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Poetry
"Gabriel Zaid . . . is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him--you'll see."--Paul Berman
The first appearance in English of the poetry of Gabriel Zaid, this book comprises forty-two poems (in both English and the original Spanish), translated by a variety of English-speaking poets. Renowned in Mexico as one of his country's leading writers, Zaid has published two books in English, So Many Books and The Secret of Fame (both from Paul Dry Books).
Late Again
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
It's so hard to coordinate:
one hand over your head
like a halo
the other
perpendicular
to your navel.
Nevertheless it's a universal law:
people begin soaping
at their bellies
while other worlds
turn around in their heads.
Think with your stomach,
said the happy Buddha.
But we
ruminate with our heads.
Gabriel Zaid's poetry, essays, social and cultural criticism, and business writings have been widely published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He lives in Mexico City, Mexico, with the artist Basia Batorska, her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books. Paul Dry Books has published his So Many Books and The Secret of Fame.
"This collection of W.S. Merwin's translations is a deeply worthy book, beautifully produced, and meant to last as a physical object and cultural offering."--World Literature Today
"None surpass him. This Selected Translations is amazing in scope, mastery, themes, artistry, imagination: a testimony to a lifetime of consequential work."--Three Percent
"An absorbing experience that resonates with a multitude of cultural viewpoints and traditions, spanning centuries of human history. An astonishing tour de force."--Midwest Book Review
Selected Translations is the lifework from one of America's greatest poets and translators. Dedicated to the art of translation since his undergraduate years at Princeton, W.S. Merwin achieved an unmatched oeurve of translated poems from every corner of the earth, from dozens of languages. This massive achievement is an essential volume for every library, public and private.
Basho's Tomb at Konpuku-ji Temple
Yosa Buson
I will die too
let me be a dry grass flower
here by the monument
In the wild winter wind
the voice of the water is torn
falling across the rocks
I bury the charcoal embers
in the ashes
my hut is covered with snow
I wear this hood
rather than look as though
I belonged to the drifting world
W.S. Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, most recently for The Shadow of Sirius, and the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Author and translator of over fifty books, Mr. Merwin lives in Hawaii and France.
These selections include a generous presentation from Sabina's recorded chants and a complete English translation of her oral autobiography, her vida, as written and arranged in her native language by her fellow Mazatec Alvaro Estrada. Accompanying essays and poems include an introduction to "The Life of María Sabina" by Estrada, an early description of a nighttime "mushroom velada" by the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, an essay by Henry Munn relating the language of Sabina's chants to those of other Mazatec shamans, and more.
In this new collection of "technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems" (Spectator)--including "Japanese Maple," which was published in The New Yorker to great acclaim--Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which--for all their grappling with death and his current illness--are primarily a celebration of what is treasurable and memorable in our time here.
Again and again, James reminds us that he is not only a poet of effortless wit and lyric accomplishment but also an immensely wise one, who delights in using poetic form to bring a razor-sharp focus to his thought. Miraculously, these poems see James writing with his insight and energy not only undiminished but positively charged by his situation. The poems of Sentenced to Life represents a career high point from one of the greatest literary intellects of our age.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Featured on NPR's Fresh Air and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.
Honored as one of the Best Books of the Year from Publishers Weekly.
A collection of luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory. --Pulitzer Prize Committee
In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style. --Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
"Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
[The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. --Harold Bloom
[Merwin's] best book in a decade--and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom. --Publishers Weekly, starred review
Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence. --Orion
[The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing. --Harvard Review
The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin's new book of poems. "I have only what I remember," Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound--the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." In "Photographer," Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by "someone who understood." In "Empty Lot," Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can't help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
W.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America's foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
The first edition of Shadowed Dreams was a groundbreaking anthology that brought to light the contributions of women poets to the Harlem Renaissance. This revised and expanded version contains twice the number of poems found in the original, many of them never before reprinted, and adds eighteen new voices to the collection to once again strike new ground in African American literary history. Also new to this edition are nine period illustrations and updated biographical introductions for each poet.
Shadowed Dreams features new poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Anita Scott Coleman, Mae Cowdery, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Casely Hayford (a k a Aquah Laluah), Virginia Houston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and Anne Spencer, as well as writings from newly discovered poets Carrie Williams Clifford, Edythe Mae Gordon, Alvira Hazzard, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Beatrice Murphy, Lucia Mae Pitts, Grace Vera Postles, Ida Rowland, and Lucy Mae Turner, among others. Covering the years 1918 through 1939 and ranging across the period's major and minor journals, as well as its anthologies and collections, Shadowed Dreams provides a treasure trove of poetry from which to mine deeply buried jewels of black female visions in the early twentieth century.
measured a half second
before it expands into a hand.
I wrap its worn grip over our feet
As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.
Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera's elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere ("City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!"), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.
In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: "We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn."
The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother--with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. "You can't stop this / song," she writes. "More hands than yours have closed / around my throat."
Francis's lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. "The secret to knowing the secret is to speak," she concludes, "but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you'd think by now / we'd tell it, at least to each other."
Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation
She says
the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug
There is no fortress against the wind
the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls-from "She Says"
Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death-the backdrop of a war-ravaged country-are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.
This poetry collection showcases all the features of Joan Logghe's work that have attracted so many readers: her attention to detail, her warmth, humor, and passionate and inclusive social conscience. At once postmodern and deeply rooted in her adopted northern New Mexico home, Logghe's work connects disparate events and objects.
"I named my last child Hope. I never had a last child," she writes in the poem "True or False."
Television Is the Golden Calf I read about
In Sabbath School. My teacher lied.
We live on the northern edge of the Sonorous desert.
Armageddon is a small lizard that reconstitutes at first rain.
Turtles have an aversion to helium because they are heavyhearted.
"Joan Logghe is one of the most exciting poets in America today. Her words sing, slide, slip, & jive. I love everything by Joan."--Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones
Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works: William Carlos Williams's "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.
This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.
"Here are poems of intelligent consideration and a deft and heart-born music, filled with the gleam of particularity and a lushness of language and substance."--Jane Hirshfield
In this collection of poems, Carol Moldaw brings the reader to a world where contrasting things form a union that is distanced by mystery--either by the mystery within the things themselves, or the mystery that surrounds them, yet this bond is necessary and complete ... Overall, Moldaw's poems can be felt much like lightning is felt--as a dashed stroke of electricity that resonates long after the flash dissolves into a vast sky or field. -- Jennifer Belcik, Southwestern American Literature
Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars, Carol Moldaw constructs poetry of imaginative daring that illuminates and transforms the life within us all. In So Late, So Soon, "oblique, wily, and intensely intelligent poems" repeatedly achieve, to quote from The New Yorker, "lyric junctures of shivering beauty." Aurally rich, structurally varied, inventive, and sensually textured, these are poems at once passionate and analytical, descriptive and meditative, lyrical and complex--poems that keep one eye on the moon while leveling their gaze at the self and its immediate world.
From Out of the West
Out of the west, unexpected, lyric,
a stand of yellow irises
rises from the pond muck.
Two horses graze the field,
one limping from the fire they fled.
Matter and spirit meet, love,
argue, wherever you rest your eyes,
on microscopic midges, horseflies.
Carol Moldaw is the author of a novel, The Widening, and four books of poetry--The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize; Through the Window; Chalkmarks on Stone; and Taken from the River. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer's Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize.
"Taha Muhammad Ali speaks with an emotional forthrightness. . . . He has developed a style that seems both ancient and new, deceptively simple and movingly direct."--The Washington Post
Taha Muhammad Ali is a revered Palestinian poet whose work is driven by vivid imagination, disarming humor, and unflinching honesty. As a boy he was exiled from his hometown, but rather than turning to a protest poetry of black-and-white slogans to convey this loss, he has created art of the highest order. His poems portray experiences that range from catastrophe to splendor, each preserving an essential human dignity.
Neither music
fame nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life's brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long, and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
So What will include Arabic en face and introductions by co-translators Gabriel Levin and Peter Cole. Muhammad Ali will be one of the international poets featured at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, and he will embark on a reading tour of the United States in the fall of 2006.
Among the Spanish people who settled New Mexico four centuries ago were Jews forced into exile during the Inquisition. This series of thirty poems reveals the life of one of these crypto Jews, a Hispanic woman with a Sephardic background. Drawing on the stories and lives of actual women as well as on the author's own life in the Española Valley, these poems, written in English and translated into Spanish, are presented bilingually in this powerful book.
Readers familiar with the later, more widely published versions of Leaves of Grass will find this first version of "Song of Myself" new, surprising, and often superior to the later versions -- and exhilarating in the freshness of its vision. In this inexpensive edition, this enormously influential work will especially delight students, teachers, and any devotee of Walt Whitman.
