Poetry

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.

Coffee House Press invites readers into the world of Native American postmodern poetry in a groundbreaking anthology sampling the work of twenty-two authors who lead us into new conceptual terrain. Visit Teepee Town is the first anthology dedicated solely to postmodern North American Native poetry and poetics. The works selected here resist established methodologies of defining indigenous aesthetics, and include bilingual texts, reinterpretations of traditional tales, and critiques of the Western tradition in anthropology and the social sciences.

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.

Osip Mandelstam is one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work. Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full of the sights and sounds of the steppes, blue sky and black earth, the roads, winter breath, spring with its birds and flowers and bees, the notebooks are a continual improvisation and an unapologetic affirmation of poetry as life.

For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel.

Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman's friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel's extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman's observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet's more personal side--his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America's greatest poet.

Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. Yesterday I lost a country, Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.

This all-new Signet Classic contains many of T.S. Eliot's most important early peoms, leading to perhaps his greatest masterpiece, "The Waste land," which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular culture and common speech linked in a fragmented narrative, Eliot recreated the chaos and disillusionment of Europe in the aftermath of WWI.
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."

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

Ofelia Zepeda is a Native American poet who possesses a kind of double vision. She sees the contemporary world through her own highly observant eyes and, at the same time, through the eyes of her Tohono O'odham ancestors. Seeing this way infuses her poetry with a resonance and depth that makes it a delight to read--and re-read.

Zepeda is as clear-eyed about the past as she is about the present. She recalls waiting for the school bus on a cold morning inside her father's truck, listening to the sounds of the engine, the windshield wipers, and the "soft rain on the hood." She remembers celebrating Mass on the "cold dirt floor of the Winter Solstice." In the present, she sees both the frustration and the humor in a woman she observes trying to eat pancakes with one hand while her other resides in a cast: "Watching her, I realize eating pancakes is a two-handed job."

Whatever she sees, she filters through her second set of eyes, which keep the past always present. She tells of traveling to Waw Giwulig, the most sacred mountain of the Tohono O'odham, to ask for blessings--and forgiveness. She writes that one should always bring music to the mountains, "so they are generous with the summer rains." And, still, "the scent of burning wood / holds the strongest memory. / Mesquite, cedar, piñon, juniper, . . . / we catch the scent of burning wood; / we are brought home." It is a joy to see the world afresh through her eyes.

Mitsu Suzuki is the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Zen monk who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. A White Tea Bowl is a selection of her poems, written after her return to Japan in 1993. These 100 haiku were chosen by editor Kazuaki Tanahashi and translated by Zen teacher Kate McCandless to celebrate Mitsu's 100th birthday on April 27, 2014. The introduction by Zen poet and priest Norman Fischer describes with loving detail a meeting with Mitsu at Rinso-in temple in 2010, considers the formative impact of war in Japan and social upheaval in America on her life, and places her poetry in the evolution of haiku as an international form.