Poetry

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works.

"Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing."

As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud.

He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.

This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.

When W.S. Merwin was a young poet, Ezra Pound advised him to "read the seeds of poetry, not the twigs." As the ballads of Spain are among those essential seeds, Merwin set out to select and translate a collection of them into English.

Few, if any, popular poetic traditions compare to that of the ballads in the culture of Spain. These terse, passionate, and often violent poems have been remembered, repeated, and loved for centuries throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Evolving from the epic song, this unique poetic genre has influenced the drama of the Golden Age, the novel, and lyric verse of the present day.

For this volume--long out of print and reissued in the new series Copper Canyon Classics--W.S. Merwin selected representative examples of every kind of ballad: from episodic story poems to unusual "wonder-mongering" songs. Grouped by kind and arranged in chronological order, these poems provide an essential key to Spanish culture from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Merwin approached this project humbly and notes in his introduction: "My aim was not to produce a series of virtuoso performances but a group of translations which would be faithful and readable, and would get in the way of the originals as little as possible."

W.S. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation. He has earned nearly every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He lives in Hawaii.

An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Gabriel Spera's The Standing Wave was a winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet Dave Smith.

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.

Stroke by Stroke is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux's most suggestive texts, Stroke by Stroke (Par des traits, 1984) and Grasp (Saisir, 1979), written towards the end of his life. Michaux's ideogrammic ink drawings accompany his poetic explorations of animals, humans, and the origins of language. This series of verbal and pictorial gestures is at once explosive and contemplative. Michaux emerges at his most Zen.

Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English

Joseph Brodsky once said of Les Murray: "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observant Subhuman Redneck Poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.

The poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, whom William Logan once called "the most talented American poet under the age of forty," published her first book of poems in 1982. She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse.

Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love, show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.

A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg Trakl

In Georg Trakl's brief, tragic life he produced a body of work of intense visual power. Dense, imagistic and full of unnerving symbolism, his poems occupy a critical place in German Expressionism.

Until his death on the Eastern Front in 1914, Trakl honed a singular poetic voice to express the horror he saw in the world around him, culminating in the starkly powerful war poems for which he is best known.

This edition includes all of Trakl's major poems alongside a judicious selection of the best of his uncollected work, all rendered in vividly clear English by translator and poet Will Stone. With a biography, a critical introduction and a chronology of Trakl's life, this collection promises to reinvigorate interest in this under-appreciated poet.

A new poetry collection from award-winning author Michael Chang

A vital breath of life arrives in American poetry with Synthetic Jungle, the latest collection from acclaimed poet Michael Chang. With poems in a register both hilarious and scathing, Synthetic Jungle effortlessly bashes convention while simultaneously rebuilding the language we use to communicate our fears and joys.

Synthetic Jungle is a collection written by a brilliant jester who winks at you as you catch their every reference before sharing a laugh at your own self-satisfaction. Themes of identity, sexuality, and literacy play out in a dizzying rhythm of microtheaters. Readers will find themselves giggling, snorting, and guffawing their way through this work: whether at a repudiation of the literary landscape or a critique of a failing justice system, to laugh along with Chang is to recognize your mistakes and, ultimately, grow from them.

Fractal and kinetic in the quick-witted spirit of John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, Chang's tender poems dance around, between, and through the personal and philosophical. Synthetic Jungle is as sweet as it is grand, and beneath its sarcastic grin reverberates an immense, open heart.

"This is Neruda at his finest, his eloquence and passion skillfully arranged in an accessible yet profound package." --Publishers Weekly

"This brief visit with Neruda ends all too soon, yet reminds one why his work still matters." --Washington Post

"They are vintage Pablo Neruda, literally and figuratively . . . he makes poetry fans swoon." --NPR

This stunning collection gathers never-before-seen poems, discovered within the Pablo Neruda Foundation's archives in Chile. Neruda is renowned for an oeuvre that casts away despair, celebrates living and arises from the belief that there is no insurmountable solitude. Then Come Back presents Pablo Neruda's mature imagination and writing: signature love poems, odes, anecdotal narratives, and poems of the political imagination.

Written on any paper imaginable--napkins, playbills, receipts--and found scattered throughout the Neruda Estate, these poems offer heartache, Chilean pride, and hope found in the changing of the seasons and the chirping of crickets. The acclaimed translator Forrest Gander beautifully renders the eros and heartache, deep wonder, and complex wordplay of the original Spanish, which is presented here alongside full-color reproductions of the poems in their original composition.

From "1"

I touch your feet in the shade, your hands in the light,
and on the flight your peregrine eyes guide me
Matilde, with the kisses your mouth taught me
my lips came to know fire.

Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling poets. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971 and died in his native Chile in 1973.

Wendell Berry's Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry's work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.

The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary Oliver

In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.

One of the world's foremost writing teachers invites readers on a joyful journey into the reading and origins of haiku

A haiku is three simple lines. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg put it, three lines that "make the mind leap." A good one, he said, lets the mind experience "a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God." As many spiritual practices seek to do, the haiku's spare yet acute noticing of the immediate and often ordinary grounds the reader in the pure awareness of now.

Natalie Goldberg is a delightfully companionable tour guide into this world. She highlights the history of the form, dating back to the seventeenth century; shows why masters such as Basho and Issa are so revered; discovers Chiyo-ni, an important woman haiku master; and provides insight into writing and reading haiku. A fellow seeker who travels to Japan to explore the birthplace of haiku, Goldberg revels in everything she encounters, including food and family, painting and fashion, frogs and ponds. She also experiences and allows readers to share in the spontaneous and profound moments of enlightenment and awakening that haiku promises.

WINNER of the INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

WINNER of the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD

FINALIST for the 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD

On October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.

Time of Grief is an anthology of poems divided into forty-nine days of mourning: "forty-nine days of mourning: reflecting a period of grieving as observed in Buddhist and Judaic traditions. Each day's reading consists of one or more poems by some of the world's most celebrated poets from diverse cultures and centuries, from classical times to today. Seventy-five writers from over twenty countries confront illness, loss, love lost, death and mortality, through moving requiems and lamentations, elegies and eulogies. Reaffirming poetry's ancient and intimate link with ritual, this collection opens up a calendrical, spiritual space for readers to experience bereavement as a means toward transformation.