded by Hall for this publication -- more than an hour of favorite poems from throughout the book. Hall's distinctive, sonorous voice and inimitable humor provide a perfect companion for fans of his work and for classroom use.
50 American Plays
Michael Dickman - 2012
. . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality." —The New YorkerIdentical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters—landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare."Lucky in Kansas"Judy Garland: This is always the worst partTin Man: The coming backJudy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shitThe Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farmStraw Man: I wouldn't call it luckyThe Lion: We were lucky to get backStraw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky meansJudy Garland: It's funny what you missTin Man: The runningJudy Garland: The flyingTin Man: The flying monkeysJudy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green worldMichael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
Noelle Kocot - 2006
As a poet who has achieved success in the realms of both grassroots popularity and national critical attention, Kocot is poised to claim her place as America’s boldest new poetic voice.
No Art: Poems
Ben Lerner - 2016
No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.