Poetry

For those who know his history, it is no surprise that Leroy V. Quintana is a great story-teller in his poetry. He was raised in Albuquerque by Mexican grandparents who told him numerous folk-tales (Cuentos) as a child. "In many ways, I'm still basically a small-town New Mexico boy carrying on the oral tradition," he comments. His work is endowed not only with a raucous frontier humor, but also a remarkable emotional range, from comic depictions of adolescent love to moving poems of death and loss, to reflections on his war experience in Vietnam.

A renowned Keats scholar illuminates the poet's extraordinary career, in a new edition featuring seventy-eight verse selections with commentary.

John Keats's career as a published poet spanned scarcely more than four years, cut short by his death early in 1821 at age twenty-five. Yet in this time, he produced a remarkable--and remarkably wide-ranging--body of work that has secured his place as one of the most influential poets in the British literary tradition. Celebrated Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson presents seventy-eight selections from his work, each accompanied by a commentary on its form, style, meanings, and relevant contexts.

In this edition, readers will rediscover a virtuoso poet, by turns lively, experimental, self-ironizing, outrageous, and philosophical. Wolfson includes such well-known favorites as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and The Eve of St. Agnes, as well as less familiar poems, several in letters to family and friends never meant for publication. Her selections redefine the breadth and depth of Keats's poetic imagination, from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying, passionate confessions, and reflections on mortality.

The selections, presented in their order of composition, convey a chronicle of Keats's artistic and personal evolution. Wolfson's revealing commentaries unfold the lively complexities of his verbal arts and stylistic experiments, his earnest goals and nervous apprehensions, and the pressures of politics and literary criticism in his day. In critically attentive and conversational prose, Wolfson encourages us to experience Keats in the way that he himself imagined the language of poetry: as a living event, a cooperative experience shared between author and reader.

"There are in Harmonium six or eight of the most beautiful poems an American has written. The poems see, feel, and think with equal success." -- Randall Jarrell, Poetry and The Age
An executive with a Connecticut-based insurance company, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) wrote poetry in the evenings and during his daily commute. Harmonium, his first collection of verse, was published when he was 44 years old. Although largely overlooked upon its 1923 debut, the compilation is recognized today as an important contribution to Modernism, offering a diverse range of satirical and philosophical lyrical works that explore the nature of reality and the power of the imagination. They include some of Stevens's most famous and frequently studied works, including "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," and "Peter Quince at the Clavier."

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history.

Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu's poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu's work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor's introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet's major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu's oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

In 1951, as a student of anthropology in Oregon, Gary Snyder set himself to the task of analyzing the many levels of meaning a single Native American myth might hold. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village is the result of Snyder's critical look at a Haida tale that was told by the great oral poet Ghandl (Walter McGregor) to John Swanton sometime before 1905. A version of the ubiquitous "swan maiden" story, it tells of a chief's son who falls in love with a wild goose-girl, loses her, follows her into the sky, and returns to land as a seagull. Snyder goes deep into the transformations that occur in the myth, considering versions of myth from around the world, and explaining how the story might apply here and now. He writes:

To go beyond and become what-a seagull on a reef? Why not. Our nature is no particular nature; look out across the beach at the gulls. For an empty moment while their soar and cry enters your heart like sunshaft through water, you are that, totally. We do this every day. So this is the aspect of mind that gives art, style, and self-transcendence to the inescapable human plantedness in a social and ecological nexus. The challenge is to do it well, by your neighbors and by the trees, and that maybe once in a great while we can get where we see through the same eye at the same time, for a moment. That would be doing it well. Old tales and myths and stories are the k_ans of the human race.

Was Little Jack Horner a squatter? ?Baa Baa Black Sheep? a bleat about taxation? What did Jack and Jill do on that hill? Who was Mary? And why was she contrary?

This witty and ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of forty of the most innocuous- sounding nursery rhymes, uncovering a seething subtext of sexual innuendo, religious hatred, and political subversion. "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown" provides a fascinating history lesson, teases out some alarming Freudian interpretations, and makes astonishing connections to contemporary popular culture. Striking and spooky silhouettes of nursery rhyme characters accompany the rhymes.

You?ll never see Mother Goose in the same way again. BACKCOVER: Praise for "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: "
?What makes HWLT so much fun to read is not just the wacky stories Roberts tells, but the way Roberts tells them. He has a quick, chummy wit and moves easily between the past and the present, making connections between the way people acted then and the way we act now, and sending up both.?
?"Orlando Sentinel"
?Roberts employs a decidedly playful approach in analyzing the rhymes.?
?"Chicago Tribune"
?Roberts deploys an informal style of scholarship to a dazzling effect, transforming a catalogue of familiar nursery rhymes into a treasure trove of tantalizingly slippery archaisms, hidden etymological layers, arcane associations and buried meanings. This is better than history lite--it's history made delightful.?
?"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
?HWLT is obviously a labor of love, performed by a man obsessed with language, history, but intent on making the education of his readers a joyous experience.?
?"Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel"
?a loving, in-depth look at history, the human condition, and why words and the way they are used matters so much.?
?"Sunday Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News"
?a lighthearted, often hilarious look at the human condition and a fascinating exploration of how words can shape mythology and culture.?
?"Syracuse Post-Standard"
) ?A fascinating slice of history with quirky, unexpected and often scandalous tales.?
?"Providence Sunday Journal"
?An intriguing & informative historical trip through those odd little songs I sang as an odd little child. A must-have for anyone who has ever been younger than they are now.?
?Angus Oblong, creator of ?The Oblongs? animated series & author of "Creepy Susie: And 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children"
?James Finn Garner, author of "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories"

"The most important poet of the twentieth century--in any language."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"'The Heights of Macchu Picchu' is a poem of ascension. . . . In its final passages, Neruda's poetry jumps from a personal hope to a global one; from a poetry dealing with the poet's heart to a poetry centered on humanity's struggles."--BBC

"The Heights of Machu Picchu" has been called Pablo Neruda's greatest contribution to poetry--a search for the "indestructible, imperishable life" in all things. Inspired by his journey to the ancient ruins, Neruda calls the lost Incan civilization to "rise up and be born," and also empowers the people of his time. This new translation by poet Tomás Q. Morín includes an introduction by Morín and Neruda's Spanish original.

I stare at the clothes and hands,
the carvings of water in a sonorous hollow,
the wall rubbed smooth by the touch of a face
that with my eyes gazed at the earthly lights,
that with my hands oiled the vanished
planks: because everything, clothes, skin, dishes,
words, wine, breads,
went away, fell to the earth.

Pablo Neruda (1904-73), one of the world's most beloved poets, was also a diplomat and member of the Chilean Senate. In 1970 he was appointed as Chile's ambassador to France; in 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tomás Q. Morín is a poet and translator and teaches at Texas State University.

In Holocaust poet Charles Reznikoff's subject is people's suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold--in history's own words.

Editors Larry Evers and Ofelia Zepeda have gathered the contributions of nineteen Native Americans in compiling this collection. Some are stories from oral traditions, others are autobiographical writings, and some are songs or poems. But all are contemporary, and all have as a unifying element a strong central theme in Native American writing: home places. Some of the contributors define the home place as a center of established values, while others speak of its cultural or physical geography. Healing powers are often found at home places. Home is a place to defend against those who would reduce it to insignificance, a place to reclaim, or a place reclaimed but not yet realized. One writer recalls a home that must be pulled from deep beneath the waters of the Columbia River. By listening to these stories of home places, the reader can gain a new appreciation of the contemporary verbal expressions of Native American communities. Home Places, note the editors, "asks you to listen to Native American singers, storytellers, and writers, and in this way to celebrate the wellsprings of creativity that continue to flow from the home places in Native America."

A House Made of Water is a lyrical examination of daughterhood, womanhood, and Asian American identity. Elusive, but tactile, the collection wrestles beautifully with trauma and our inherited stories, seeking transformation throughout. What I love most is the intimacy of detail: the difficult weight of memory, the exquisite relief of disclosure. Michelle Lin's debut is a document of deep feeling, in the vein of Li-Young Lee and Sylvia Plath, but told in a voice entirely her own.

- CATHY LINH CHE, author of Split

Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement: The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world: the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.

The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a dark night of the soul brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.

Now in paperback: the superb selection from Marge Piercy's nine most recent books, the heart of her mature poems.

This gathering of Piercy's poems is the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. These poems chart the milestone events and fierce passions of the poet's middle years: her Judaism, her deep connection with nature, her marriage, her cats, her politics, and in the face of the loss of time and people, her own legacy.

First published in 1992, this text is a portrait of the life and work of Rumi. Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), a provincial religious teacher, became an ecstatic mystic at the age of 37 after meeting the wandering dervish, Shams Tabriz.