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IDYLLS TR MILLS

IDYLLS TR MILLS

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These thirty Idylls, written by the Sicilian Theokritos in the third century B.C., present the charms of rustic life in learned, polished verse aimed at a sophisticated audience. A bucolic paradise is seen through the eyes of city men going to the harvest festival for a holiday, to rest their bodies and minds for awhile in nature's beauty and bounty-not unprovided with well-aged wine. In this handsome volume, which won the Best Poetry Award at the 1963 Indiana Author's Day, Professor Mills translates them into modern English verse that preserves the pastoral quality of the original but emphasizes those qualities of Theokritos that speak most directly to the modern reader.
ILLUMINATIONS

ILLUMINATIONS

By: Rimbaud, Arthur
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The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--des vertiges, des silences, des nuits. These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought.
IMAGINATIONS: Kora in Hell/ Spring and All/ The Descent of Winter/ The Great American Novel/ a Novelette and Other Prose

IMAGINATIONS: Kora in Hell/ Spring and All/ The Descent of Winter/ The Great American Novel/ a Novelette and Other Prose

By: Williams, William Carlos
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Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward."

The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing The Great American Novel in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
IN THE DARK

IN THE DARK

By: Stone, Ruth
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"An aging poet's failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone's lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant."--Utne


Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone's follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a "people's poet" whose work is "profoundly rewarding," and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: "There's no question."
From "What is a Poem?"


Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.

IN THE LATENESS OF THE WORLD: POEMS

IN THE LATENESS OF THE WORLD: POEMS

By: Forché, Carolyn
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FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

"An undisputed literary event." --NPR

"History--with its construction and its destruction--is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave--a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories." --Hilton Als, The New Yorker


Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, SECOND EDITION: A POET'S PORTABLE WORKSHOP

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, SECOND EDITION: A POET'S PORTABLE WORKSHOP

By: Kowit, Steve
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*Over 90,000 copies sold*

Long an anchor text for college and junior college writing classes, this illuminating and invaluable guide has become a favorite for beginning poets and an ever-valuable reference for more advanced students who want to sharpen their craft, expand their technical skills, and engage their deepest memories and concerns.This edition adds Steve Kowit's famous essay on poetics "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem," in which he argues stirringly and forcefully that a poem need not be obscure to be great.

IN THESE MOUNTAINS

By: Sacks, Peter M
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IN WHAT DISAPPEARS

IN WHAT DISAPPEARS

By: Brandi, John
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Spanning the years since the 1995 publication of Heart's Geography: New & Selected Poems, these poems traverse distant lands, as well as the continent of the heart. In travels that take him through North America, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Vietnam, India and Mexico, Brandi engages the world with open eyes, ears and heart. Like Jack Kerouac, he seeks source and renewal in new geographies and in the act of travel with its inevitable encounters and mysteries. He gets inside and outside things. Nothing passes him by. He's a seer, a person who looks, who retains an abiding curiosity and sympathy with special people and places.--David Meltzer

INVISIBLE LISTENERS: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashberry

INVISIBLE LISTENERS: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashberry

By: Vendler, Helen
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When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.

Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.

By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE: SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE: SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

By: Baudelaire, Charles
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"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language," said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems--dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, elsewhere--draw us in with their descriptive and perceptual richness. There is also the bitter, compassionate, and desolate Baudelaire. Ultimately, Baudelaire's true genius might reside in his expressive force and in the tension between his passions and intellect. The latter is most evident in his control of rhetoric and poetic form, and--given the poems' density of language, thought, and feeling--his astonishing clarity.

This new English rendition of Baudelaire by award-winning translator Beverley Bie Brahic includes poems from his celebrated volumes: Les Fleurs du mal, Les Épaves, Le Spleen de Paris, and Paradis artificiels. It also includes several of his prose poems, as well as an excerpt from his famous essay on wine and hashish. The poems in verse have Baudelaire's French originals on facing pages; the prose poems, unaccompanied by their originals, are printed near the poems in verse with which they resonate. Complete with the translator's illuminating introduction and notes, this beautifully crafted volume is an important addition to Baudelaire's work in English translation.

IRON HARP

By: Fitzsimmons, Thomas
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Thomas Fitzsimmons went into World War II as an underage merchant seaman just after Pearl Harbor and was discharged from the USAAF just after Hiroshima. Iron Harp is a book about the memories, hard and sweet, which linger throughout a lifetime. One man's century--from a depressed New England mill-town in the 1920s, through the spirit-splintering insanities of World War II, to renewal in love, and on to glimpses of grace in Japan, along the Mediterranean, and in the high desert of New Mexico. Many of these poems are poignant evocations of battle and its emotional aftermath and leave the reader shuddering as to the undeniable folly of war.

IS MUSIC: New & Selected Poems

IS MUSIC: New & Selected Poems

By: Taggart, John
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Is Music--a major retrospective of an American original--gathers the best poems from John Taggart's fourteen volumes, ranging from early objectivist experiments and jazz-influenced improvisational pieces to longer breathtaking compositions regarded as underground masterpieces. There is a prayerful quality to Taggart's poetry, rooted in music--from medieval Christian traditions and soul to American punk rock. He is also heavily influenced by the visual arts, most notably in his classic "Slow Song for Mark Rothko," in which he did with words what Rothko did with paint and dye.

A fearsome intelligence wedded to a kind of craftsmanship that happens once or twice a generation.--Stop Press

"In the lovely sonnet 'Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves, ' Taggart seems to look at nature himself, rather than through another artist's eyes: 'Darkened not completely dark let us walk in the darkened field/trees in the field outlined against that which is less dark.' Is Music contains many such pieces, a wealth of sublime and quiet poems; they are unlike anything being written today, and like good music they stay in the mind."--The Antioch Review

John Taggart has long been a master of accumulating complexly layered patterns of sound and sense.--Robert Creeley

"John Taggart's poetry is not like music, it is music."--George Oppen

The long overdue selection of John Taggart's work, Is Music, reminds us that a good deal of his work, in cutting new songs from old, is transcription. 'Marvin Gaye Suite' opens with the opening of the soul singer's album, What's Going On: '17 seconds of party formulaics by professional football players / intro of 17 seconds of hey man what's happening and right on.' Like Gaye's voice throughout the album, the voice in Taggart's poem--and this is true throughout his work - is multitracked into a call and response with itself and with the world."--Sink

To breathe and stretch one's arms again
to breathe through the mouth to breathe to
breathe through the mouth to utter in
the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper
to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to
breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe
to sing the most quiet way.

To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radiantia radiantia
singing light in darkness.

To sing as the host sings in his house.

John Taggart is the author of fourteen books of poetry and two books of criticism. He was, for many years, a professor of English and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Shippensburg University. He lives near Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.


IT

IT

By: Christensen, Inger
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it is the masterwork by Danish poet Inger Christensen (a true singer of the syllables, said C. D. Wright), often cited as a Nobel contender and one of Europe's most revered poets. On its publication in 1969, it took Denmark by storm, winning critical praise and becoming a huge popular favorite. Translated into many languages, it won international acclaim and is now a classic of modern Scandinavian poetry.

it is both a collection of poems and a single poetic epic, forming a philosophical statement on the nature of language, perception, and reality. The subject matter, though, is down to earth: amoebas, stones, and factories; fear, sea urchins, and mental institutions; sand, sexuality, and song. The words and images of it recur in ways reminiscent of Christensen's other works, but here is a younger poetry, wilder, and crackling with energy. The marvelous and complex use of mathematical structure in it is faithfully captured in Susanna Nied's English translation, which won a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
JANGAR

JANGAR

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The first English translation of a Kalmyk epic nearly lost to history.

This is the first English translation of Jangar, the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads, who are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan's medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by the son of Genghis Khan, Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized, and orally transmitted some of the most transformative developments, both victorious and tragic, in the history of civilizations. A tribute to the protectors of the mythical country Bumba, Jangar reflects the hopes and aspirations of the Kalmyk people as well as their centuries-long struggle for their cultural existence.

This new English translation is more than a tribute to the artistic creativity and imagination of the Kalmyk people--it is also an important step in their struggle for cultural survival. It was only after centuries of oral transmission that the songs and stories surrounding Jangar were written down. When the first translation, into Russian, finally appeared, Stalin had the entire Kalmyk population deported to Siberia and ordered that their national literature be eliminated from the published world. This Soviet repression has had enormous consequences for world literature, silencing nomadic voices and keeping hidden their distinctive contributions. Making Jangar available in English is a landmark event, bringing a lost classic to the world's attention and restoring the voices of an almost-erased tradition at the heart of the history of Eurasia.

JEJURI

JEJURI

By: Kolatkar, Arun
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A sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems, Jejuri is one of the great books of modern India. Jejuri is a site of pilgramage in author Arun Kolatkar's native state of Maharashtra, and Jejuri the poem is the record of a visit to the town -- a place that is as crassly commercial as it is holy, as modern and ruinous as it is ancient and enduring. Evoking the town's crowded streets, many shrines, and mythic history of sages and gods, Kolatkar's poem offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion. For the essence of the poem is a spiritual quest, the effort to find the divine trace in a degenerate world. Spare, comic, sorrowful, singing, Jejuri is the work of a writer with a unique and visionary voice.
JOHN ASHBERY: COLLECTED POEMS 1991-2000: LIBRARY OF AMERICA #297

JOHN ASHBERY: COLLECTED POEMS 1991-2000: LIBRARY OF AMERICA #297

By: Ashbery, John
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The second volume of Library of America's definitive edition, including the modern classic Flow Chart in a newly corrected text.

Published for his ninetieth birthday, Library of America presents the second volume of John Ashbery's collected poems, spanning a crucial and prolific decade in the poet's work. The volume opens with the indispensable Flow Chart (1991), in a complete text for the first time. The other collections gathered here--Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), and Your Name Here (2000)--show Ashbery perfecting the playful, cerebral style that has made his poetry a genre unto itself, highly influential and often imitated. Long an art critic and one of the shrewdest observers of the American art scene, Ashbery engages with the renowned outsider artist Henry Darger in the fascinating book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the exuberant, unsettling fictional universe Darger created. The volume concludes with a selection of twenty-six previously uncollected poems.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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JUST US: AN AMERICAN CONVERSATION

By: Rankine, Claudia
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Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into it

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

KLAEBERS BEOWULF 4th edition

KLAEBERS BEOWULF 4th edition

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Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.

A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

LALLA: NAKED SONG

LALLA: NAKED SONG

By: Laldyada
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The words of this 14th-century Kashmiri mystic speak to us across the centuries with clarity and courage.
LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS: A Memorial Anthology

LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS: A Memorial Anthology

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With Lament for the Makers W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet.


Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included.


Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.

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LAST CIGARETTE ON EARTH

By: Saenz, Benjamin Alire
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A major Latino writer's intimate but healing journey through addiction, human desire and broken love.

From "He Leaves a Message in the Middle of the Night"

He loved beer
and crack. He loved heroin, ecstasy, the sad music
of the bars. He said he loved you too. You are
thinking of the night you met him. Late October
night, the breeze as soft as his black eyes. He was
so hungry for trouble. You were so hungry
for anything that resembled love. Your finger
tracing the tattoos on his chest, you dreamed
of living in the prison of his arms. But you refused
to live in the prison of his deadly nights. You
can't survive without the morning
light. You repeat this again and again:
He's a man, not an illness. Tattoos and prison.
Novels and poems.
A bird can love a fish but they can't
live in your apartment.
He called again last night
and left a message that was meant to wound.

He said: I want to know what you meant when
you said I love you.
You said: I love you. I meant I love you.
He said:
I want to know what you meant when
you said goodbye.
You said: Goodbye. I meant goodbye.

You whispered his name in the dark.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz in 2013 won the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Lambda Award for his book Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. His young adult novel Dante and Aristotle in Paradise was a 2013 Printz Honoree. He lives in El Paso, Texas.

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LAST POEMS

By: Carruth, Hayden
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Praise for Hayden Carruth:

"Something Hayden Carruth does as well as any writer is to treat the reader as a friend, and to provide, through his poetry, hours of good company."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the lasting literary signatures of our time."--Library Journal, starred review

"Carruth, like Whitman, like Chaucer, is large--he contains multitudes. Dip into his work anywhere, and there is life--and death--as stirringly felt and cogitated as in some vast, Tolstoyan novel."--Booklist, starred review

Hayden Carruth's Last Poems is a triumph--a morally engaged, tender, and fearless volume that combines the last poems of his life with the concluding poems from each of his previous volumes. Introduced by Stephen Dobyns, Last Poems is a moving tribute to a towering and beloved figure in American poetry.

From "Father's Day":

I don't know what fathers are
Supposed to do, although the calendar says
This is "Father's Day." But the day is gloomy
And not at all conducive to visiting or
Celebrating. I know the best thing fathers in
Their prime can do is to make daughters and
More daughters; we can never have enough.
Daughters are our best protection against

Loneliness and the absurd atrocities of
Foreign policy . . .

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) lived for many years in northern Vermont, then moved to upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, and his Collected Shorter Poems received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

LATE FRAGMENTS

LATE FRAGMENTS

By: Baudelaire, Charles
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The first English collection of the late poetry and prose fragments of literary icon Charles Baudelaire

"[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth's learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"[These] unfinished works written after 1861 . . . deliver what their titles seem to promise: a soul stripped of guises and illusions."--Ange Mlinko, New York Review of Books

While not as well-known as his other works, Charles Baudelaire's late poems, drafts of poems, and prose fragments are texts indispensable to the history of modern poetics.

This volume brings together Baudelaire's late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate.

Baudelaire's turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.

LATE FRAGMENTS

LATE FRAGMENTS

By: Baudelaire, Charles
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The first English collection of the late poetry and prose fragments of literary icon Charles Baudelaire

"[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth's learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"[These] unfinished works written after 1861 . . . deliver what their titles seem to promise: a soul stripped of guises and illusions."--Ange Mlinko, New York Review of Books

While not as well-known as his other works, Charles Baudelaire's late poems, drafts of poems, and prose fragments are texts indispensable to the history of modern poetics.

This volume brings together Baudelaire's late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate.

Baudelaire's turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.

LEDGER: POEMS

LEDGER: POEMS

By: Hirshfield, Jane
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A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate--Some of the most important poetry in the world today (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine).

Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments.

They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap, recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty.

Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a modern master (The Washington Post).

LETTERS ON CEZANNE

LETTERS ON CEZANNE

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art

For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.

Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.

Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET TR. HARMAN

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET TR. HARMAN

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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In 1902, a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet named Franz Kappus wrote to Rilke, then twenty-six, seeking advice on his poetry. Kappus, a student at a military academy in Vienna similar to the one Rilke had attended, was about to embark on a career as an officer, for which he had little inclination. Touched by the innocence and forthrightness of the student, Rilke responded to Kappus' letter and began an intermittent correspondence that would last until 1908.

Letters to a Young Poet collects the ten letters that Rilke wrote to Kappus. A book often encountered in adolescence, it speaks directly to the young. Rilke offers unguarded thoughts on such diverse subjects as creativity, solitude, self-reliance, living with uncertainty, the shallowness of irony, the uselessness of criticism, career choices, sex, love, God, and art. Letters to a Young Poet is, finally, a life manual. Art, Rilke tells the young poet in his final letter to him, is only another way of living.

With the same artistry that marks his widely acclaimed translations of Kafka's The Castle and Amerika: The Missing Person, Mark Harman captures the lyrical and spiritual dimensions of Rilke's prose. In his introduction, he provides biographical contexts for the reader and discusses the challenges of translating Rilke. This lovely hardcover edition makes a perfect gift for any young person starting out in life or for those interested in finding a clear articulation of Rilke's thoughts on life and art.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET tr. Herter Norton

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET tr. Herter Norton

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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Letters written over a period of several years on the vocation of writing by a poet whose greatest work was still to come.
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET TR. JOANNA MACY AND ANITA BAROWS

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET TR. JOANNA MACY AND ANITA BAROWS

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
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A fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875-1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke's personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy's translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today's world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET: WITH THE LETTERS FROM THE "YOUNG POET"

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET: WITH THE LETTERS FROM THE "YOUNG POET"

By: Searls, Damion
$17.95
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For more than ninety years, eager writers and young poets, even those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars assumed that the letters from young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, the letters were recently discovered by Erich Unglaub, a Rilke scholar, and published in German in 2019. The acclaimed translator Damion Searls has now not only retranslated Rilke's original letters but also translated the letters by Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and, yes, aspiring poet. This timeless edition, in addition to joining the two sets of letters together for the first time in English, provides a new window into the workings of Rilke's visionary poetic and philosophical mind, allowing us to reexperience the literary genius of one of the most inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.