Poetry
The book spans three centuries--opening with Angelus Silesius, Klopstock, Claudius, Goethe, and Schiller, and ending with Brecht and Böll--but it has considerable continuity. The prefaces for each of the twenty-five poets integrate the selections into a story, and often poems by different writers invite comparison. For example, almost all of the poets express an attitude toward death. Not only would many discussions of death be better if the authors had some inkling of the great variety of attitudes illustrated here, but one can also gain a better understanding of a poet's experience of life by comparing his attitude toward death with that of some other poets. The book should contribute to a better understanding of some of these twenty-five poets, of German literature, of intellectual history, and of some of the themes with which these poets deal.
The sequence of the poets, and the poems of each poet, is roughly chronological. Walter Kaufmann has made all the translations and have endeavored to capture the distinctive tone of each of the poets. The original German texts are printed on facing pages.
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been to me, even from childhood, a great museum.
-- Lydia Davis
Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches
under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on
a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like
a snow-drift.
-- Eliot Weinberge
An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century
Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith's searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:
We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners'
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.
The poet's unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature's finest wordsmiths doing what she does best--unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.
An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English
An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman's startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse.
Shaped by Oberman's scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. "Wulf and Eadwacer," a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as "On Trans" draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.
If McHugh is serious, she's anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering, and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics.--The New York Times Book Review
Her poems are open, resilient, invisibly twisted: part safety net, part trampoline.--Village Voice Literary Supplement
This fast-paced, verbally dexterous book--honored as a Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly--boils up and boils over as it utilizes medical terminology and iconography to work through loss and detachment. Heather McHugh's startling rhymes and rhythms, coupled with her sarcastic self-reflection and infectious laughter, serve as both palliative and prophylactic in the face of human sufferings and ignorance. Being upgraded to serious from critical condition is a nod to the healing powers of poetry.
Not to Be Dwelled On
Self-interest cropped up even there,
the day I hoisted three instead
of the ceremonially called-for two
spadefuls of loam
onto the coffin of my friend.
Why shovel more than anybody else?
What did I think I'd prove? More love
(mud in her eye)? More will to work?
(her father what, a shirker?) Christ,
what wouldn't anybody give
to get that gesture back?
She cannot die again; and I
do nothing but re-live.
Heather McHugh is the author of a dozen books of poetry and translation. She teaches at the University of Washington and Warren Wilson College and lives in Seattle, Washington.
A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.
Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees-
The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;
on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.
-from "tributaries"
Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.
Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines-expansive, fluent, and full-manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.
The collection features both new and established authors, including James Thomas Stevens, Lise McCloud, Gerald Vizenor, James Luna, Rosemarie Waldrop, Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Barbara Tedlock, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Hachavi Edgar Heap of Birds, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Victoria Lena Manyarrows, Besmilr Brigham, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, Diane Glancy, Phil Young, Larry Evers and Felipe Molina, Juan Felipe Herrera, Greg Sarris, Peter Blue Cloud, and Louise Bernice Halfe.
Certain to spark lively debate in the classroom and beyond, Visit Teepee Town sidesteps the roadblocks and knocks down the barricades that have limited contemporary criticism and poetry. A revival of the magic of sound and oral tradition, Visit Teepee Town redefines contemporary and postmodern poetry and poetics as it leads readers to the Teepee Town at the end of the mind.
The Wast Land is a modernist literary masterpiece.
Contains a number of early poems, including "Spleen, The Death of St. Narcissus, The Love Song of J. Prufrock, Preludes, Gerontion, The Hippopotmaus," and "Sweeny Among the Nightingales."
T.S Eliot is the winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of America's greatest poets.
Edited and with an Introduction by Helen Vendler, a foremost scholar of moderism at Harvard University who writes regularly for the "New Yorker" and "The New Republic."
Vendler is also the author of books on other essential poets, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, George Herbert, and the forthcoming "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnete."
From Ars Poetica
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat--
you could feel their gold wings trembling. . .
Dana Levin's singular voice and talent are unmistakable. Wedding Day is Levin's quest to synthesize the public and private, to find pattern and connection amid the disparate elements of modern life. Relentless in her examinations, she ultimately puts faith in poetry, believing it is the truest means--and best chance--to bridge the chasms between soul and society. Readers will put faith in Levin's poetry as well.
Dana Levin grew up in California's Mojave Desert. Her debut volume, In the Surgical Theatre, received nearly every honor available for first books and emerging writers. Other honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe and Whiting Foundations. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin chairs the Creative Writing and Literature Department at College of Santa Fe in Sante Fe, New Mexico
From Library Journal
For her debut collection, In the Surgical Theatre, Levin (creative writing, Coll. of Santa Fe) won the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares; it's no wonder, then, that her follow-up has been anticipated by academic scholars and poetry lovers, who won't be disappointed. While her first work focused on the gritty details of physical matter, often its desecration or decay, Levin's current work offers insight into the most personal and unspoken thoughts that can be easily overlooked: "we were losing our bodies/ digitized salt of bytes and speed we were becoming a powder/ light/ bicarbonate/ what we might have seen, if we had looked." Her voice speaks to the private wars of self and the dark violence of reflection. Readers will find that this work carries the pulse of their darkest sorrows, in the breath of their humanity. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.--April Davis, STG International, NIST, Oakotn, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information
"intimate and hyponotic...whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysic needs that poetry exists to fill."
--Ploughshares
"Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us."
--LA Times
"Images that are satisfyingly clear...and excitingly inexplicable"
--Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
The New York Times has called Mary Oliver's poems "thoroughly convincing - as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring." In this stunning collection of forty poems - nineteen previously unpublished - she writes of nature and love, of the way they transform over time. And the way they remain constant. And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? On one street after another, the litter ticks in the gutter. In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. They have done all they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.
Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world--with accompanying photos throughout.
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics--on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces--in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as "luminous."
With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one's sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems--in Margaret Jull Costa's gorgeous English versions--seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask "What's in a name?"
"How solid is a name if answered to," Amaral answers, but "like the Rose--no, like its perfume: ungovernable. Free." There is much freedom within Amaral's poetry, room for mysteries to multiply, and yet her beautiful lines are as clear as water:
And that time of smiles Which does, incidentally,
really exist, I swear, as does the fire
And the invisible sea, which with nothing will agree
Familiar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.
For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.