Poetry

Jimmy Santiago Baca's brilliantly received memoir, A Place to Stand, earned him the prestigious International Prize and offered a keyhole view into the brutal personal history that shaped -- and continues to inform -- his raw, incisive voice. In C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, he trains his hallmark lyrical intensity on the dark underbelly of addiction and takes us on an unforgettable guided tour of the darkest corners of a brutal, unjust world. C-Train is a heartstopping series of episodes from the life of Dream-boy, a young man who finds himself seduced, and later enslaved, by the siren song of cocaine. Part paean to the delicious power of intoxication, part lament for those helplessly under its power, C-Train is a ride its hero, and the reader, struggle to get off. In Thirteen Mexicans, Baca writes of the Chicano community and the gulf between the American dream and American reality. In searing, elegiac vignettes he portrays the raw beauty of life in the barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront how they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white society. Giving voice to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca illuminates the most unforgiving landscapes; yet his is a vision tempered by a searching hopefulness that brings these collections inching toward redemption. Baca's latest achievement will confirm his place as one of the nation's leading poets, a poet whose words heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love (Garrett Hongo). [Baca] writes with ... an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events. -- Denise Levertov

At a time of environmental crises, poetry can reawaken us to the beauty and fragility of our natural world

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth.

In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets--from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder--have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.

Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers--a poetic legacy more vital now than ever.

A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain

The rich tradition of troubadour poetry in western Iberia had all but vanished from history until the discovery of several ancient cancioneiros, or songbooks, in the nineteenth century. These compendiums revealed close to 1,700 songs, or cantigas, composed by around 150 troubadours from Galicia, Portugal, and Castile in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Cantigas, award-winning translator Richard Zenith presents a delightful selection of 124 of these poems in English versions that preserve the musical quality of the originals, which are featured on facing pages. By turns romantic, spiritual, ironic, misogynist, and feminist, these lyrics paint a vibrant picture of their time and place, surprising us with attitudes and behaviors that are both alien and familiar.

The book includes the three major kinds of cantigas. While cantigas de amor (love poems in the voice of men) were largely inspired by the troubadour poetry of southern France, cantigas de amigo (love poems voiced by women) derived from a unique native oral tradition in which the narrator pines after her beloved, sings his praises, or mocks him. In turn, cantigas de escárnio are satiric, and sometimes outrageously obscene, lyrics whose targets include aristocrats, corrupt clergy, promiscuous women, and homosexuals.

Complete with an illuminating introduction on the history of the cantigas, their poetic characteristics, and the men who composed and performed them, this engaging volume is filled with exuberant and unexpected poems.

Most of Xi Xi's animal poems featured here are new works written during the past few years. Full of whimsical ideas, they embody the notion of "all humans are siblings, and all things are companions," brimming with warmth and compassion. These poems could be described as bright and cheerful, approachable, clever and fluid, humorous, and deep with meaning, written as though the author is able to directly communicate with animals. Overall, they serve as a voice for animals, showing that they are able to coexist equally and peacefully, resulting in a "carnival of animals." More than twenty young Hong Kong artists and illustrators have been invited to join this project, with each poem accompanied by different illustrations, their styles of illustration totally distinct, not limited to any particular form, presenting multiple heterogeneities.

This book is suitable for young readers, as well as adults who appreciate literature and art.

This collection of prose writings by an internationally known poet includes an autobiographical essay describing Hollo's remarkable odyssey from the time he left his native Finland for the United States as a high school student until he settled in Colorado in the late 1980s. Other pieces in the collection, ranging from brief pieces ("caws") to more extended "causeries" (informal essays), include "Some Aereated Prose for a Panel on 'experimental writing, '" "Gregorio the Herald" (a tribute to Gregory Corso), discussions of other poets, among them Tom Raworth and Francis Ponge, "What Was It Like: A Remembrance of Allen Ginsberg's Howl," and a sampling of a lifetime's observations on poetry and poets. What emerges is a lively, unabashedly opinionated, always personal poetics forged in association and friendship with numerous "New American" poets: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the Language poets, and the perennially unclassifiable and enigmatic.

This volume--a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh's 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry--brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of 85 poets from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, it contains more than 280 poems that span the entire history of modern Chinese poetry. Poets include those regarded as canonical as well as some who have been newly "discovered" or reevaluated in recent years, each selected for their distinctive voice and inimitable style. Also, for the first time, contemporary song lyrics are included as poetry. This diversity of perspectives, along with its geographic reach and expansive timeframe, make the anthology a much-needed contribution to the study of Chinese poetry and world literature. With short biographies of the poets, a select bibliography, and a comprehensive introduction, A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry is a critical resource for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

"A listening experience of unadulterated pleasure."-- "Mass Media Newsletter." First recorded in l952 ," A Child's Christmas in Wales" is the nostalgic recollection of Dylan Thomas' childhood that has become a classic among Christmas tales. With powerful grace, Thomas here performs this renowned work along with five of his best-known poems-- "Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, In the White Giants Thigh, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait, and Ceremony After a Fire Raid."

The only single-volume edition of Marlowe's poems available. Selections include "The Passionate Shepard", "Hero and Leander", "Lucan's First Book", and translations of Ovid's "Amore" and "Elegies".

"These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."--Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms--beautifully, forcefully--for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."--Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."--Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."--Out Magazine

Of special significance are the "Uncollected and Unpublished Poems (1912-1944)," the third section of the book, written mainly in the 1930s, during H. D.'s supposed "fallow" period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only a small part of it. The later, wartime poems in this section form an essential prologue to her magnificent Trilogy (1944), the fourth and culminating part of this book. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words "H. D., Imagiste" to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago. The Collected Poems 1912-1944 traces the continual expansion of H. D.'s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her "hidden" years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.'s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.

An extraordinary culmination for Robert Bly's lifelong intellectual adventure, Collected Poems presents the full magnitude of his body of work for the first time. Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation; every stage of his work is warmed by his devotion to the art of poetry and his affection for the varied worlds that inspire him. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau alongside spiritual traditions from Sufism to Gnosticism, he is a poet moved by mysteries, speaking the language of images. Collected Poems gathers the fourteen volumes of his impressive oeuvre into one place, including his imagistic debut, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962); the clear-eyed truth-telling of his National Book Award-winning collection, The Light Around the Body (1967); the masterful prose poems of The Morning Glory (1975); and the fiercely introspective, uniquely American ghazals of his latest collection, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011).

A monumental poetic achievement, Collected Poems makes clear why poets and lovers of poetry have long looked to Robert Bly for emotional authenticity, moral authority, and artistic inspiration.

Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

Muriel Rukeyser held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language. She earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism. Her eloquent poetry of witness-of the Scottsboro Nine, the Spanish Civil War, the poisoning of the Gauley Bridge laborers-split the darkness covering a shameful world.

In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser's translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz's work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem Wake Island. An introduction by the editors traces Rukeyser's life and literary reputation and complements discerning annotations and textual notes to the poems.

There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.

Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock along with Four Quartets, The Waste Land, and several other poems.