Poetry
Here is the best of Emily Dickinson's poetry -- 576 poems that fully and fairly represent not only the complete range of Dickinson's poetic genius but also the complexity of her personality, the fluctuation of her mood, and the development of her style. Final Harvest is the first selected volume of Dickinson's work that draws from all 1,775 of her poems -- poems of such startling originality that they were doomed to obscurity in Dickinson's own lifetime.
We have had to wait more than a century and a quarter for Final Harvest, the first truly selected poems of Emily Dickinson...In its own and special way, this book stands like a monument at the end of a very long road in literary history. --Christian Science Monitor
The second of five new books of unpublished poems from the late, great, Charles Bukowski, America's most imitated and influential poet -- 143 never-before-seen works of gritty, amusing, and inspiring verse.
The first critical edition of Auden's only explicitly religious long poem
For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most clichéd of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.
Winner, 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category
Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize
Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color
Containing some of the most melodic passages in modern poetry, "Four Quartets" blends the religious, the philosophical and the personal themes that preoccupied Eliot. The four parts, "Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding," are interconnected both by theme and by symbol. A poem of war, of Christianity, of literature and of history, "Four Quartets" speaks for a whole generation and is an enduring masterpiece.
The novel tells the rags-to-riches story of Franklin Evans, an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters, and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the very end of the tale, Evans's efforts to abstain fail, and each time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues. Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery, investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform. Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes in antebellum American culture.
The editors' substantial introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman's life and career, mid-nineteenth-century American print culture, and many of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same year that Franklin Evans was published.
For Fresco, editor Henry Israeli has gathered fifty-seven poems from Luljeta Lleshanaku's published books (The Sleepwalker's Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; Antipastoral, 1999) as well as some newer work. His Afterword places her writing within its personal and social context, while an Introduction by the award-winning translator Peter Constantine views the poet from the wider perspective of modern Albanian literature. The poems themselves are translated by Henry Israeli in collaboration with the author and Uk Zenel Bucpapa, Noci Deda, Joanna Goodman, Alban Kupi, Albana Lleshanaku, Lluka Qafoku, Shpresa Qatipi, Qazim Sheme, and Daniel Weissbort. Many of the translations have appeared in such magazines as Grand Street, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, and Quarterly West
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham.
The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." In 1996, her volume of poetry selected from her first five books, Dream of a Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.
In From the New World--Poems 1976-2014, we can witness the unfolding of Graham's signature ethical and eco-political concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, love and, increasingly, love of the world in a time of crisis. As the work evolves, the depth of compassion grows--gradually transforming, widening and expanding her extraordinary formal resources and her inimitable style.
These pages present a brilliant portrait one of the major voices of American contemporary poetry. As critic Calvin Bedient says, "If Graham has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry, it is because she continually recalls the great Western tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry . . . tenaciously thinking and feeling her way through layer after layer of perception, like no poet before her."
An engaging and accessible collection that includes some of the Nobel Prize winner's own favorite poems, with the English translations and original Spanish presented on facing pages.
The SeaA single entity, but no blood.
A single caress, death or a rose.
The sea comes in and puts our lives together
and attacks alone and spreads itself and sing
sin nights and days and men and living creatures.
Its essence-fire and cold; movement, movement. Pablo Neruda himself regarded Fully Empowered -- which first appeared in Spanish in 1962 under the title Plenos Poderes -- as a particular favorite, in part because it came out of a most fruitful period in his life. These thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics to characteristic Neruda odes to magnificent meditations on the office of poet, including poems that would undoubtedly claim a place in any selection of Neruda's greatest work. The People (El Pueblo), about the state of the working man in Chile's past and present, and the most celebrated of Neruda's later poems, completes this reflective, graceful collection.
The Galloping Hour: French Poems--never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime--gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960-1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970-1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik's deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.
Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors--Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud--this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik's work led Raúl Zurita to note: "Her poetry--with a clarity that becomes piercing--illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."
The extracts and essays included here date from early as 1368, when Eustace Deschamps paid the first recorded tribute to Chaucer's genius, and move chronologically through to the late 1990s. The selections address the opinions of early editors of Chaucer as well as the continuing interest in the poet by other writers throughout the ages. Sociological, gender-based, historical, and structural readings of The Prologue are also represented.
Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained One Art, Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds 'grand, ' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech.
More than any other Persian poet--even Rumi--Hafiz expanded the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Because his poems were often ecstatic love songs from God to his beloved world, many have called Hafiz the "Invisible Tongue." Indeed, Daniel Ladinsky has said that his work with Hafiz is an attempt to do the impossible: to render Light into words--to make the Luminous Resonance of God tangible to our finite senses. I am
a hole in a flute
that the Christ's breath moves
through--
listen to this
music!
With this stunning collection of Hafiz's most intimate poems, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in presenting the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and religious voices. Each line of The Gift imparts the wonderful qualities of this master Sufi poet and spiritual teacher: encouragement, an audacious love that touches lives, profound knowledge, generosity, and a sweet, playful genius unparalleled in world literature.
Beautifully illustrated with 16 full-color paintings and scores of line drawings by Florence Harrison, this volume also includes such popular poems as "The Hour and the Ghost," "My Dream," "Mirage," "Twilight Calm," and 32 other wondrous meditations on love and loss, death and remembrance, and nature and spirituality. It offers a splendid introduction to the glories of Rossetti's work as well as a lovely keepsake edition for those already acquainted with the deeply spiritual poet.
Louie Pérez is a master musician and innovative visual artist who has spent the last forty years as founding member and principal songwriter for the internationally acclaimed group Los Lobos. Working with his songwriting partner, David Hidalgo, Pérez has written more than four hundred songs. Many of those songs, along with previously unpublished poems and short stories as well as paintings, sketches, and photos, are collected in this deeply personal, yet universally appealing volume. The book also features essays by musicians, artists and scholars who artfully dissect the significance of Pérez' work. Good Morning, Aztlán is, without question, a different kind of memoir.
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, 17 Poems, through his epic poem Baltics (my most consistent attempt to write music), and The Sad Gondola, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 (I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.), to his most recent slim book, The Great Enigma, published in Sweden in 2004. Also included is his prose-memoir Memories Look at Me, containing keys into his intensely spiritual, metaphysical poetry (like the brief passage of insect collecting on Runmaro Island when he was a teenager). Firmly rooted in the natural world, his work falls between dream and dream; it probes the great unsolved love with the opening up, through subtle modulations, of concrete words.