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Poetry

COMPLETE POETRY

COMPLETE POETRY

By: Herbert, George
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A wonderful edition of Herbert's poetry, edited by his acclaimed biographer John Drury and including elegant new translations of his Latin verse

George Herbert wrote, but never published, some of the very greatest English poetry, recording in an astonishing variety of forms his inner experiences of grief, recovery, hope, despair, anger, fulfilment and - above all else - love. This volume, edited by John Drury, collects Herbert's complete poetry - including such classics of English devotional poetry as 'The Altar', 'Easter-Wings' and 'Love'. It also includes the verse Herbert wrote in Latin, newly translated into English by Victoria Moul.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

COMPLETE WORKS OF ALBERTO CAEIRO: BILINGUAL EDITION

COMPLETE WORKS OF ALBERTO CAEIRO: BILINGUAL EDITION

By: Pessoa, Fernando
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Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari's splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary "heteronym" coterie created by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist master. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sa-Cárrneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa's greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa well as his other heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.
COMRADE PAST & MR PRESENT

COMRADE PAST & MR PRESENT

By: Codrescu, Andrei
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The Romanian-born NPR commentator renews the tradition of the poet as social critic.

CONDUCTORS OF THE PIT

By: Eshelma
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CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

By: Attar, Farid Ud-Din
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Composed in the twelfth century in north-eastern Iran, Attar's great mystical poem is among the most significant of all works of Persian literature. A marvellous, allegorical rendering of the Islamic doctrine of Sufism - an esoteric system concerned with the search for truth through God - it describes the consequences of the conference of the birds of the world when they meet to begin the search for their ideal king, the Simorgh bird. On hearing that to find him they must undertake an arduous journey, the birds soon express their reservations to their leader, the hoopoe. With eloquence and insight, however, the hoopoe calms their fears, using a series of riddling parables to provide guidance in the search for spiritual truth. By turns witty and profound, The Conference of the Birds transforms deep belief into magnificent poetry.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION FOR HOLY BEINGS: POEMS

CONFLICT RESOLUTION FOR HOLY BEINGS: POEMS

By: Harjo, Joy
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In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a magician and a master (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize

COTTON CANDY

COTTON CANDY

By: Kooser, Ted
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"Poems dipped out of the air" describes the manner in which Ted Kooser composed the poems in Cotton Candy, the result of his daily routine of getting up long before dawn, sitting with coffee, pen, and notebook, and writing whatever drifts into his mind. Whether those words and images are serious or just plain silly, Kooser tries not to censor himself. His objective is to catch whatever comes to him, to snatch it out of the air in words, rhythms, and cadences, the way a cotton candy vendor dips an airy puff out of a cloud of spun sugar and hands it to his customer. Poems written in fun and now shared with the reader, Kooser's playful and magical confections charm and delight.

COWBOY FROM PHANTOM BANKS

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CROSSING THE EQUATOR 1972-2004

CROSSING THE EQUATOR 1972-2004

By: Christopher, Nicholas
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Nicholas Christopher has been praised as one of America's most important poets by such literary talents as John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. Crossing the Equator collects Christopher's best work from the past three decades and includes a section of new poems that are among his finest.


Cold missiles and a rain

of embers accompany the men

who slide like shadows into the city

faces mud-smeared

stones for teeth no eyes


who slit the throats of everyone

they encounter until breaking down

my door they drag me into the darkness

that floods the corridor

and lock me in an icy chamber

--from THE LAST HOURS OF LAÓDIKÊ, SISTER OF HEKTOR

CULTURE OF ONE

CULTURE OF ONE

By: Notley, Alice
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A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert.

Award-winning, Paris-based poet Alice Notley's adventurous new book is inspired by the life of Marie, a woman who resided in the dump outside Notley's hometown in the Southwestern desert of America. In this poetical fantasy, Marie becomes the ultimate artist/poet, composing a codex-calligraphy, writings, paintings, collage-from materials left at the dump. She is a culture of one. The story is told in long-lined, clear-edged poems deliberately stacked so the reader can keep plunging headlong into the events of the book. Culture of One offers further proof of how Notley has freed herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be (The Boston Review).

DADA MARKET

DADA MARKET

By: Bohn, Willard
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Willard Bohn s collection of Dada poetry is the most comprehensive ever compiled. Forty-two poets writing in seven different languages (French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch) are presented in a bilingual format, where appropriate, with the original text and its English translation on facing pages. The collection, which opens with a critical and historical introduction, spans the years from 1914 to 1923 and includes such poets as Walter Conrad Arensberg, Andre Breton, Malcolm Cowley, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. Twelve works by ten Dada visual artists (six of whom are also represented by their poetry) illustrate the book.

Dada s overriding concern was libertysocial, moral, artistic, and intellectual. While rebelling against bourgeois values and all forms of authority, the Dadaists venerated scandalous behavior, spontaneity, and a general "joie de vivre. "Their adherents questioned the basic postulates of rationalism and humanism as few had done before. In trying to strip artistic expression down to its bare essentials, these writers often created works that were experiments in sound or typography."

DAM-BURST OF DREAMS

DAM-BURST OF DREAMS

By: Nolan, Christopher
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DANCING W/DOE 1986-91

By: Randall, Margaret
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This is the most recent poetry collection of thisinternationally celebrated socialist and feministauthor. Covering the first five years after her return from over twenty years abroad, in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua, these poems describe Randallbattling threats of deportation from the Immigra-tion and Naturalization Service, waking from thenightmare of childhood incest, emerging as alesbian, and continuing her feminist support ofworldwide socialism in politically troubled times. Margaret Randall divides her time between herhome in Albuquerque and lecture tours across thecountry.
DARK INTERVAL: LETTERS ON LOSS, GRIEF, AND TRANSFORMATION

DARK INTERVAL: LETTERS ON LOSS, GRIEF, AND TRANSFORMATION

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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From the writer of the classic Letters to a Young Poet, reflections on grief and loss, collected and published here in one volume for the first time.

"A great poet's reflections on our greatest mystery."--Billy Collins

"A treasure . . . The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and necessary."--The Guardian

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated letters to bereaved friends and acquaintances, The Dark Interval is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives. Following the format of Letters to a Young Poet, this book arranges Rilke's letters into an uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of the great author's thoughts on death and dying, as well as his sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence.

Presented with care and authority by master translator Ulrich Baer, The Dark Interval is a literary treasure, an indispensable resource for anyone searching for solace, comfort, and meaning in a time of grief.

Praise for The Dark Interval

"Even though each of these letters of condolence is personalized with intimate detail, together they hammer home Rilke's remarkable truth about the death of another: that the pain of it can force us into a 'deeper . . . level of life' and render us more 'vibrant.' Here we have a great poet's reflections on our greatest mystery."--Billy Collins

"As we live our lives, it is possible to feel not sadness or melancholy but a rush of power as the life of others passes into us. This rhapsodic volume teaches us that death is not a negation but a deepening experience in the onslaught of existence. What a wise and victorious book!"--Henri Cole

DARK WOULD

DARK WOULD

By: Waldner, Liz
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A philosophical, tough, and often funny inquiry into twenty-first-century selfhood, Liz Waldner's new collection of poems takes shape in the shadow of Dante's "dark wood." Dark Would (the missing person) is quirky. It's audaciously American, out of the Dickinson house. Waldner uses short, quick syntactical units that swerve rather than build up an architecture of ideas through sequential juxtaposition. She also has, like Dickinson, a canny, carnal, specifying diction. Her poems are sonorous, sly, and sexy. They are political in their address of gender through reference to pop songs, poems, and analyses of personal experiences. The resulting wry permutations of will and desire alternately leaf and hew an American "dark wood." The pages and paths turn to and through the kinds of lostness and foundness to which rootlessness gives rise.
DARKER FALL

DARKER FALL

By: Barot, Rick
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Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

Barot's mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over.--From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story.--Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

DEAR ANNE FRANK

DEAR ANNE FRANK

By: Agosín, Marjorie
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In her new collection, Marjorie Agosin invokes the presence of Anne Frank in [poetry] that stir us to become engaged in history's making. A tireless human rights activist, Agosin is also a descendent of European Jews who escaped the Holocaust. juda
DEAR FRIEND: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

DEAR FRIEND: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Torgersen, Eric
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In 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Requiem for a Friend in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the German painter who had profoundly affected him and who had died a year earlier. Although a great modern painter, Modersohn-Becker is remembered primarily as she is portrayed in Rilke's poem. Dear Friend looks at the relationship of two great artists whose often-strained friendship was extraordinary for both.
DICTEE

DICTEE

By: Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung
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Newly restored, this version of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's masterpiece honors the author's original intentions and vision for the book. Originally published in 1982, Dictee is a classic of modern Asian American literature.

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

This restored edition, produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), reflects Cha's original vision for the book as an art object in its authentic form, featuring:

  • The original cover
  • High-quality reproductions of the interior layout

  • Dictee tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself.

    This dynamic autobiography:

  • Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses
  • Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry
  • Links the women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes

  • The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

    DIVING INTO THE WRECK: POEMS 1971-1972

    DIVING INTO THE WRECK: POEMS 1971-1972

    By: Rich, Adrienne
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    I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail. These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.

    DIVINING POETS: DICKINSON: A QUOTABLE DECK FROM TURTLE POINT PRESS

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    DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

    DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

    By: Boland, Eavan
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    These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.
    DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE: POEMS 1974-1977

    DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE: POEMS 1974-1977

    By: Rich, Adrienne
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    "The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman's heart and mind in language for everybody--language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this."--Boston Evening Globe
    DREAM OF GERONTIUS

    DREAM OF GERONTIUS

    By: Newman, John Henry
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    Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR John Henry Cardinal Newman's renowned poem describes the death of an old man and the journey of his soul to the judgment seat of God. First published in 1865, it quickly became a bestseller in its field. Also included are a section on Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, which rapidly became the most popular choral work in Britain after Handel's Messiah, and a discography of currently available recordings of Elgar's Dream.
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    DREAM OF REASON

    By: George, Jenny
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    Jenny George's debut showcases an astonishing poetic talent, a new voice that is intensely focused, patient, and empathic. The Dream of Reason explores the paradoxical relationships between humans and the animals we imagine, keep, fear, and consume. Titled after Goya's grotesque bestiary, George's own dreamscape is populated by purring moths, bats that crawl like goblins, and livestock--especially pigs, whose spirit and slaughter inform a central series of portraits. The poems invite moments of stark realism into a spacious, lucid realm just outside of time--finding revelation in stillness, intimacy in violence, and vision in language that lifts from the dark.

    From "Threshold Gods"

    I saw a bat in a dream and then later that week
    I saw a real bat, crawling on its elbows
    across the porch like a goblin.
    It was early evening. I want to ask about death.
    But first I want to ask about flying.

    Jenny George lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she runs a foundation for Buddhist-based social justice. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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    DROWNED BOOK:ECSTATIC AND EARTHY REFLECTIONS OF BAHAUDDIN FATHER OF RUMI

    By: Moyne, John
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    The Lost Words of the Sufi Master and Father of Rumi

    Bahauddin, Rumi's father, was not only a major force in the development of Islamic spirituality, but also a deeply influential force in his son's life. In this, the first ever substantial English version of a wonderful but virtually unknown book, Bahauddin proves to be a daring, spiritual genius. His voice comes through the delightful, passionate craft of Coleman Barks, who transforms the Persian translations of John Moyne into fresh spiritual literature.

    DRUM-TAPS: THE COMPLETE 1865 EDITION

    DRUM-TAPS: THE COMPLETE 1865 EDITION

    By: Whitman, Walt
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    Walt Whitman worked as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War and published Drum-Taps, his war poems, as the war was coming to an end. Later, the book came out in an expanded form, including "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Whitman's passionate elegy for Lincoln. The most moving and enduring poetry to emerge from America's most tragic conflict, Drum-Taps also helped to create a new, modern poetry of war, a poetry not just of patriotic exhortation but of somber witness. Drum-Taps is thus a central work not only of the Civil War but of our war-torn times.

    But Drum-Taps as readers know it from Leaves of Grass is different from the work of 1865. Whitman cut and reorganized the book, reducing its breadth of feeling and raw immediacy. This edition, the first to present the book in its original form since its initial publication 150 years ago, is a revelation, allowing one of Whitman's greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory.

    DUETS: SONNETS : LOUISE LABAN : GUIDO CAVALCANTI

    DUETS: SONNETS : LOUISE LABAN : GUIDO CAVALCANTI

    By: Byrne, Edward
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    In the case of Louise Labé, the twenty-four sonnets (one in Italian, twenty-three in French) constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the entire duration of an intense love relation. In Guido's case, the sonnets are not sequential, but Byrne has selected out what he believes to be the most directly philosophical of his sonnets, those which, as has been argued, demonstrate his "radical aristotelianism" (averroism). In both cases, one pre-Petrarchan, one post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness or malady, and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relation between body and intellect. I refer to these poems as translations, rather than versions, because the depth of my engagement with them convinces me that they remain subservient to their sources - this can only be tested by reading them against their originals. A reader not compelled to do so, can read them as their poems. In doing so, they will find ninety poems, each made up of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables (with minor exceptions - only Allah is perfect). The main body of the work was written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice whereby the composing mind passes from room to room (stanza to stanza) in a kind of trance of forgetting and remembering. A distant, but undeniable precursor of this practice, in the context of translation, is Robin Blaser's les chimères. The second version of Louise Labé's sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke's German translation, using Louise's middle French text as a "pony" (crib or gloss - necessary because the author's German ain't so great). interspersed, or intervening, within the translations, are "sonnets" by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Proust, and Jacques Lacan. In addition, between the main translations there is a sequence of wild sonnets, or nonets, taken from a separate collaboration with Kim Minkus (to be published in The Capilano Review), and a pendant of sonnets by Louise's admirers (members of her salon, such as Maurice Scève and Clément Marot).
    DUINO ELEGIES TR SNOW

    DUINO ELEGIES TR SNOW

    By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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    Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
    orders? and even if one of them pressed me
    suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
    in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
    but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
    and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
    to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
    -from The First Elegy

    Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English.

    Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

    DUINO ELEGIES/DUINESER ELEGIEN DUAL LANGUAGE TR, MACINTYRE

    DUINO ELEGIES/DUINESER ELEGIEN DUAL LANGUAGE TR, MACINTYRE

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    Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany's greatest poets, began this work in 1912, at the castle of Duino near Trieste. It took him a decade to complete these meditations on love, death, God, and life's meaning, and he regarded them as his greatest achievement. Innovative and enigmatic, they express his irresolvable conflict between a longing for solitude and a painful loneliness. The elegies' enduring popularity attests to their vivid reflection of the human condition, in all its joy, terror, sorrow, and splendor.
    Translator C. F. MacIntyre declares these works as among the great and unforgettable poetry of the world. His interpretations are both true to the originals and poetic in their own right. This dual-language edition features English translations on the pages facing the original German. Poetry lovers, students of German literature and language, and other readers will find this volume an accessible exploration of one of modern literature's most profound sequences of poetry.