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Poetry
A wonderfully readable anthology of our greatest poetry, chosen by the author of A Little History of Poetry "Does anyone know more about poetry than John Carey? Almost certainly not."--The Times A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems. Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction to the very best that poetry can offer. Familiar favorites are nestled alongside marvelous new discoveries--all woven together with Carey's expert commentary. Particular attention is given to the works of female poets, like Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew. This is a personal guide to the poetry that shines brightest through the ages. Within its pages, readers will find treasured poems that remain with you for life.
The American poet Robert Lax belongs to the generation of Thomas Merton, Beat poetry, Abstract Expressionism, and the compositions of John Cage. Yet he stands out as this era's most intriguing minimalist poet, gaining this reputation through a constant questioning of the universe and our idea about it. His poetry varies from fables and parables to clear-cut columns of words, from his account of a day at the circus as a vision of creation to his own insistent and mystical search for truth.
33 Poems presents the quintessential gathering of Lax's work, including Sea & Sky and The Circus of the Sun, "perhaps the greatest English-language poem of this century" (The New York Times).
33 Poems presents the quintessential gathering of Lax's work, including Sea & Sky and The Circus of the Sun, "perhaps the greatest English-language poem of this century" (The New York Times).
44 Poems on Being with Each Other is a new volume that offers immersive reflections on the human connection. With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines friendship and its loss through Langston Hughes's "I Loved My Friend," changing familial bonds in Rita Dove's "Eurydice, Turning," the relationship with the past in Mary Oliver's "The Uses of Sorrow," the power of declaration in Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me," and the necessity of connection to land in Joy Harjo's "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings."
Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other articulates the power of poetry itself. Through careful and incisive readings, it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly the ways we are inextricably linked to each other, and provides inspiration for grounded self-reflection. It is an anthology that will delight readers, just as Pádraig's podcast has done for millions around the world.
Four months after Cummings's death in September 1962, his widow, the photographer Marion Morehouse, collected the typescripts of 29 new poems. These poems, as well as uncollected poems published only in periodicals up to that time, make up 73 Poems. This is the final volume in Liveright's reissue of Cummings's individual volumes of poetry, with texts and settings based on E. E. Cummings: The Complete Poems 1904-1962.
Although Robert Frost (1874-1963) wrote poetry throughout his youth and early adult years, his first collection of poems was not published until he was nearly 40 years old. And, ironically, it was not in America that this quintessentially American poet was first published, but in England. In 1912, he settled his family in Buckinghamshire, determining to devote his full life to poetry.
In 1913, Frost published A Boy's Will, his first collection of poems. A series of sharply observed impressions of New England rural life touching upon universal themes, it included such poems as Into My Own, Asking for Roses, Spoils of the Dead, and Reluctance. A second volume, North of Boston, followed in 1914 and contained several of Frost's finest and best-known works: Mending Wall, After Apple-Picking, The Death of the Hired Man, and others. Both volumes are reprinted here complete and unabridged ― a treasury of fine early verse by one of the 20th century's most admired poets.
In 1913, Frost published A Boy's Will, his first collection of poems. A series of sharply observed impressions of New England rural life touching upon universal themes, it included such poems as Into My Own, Asking for Roses, Spoils of the Dead, and Reluctance. A second volume, North of Boston, followed in 1914 and contained several of Frost's finest and best-known works: Mending Wall, After Apple-Picking, The Death of the Hired Man, and others. Both volumes are reprinted here complete and unabridged ― a treasury of fine early verse by one of the 20th century's most admired poets.
In this exquisite book, Alice Walker's first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as "one of the best American writers of today" (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker's Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, "In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind," and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker's Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, "In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind," and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful societies the world has ever known. Unlike its Homeric predecessors, which arose from a long oral tradition, the Aeneid was composed by a singular poetic genius, and it has ever since been celebrated as one of the greatest literary achievements of antiquity.
This exciting new edition of the Aeneid, the first collaborative translation of the poem in English, is rendered in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English meter that corresponds best, in its history and cultural standing, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright achieve an ideal middle ground between readability and elevation, engaging modern readers with fresh, contemporary language in a heart-pounding, propulsive rhythm, while also preserving the epic dignity of the original. The result is a brisk, eminently approachable translation that captures Virgil's sensitive balance between celebrating the Roman Empire and dramatizing its human costs, for victors and vanquished alike. This Aeneid is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original.
With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson, maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, genealogies, extensive notes, and helpful summaries of each book, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding poem will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.
This exciting new edition of the Aeneid, the first collaborative translation of the poem in English, is rendered in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English meter that corresponds best, in its history and cultural standing, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright achieve an ideal middle ground between readability and elevation, engaging modern readers with fresh, contemporary language in a heart-pounding, propulsive rhythm, while also preserving the epic dignity of the original. The result is a brisk, eminently approachable translation that captures Virgil's sensitive balance between celebrating the Roman Empire and dramatizing its human costs, for victors and vanquished alike. This Aeneid is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original.
With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson, maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, genealogies, extensive notes, and helpful summaries of each book, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding poem will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.
Highway 18 between Mission and Okreek, South Dakota, is a stretch of no more than eighteen miles, but late at night or in a blizzard it seems endless. "It feels like being somewhere between South Dakota and 'there, '" says Simon Ortiz, "perhaps at the farthest reaches of the galaxy." Acoma Pueblo poet Ortiz spent a winter in South Dakota, teaching at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud Lakota Sioux Reservation. The bitter cold and driving snow of a prairie winter were a reality commanding his attention through its absolute challenge to survival and the meaning of survival. Ortiz's way of dealing with the hard elements of winter was to write After and Before the Lightning, prose and verse poems that were his response to that long season between the thunderstorms of autumn and spring. "I needed a map of where I was and what I was doing in the cosmos, " he writes. In these poems, which he regards as a book-length poetic work, he charts the vast spaces of prairie and time that often seem indistinguishable. As he faces the reality of winter on the South Dakota reservation, he also confronts the harsh political reality for its Native community and culture and for Indian people everywhere. "Writing this poetry reconnected me to the wonder and awe of life, " Ortiz states emphatically. Readers will feel the reality of that wonder and awe - and the cold of that South Dakota winter - through the gentle ferocity of his words.
Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie Burt
Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Greeks and Romans, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt's attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today's poetry readers. Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first-century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus's whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context. After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.
Jim Harrison's popular novels represent only part of his literary output--he has also been widely acclaimed for the "renegade genius" of his powerful, expressive verse, collected in several books such as The Theory and Practice of Rivers and Other Poems (Clark City Press, 1989). After Ikkyu is the first collection of Harrison's poems that are directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice.
Hasan Sijzi, also known as Amir Hasan Sijzi Dehlavi, is considered the originator of the Indo-Persian ghazal, a poetic form that endures to this day--from the legacy of Hasan's poetic descendent, Hafez, to contemporary Anglophone poets such as John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Agha Shahid Ali, and W. S. Merwin.
As with other Persian poets, Hasan worked within a highly regulated set of poetic conventions that brought into relief the interpenetration of apparent opposites--metaphysical and material, mysterious and quotidian, death and desire, sacred and profane, fleeting time and eternity. Within these strictures, he crafted a poetics that blended Sufi Islam with non-Muslim Indic traditions. Of the Persian poets practiced the ghazal, Hafez and Rumi are best known to Western readers, but their verse represents only a small fraction of a rich tradition. This collection reveals the geographical range of the literature while introducing an Indian voice that will find a place on reader's bookshelves alongside better known Iranian names.
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn ForchéWhen I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what
the current gives. When we reach the camp, there will be thousands like us.
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads
and waiting pastures of America. We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo
as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage
for the sweetest mangoes. I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep. --from "Transmigration" Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture's ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.
Attachments to proper names, traditions, and entrenched thought formations are a perennial problem and, as LM Rivera shows, an addiction. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that pervasive, and possibly eternal, compulsion. Rivera builds his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against simplistic, naive, sentimental, and played-out narratives, opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting-at-the-seams, experimental formations through which he thinks a concept through to its (im)possible end. On this philosophical-poetic journey, Rivera positions the grand figure of Martin Heidegger as a whipping boy who receives the punishment for the sins of blind tradition. Through this collection, Rivera attempts to sever many troubling yet lasting customs--be they overt, hidden, canonical, esoteric, forbidden, or blatantly authoritarian.
The Alexandreis is an extraordinarily layered and subtle epic poem on the life of Alexander the Great.
WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness. Or putting it another way: here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Moss's ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.
Sam Hamill is that rare figure whose life is continually in dialogue with the rich and diverse tradition of poetry, whether that dialogue takes the form of translating the work of a poet long dead, writing a poem in celebration of the work of a contemporary poet, or musing on what it means to be a poet himself. A true poet's poet--and also the founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, one of the most influential publishers of poetry today--Hamill has been part of America's poetry scene for decades and has won numerous prizes and awards for his work. This collection presents the best of Hamill's work from his thirteen books of original poetry and from his numerous critically acclaimed works of translation, as well as a number of new, previously unpublished poems.
Guayasamín is one of the last crusaders of imaginismo. He is a creator of humanity in its broadest sense, of the living and historical imagination. His universe is sustaining although it threatens us like a cosmic disaster. Think before approaching his painting because it will not be easy to withdraw.--Pablo Neruda
To paint is to pray. To paint is to scream.--Oswaldo Guayasamín
In this breathtakingly beautiful book, excerpts from Pablo Neruda's Canto General are illustrated by Oswaldo Guayasamín's powerful work, bringing to life the battles, defeats, victories, and heroes of Latin America's history of resistance.
After their paths first crossed in Mexico, the Chilean poet and indigenous Ecuadoran painter developed a lifelong friendship based on mutual admiration, profound affection, and political solidarity.
With Spanish and English text throughout, this book by two of Latin America's most beloved artists is a captivating, reasonably priced book for the holidays.
Pablo Neruda is one of Latin America's best-loved poets, his most famous work being Canto General. Born in Chile, and widely respected for his outspoken political views, he died days after the coup against the popularly elected Allende government in September 1973.
Oswaldo Guayasamín is generally considered Diego Rivera's successor as Latin America's most prominent painter. Deemed an expressionist, with evident indigenous roots, the humanist spirit of Guayasamín´s work reflects the pain and misery endured by much of humanity during the last century, but at the same time conveys a sense of human dignity and great tenderness. He died in 1999.
Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945.
Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy for the imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger, and some from the suburbs of the 1980s, are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.
This groundbreaking Library of America volume offers a fresh look at early American poetry, charting its evolution over a span of almost two centuries, from the first years of English settlement in the New World to the death of George Washington. Gathering the work of more than 100 poets--including many poems never previously anthologized and some published here for the first time--it is the most comprehensive collection of its kind ever assembled, a celebration of the rich, varied, and often surprising beginnings of American poetry. The range of voices is unprecedented: broadside and newspaper satires, epitaphs, children's verse, popular songs, ballads, and Christian hymns evoke the vital currency of poetry in daily life; exhortatory elegies for public figures and historical epics declaimed on occasions of state stand alongside intricate meditative lyrics and private epistolary verses. The dramatic unfolding of American history is made immediate and vivid in the words of the participants: William Bradford reflects on the growth of New England's first colonies; Roger Wolcott recounts the incidents of the Pequot War; Thomas Paine hails the victories of the American Revolution; Ann Eliza Bleecker describes her flight from General Burgoyne's invading army; loyalist Jonathan Odell bitterly mocks the new Continental Congress. The first comprehensive anthology of early American poetry in more than a generation, this volume incorporates recent scholarly discoveries that have altered our understanding of the early American literary landscape. Alongside generous selections from long admired New England poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth are poets from the Middle Colonies and the South, newly emerged from the archives. Along with familiar favorites by Phillis Wheatley, celebrated pioneer of the African-American tradition in poetry, are little-known verses by Benjamin Banneker, known as "the Sable Astronomer," and African-American Minuteman Lemuel Haynes. The anthology includes hymns recently attributed to Mohegan preacher Samson Occom and the earliest known translation of a traditional Native American chant, Henry Timberlake's Cherokee "War-Song." The unpublished poems of Henry Brooke, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Joseph Green, Hannah Griffitts, Margaret Lowther Page, and Annis Boudinot Stockton, among others, reflect the rediscovered vitality and importance of manuscript exchange as a form of publication in an era when it was sometimes considered indecorous, especially for women, to appear in print. Unprecedented in its textual authority and unrivaled in its scope, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet and extensive notes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy. This first volume of the set, organized chronologically by the poets' birthdates, takes the reader from Henry Adams (1838-1918) to Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), and in the process reveals the unfolding of a true poetic renaissance. Included are generous selections from some of the century's greatest poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot. Here they are seen as part of an age that proposed new and often contentious definitions of what American poetry could be and fresh perceptions of a society undergoing rapid and often tumultuous change. The multifarious aesthetic influences brought to bear--Chinese and Japanese poetry, the African-American sermon, the artistic revolutions of Cubism and Dada, the cadences of jazz, the brash urgencies of vernacular speech--resulted in a poetic culture of dynamic energy and startling contrasts. The poets of this era transformed not only style but traditional subject matter: there are poems here on a silent movie actress, a lynching, the tenements of New York, the trench warfare of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the landscape of Mars. Here too are folk ballads on events like the assassination of McKinley and the sinking of the Titanic; popular and humorous verse by Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams; the famous "Spectra" hoax; song lyrics by Ma Rainey, Joe Hill, and Irving Berlin; and poems by writers as unexpected as Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, John Reed, and H. P. Lovecraft. Included are some of the century's most important poems, presented in full: Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Eliot's The Waste Land, Steven's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
In nineteenth-century America, poetry was an integral part of everyday life. The two volumes of The Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveal the vigor and diversity of a tradition embracing solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. These extraordinary anthologies reassess America's poetic legacy with a comprehensive sweep that no previous anthology has attempted. Extending chronologically from the classic couplets of Philip Freneau to the pioneering free verse of Walt Whitman, this first volume charts the formation of a distinctly American poetry. Here, in generous selections, are the major figures: Poe, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier--as well as such unexpected contributors as the landscape painter Thomas Cole, the actress Fanny Kemble, and the presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln. This collection offers the unique opportunity to appreciate anew such classics as Whittier's "Snow-Bound," Bryant's "Forest Hymn," and Emerson's "Hamatreya," while discovering a world of less familiar pleasures: the mystical sonnets of Jones Very, the Romantic fantasias of Maria Gowen Brooks, the stirring political poems of Joel Barlow and John Pierpont, and the somber and undervalued late lyrics of Longfellow. Woven among the poetry of the early nineteenth century is a wealth of popular ballads, recitations, and songs both secular and religious: "Home, Sweet Home," "A Visit from St. Nicholas," "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear," "Battle Hymn of the Republic." From Lydia Maria Child's Thanksgiving poem ("Over the river and through the wood") to George Pope Morris's "The Oak" ("Woodman, spare that tree!"), these pages ring with the phrases that have become part of the national memory. Unprecedented in its textual authority, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet, a year-by-year chronology of poets and poetry from 1800 to 1900, and extensive notes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Mary Oliver's most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
Mary Oliver's most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
No more profound and intimate expression of America's spiritual life can be found than the work of its poets. From Anne Bradstreet to the Beats, from Native American chant and Shaker hymnody to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, religion and spirituality have always been central to American poetry. In this unique anthology, world-renowned scholar Harold Bloom weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice: the searching meditations of Puritan pioneers, the evangelical fervor of the Great Awakenings, the mystical currents of Transcendentalism, the diverse influences of the world religions that have taken root in modern America. Spanning four centuries and more than 200 poets, American Religious Poems is a bountiful and moving gathering of voices that offers countless moments of inspiration, solace, meditation, and transcendence. The poems in this unprecedented volume are a lasting testimony to the American spirit and its unremitting quest for ultimate truth and meaning. This deluxe collector's edition features: - an introduction by Harold Bloom;
- a reader's guide to significant topics and themes in the poems;
- Smyth-sewn binding and flexible, leatherette covers; and
- a ribbon page-marker.
- a reader's guide to significant topics and themes in the poems;
- Smyth-sewn binding and flexible, leatherette covers; and
- a ribbon page-marker.
In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus.
Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.
Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.
Barzun, Essay on French Verse. From the author of From Dawn to Decadence.
The reimagined story of Anarcha, an enslaved Black woman, subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Marion Sims. Selected by Tyehimba Jess as a National Poetry Series winner. In this provocative collection by award-winning poet and artist Dominique Christina, the historical life of Anarcha is personally reenvisioned. Anarcha was an enslaved Black woman who endured experimentation and torture at the hands of Dr. Marion Sims, more commonly known as the father of modern gynecology. Christina enables Anarcha to tell her story without being relegated to the margins of history, as a footnote to Dr. Sims's life. These poems are a reckoning, a resurrection, and a proper way to remember Anarcha . . . and grieve her.
After Sappho but before the great Latin poets, the most important short poems in the ancient world were Greek epigrams. Beginning with simple expressions engraved on stone, these poems eventually encompassed nearly every theme we now associate with lyric poetry in English. Many of the finest are on love and would later exert a profound influence on Latin love poets and, through them, on all the poetry of Europe and the West. This volume offers a representative selection of the best Greek epigrams in original verse translation. It showcases the poetry of nine poets (including one woman), with many epigrams from the recently discovered Milan papyrus. Gordon L. Fain provides an accessible general introduction describing the emergence of the epigram in Hellenistic Greece, together with short essays on the life and work of each poet and brief explanatory notes for the poems, making this collection an ideal anthology for a wide audience of readers.