Love Songs


Sara Teasdale - 1917
    In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (which became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the Poetry Society of America Prize for Love Songs. She later committed suicide. In addition to new poems, this book contains lyrics taken from Rivers to the Sea, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, and one or two from an earlier volume.

Native Guard


Natasha Trethewey - 2006
    Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Time and Materials


Robert Hass - 2007
    This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris­ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every­thing else, into his poetry."Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems


Kay Ryan - 2010
    She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The two hundred poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

That Championship Season


Jason Miller - 1972
    The occasion begins in a light-hearted mood but gradually, as the pathos and desperation of their present lives are exposed and illuminated, the play takes on a rich power of rare dimension. One former player is now the inept mayor of the town-and facing a strong challenge for re-election. Another, the frustrated principal of the local high school, is his ambitious campaign manager. A third, now a successful (and destructive) businessman, is wavering in his financial support of the mayor. While the fourth is a witty, but despairing alcoholic. As the evening progresses all that these men were-and have become-is revealed and examined with biting humor and saving compassion. In the end self-preservation, abetted by the unconscious cynicism and bigotry of their coach, draws them together. But they are lost, morally bankrupt men holding onto fraudulent dreams that have poisoned their present lives and robbed them of the future that was once so rich in promise.

Live or Die


Anne Sexton - 1966
    Live or Die, her third volume, consists of poems written from January 25, 1962 to February, 1966, many of them published in such leading periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper's and Encounter.These poems are arranged chronologically and compose a fierce and intimate autobiography. The poet speaks with total frankness, her imagery and reference brilliant and hard as diamonds. It is impossible for her to be banal. Much of her experience is rendered as nightmarish, but it is significant that the final poem is stunningly affirmative, its title the single command "Live."This collection is a striking body of work by a poet whose experience is intensely female, whose poetry is strong and powerful.

Moy Sand and Gravel


Paul Muldoon - 2002
    Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems


William Carlos Williams - 1962
    The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House. In these books, Dr. Williams perfected his "variable foot" metric and achieved full mastery of the "American idiom" which was his lifelong first concern. Among the poems of this period is the long "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" which W. H. Auden has called "one of the most beautiful love poems in the language." Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry only two months after William Carlos Williams' death on March 4, 1963.

77 Dream Songs


John Berryman - 1964
    This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

New and Collected Poems


Richard Wilbur - 1988
    Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry.

The Wild Iris


Louise Glück - 1992
    Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realmsBound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

250 Poems: A Portable Anthology


Peter Schakel - 2002
    This well-chosen and comprehensive collection offers a compact and affordable alternative to larger and more expensive anthologies.

New Hampshire


Robert Frost - 1923
    The titular poem is the longest, and it has cross-references to 14 of the following poems. These are the "Notes" in the book title. The "Grace Notes" are the 30 final poems. Contained in this collection are some of Frost's best known works, such as "Fire and Ice", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Olio


Tyehimba Jess - 2016
    Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.So, while I lead this choir, I still find thatI'm being led…I'm a missionarymending my faith in the midst of this flock…I toil in their fields of praise. When folks seethese freedmen stand and sing, they hear their Godspeak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue


W.H. Auden - 1947
    H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.