Download or read book Dawn of the Senses Selected Poems written by Alberto Blanco and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1995-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impressive selection, in bilingual format, from the work of one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Blanco is a dynamic and influential voice in the new poetry of Mexico. A musician, artist, essayist, translator, and storyteller, his poetry explores the connections on frontiers between verbal, visual, and aural experience. He is both an innovator and a classicist, a materialist and a mystic, a visionary and a chronicler of everyday life. Here his poems converse with their English translations, to create "a singular book . . . not simply a bilingual edition, but one unified voice, a poetry that speaks of a world far beyond languages and borders." (from the introduction by Jose Emilio Pacheco).
Download or read book Selected Poems written by José Emilio Pacheco and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1987 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major retrospective gathering to appear in an English-Spanish bilingual format of the work of one of Mexico's foremost writers. It is a glittering and giant technical achievement, as brilliant and instantly visible as Hart Crane's The Bridge.
Download or read book In the Dark Before Dawn New Selected Poems written by Thomas Merton and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2005-04-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new, broad, comprehensive view of the innovative poetry of the late, great Trappist monk and religious philosopher Thomas Merton. Poet, Trappist monk, religious philosopher, translator, social criticthe late Thomas Merton was all these things. Until now, no selection from his great body of poetry has afforded a comprehensive view of his varied and largely innovative work. In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton is not only double the size of Merton's earlier Selected Poems (1967), it also arranges his poetry thematically and chronologically, so that readers can follow the poet's multifarious interrelated lines of thought as well as his poetic development over the decades, from his college days in the 1930s to his untimely accidental death in Bangkok in 1968 during his personal Eastern pilgrimage. The selections are grouped under eight thematic headings"Geography's Landscapes," "Poems from the Monastery," "Poems of the Sacred," "Songs of Contemplation," "History's Voices: Past and Present," "Engaging the World," "On Being Human," "Merton and Other Languages."
Download or read book A Country of Strangers written by D. Nurkse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.
Download or read book As If written by Michael Saler and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people throughout the world "inhabit" imaginary worlds communally and persistently, parsing Harry Potter and exploring online universes. These activities might seem irresponsibly escapist, but history tells another story. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, when Sherlock Holmes became the world's first "virtual reality" character, readers began to colonize imaginary worlds, debating serious issues and viewing reality in provisional, "as if" terms rather than through essentialist, "just so" perspectives. From Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and Tolkien's Middle-earth to the World of Warcraft and Second Life, As If provides a cultural history that reveals how we can remain enchanted but not deluded in an age where fantasy and reality increasingly intertwine.
Download or read book Cinder written by Susan Stewart and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Salt to the Nth, like the truth of an ending unskeined across the crust of the white field. Though it happened only once, I am sending the thought of the thought continuing. To return to the field before the mowing. When a goldfinch swayed on a blue stem stalk, and the wind and the sun stirred the hay. —from “After the Mowing” Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. “Stewart explores our insatiable desire to remember and make meaning out of this remembering,” Ange Mlinko writes in The Nation. “Stewart’s elegiac bent has broadened, over time, from the personal lyric . . . to what might be called the cultural lyric. Fewer and fewer of her poems reference what she alone remembers; they are about what you and I remember.” Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.
Download or read book Forest of Eyes written by Chimako Tada and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.
Download or read book New and Selected Poems of Edith Shiffert written by Edith Shiffert and published by White Pine Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New and Selected Poems of Edith Shiffert spans over twenty years of writing, including nearly the whole of her work, most of which is out of print in earlier editions. "From the nature of her experience a woman draws poetry--this woman--gentle and sensitive--the sharing of a lifetime with us."--Cid Corman
Download or read book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country written by Etel Adnan and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mosaic of lyrical vignettes, at once deeply personal and political, set against the turbulent backdrop of Arab/Western relations. Adnan writes, "Contrary to what is usually believed, it is not general ideas and grandiose unfolding of great events that impress the mind during times of heightened historic upheavals, but rather the uninterrupted flow of little experiences, observations, disturbances, small ecstasies, or barely perceptible discouragements that make up day-to-day living." Etel Adnan, a Lebanese American poet, painter, and essayist, lives in Paris, Beirut, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Among her books, the novel Sitt Marie Rose is considered a classic of Middle Eastern literature. She has been a powerful voice for compassion and empowerment in feminist and antiwar movements.
Download or read book Selected Poetry and Prose of Edmond Holmes written by John Howlett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first scholarly gathering together of the long-neglected poetry of the School Inspector, educationalist and philosopher Edmond Holmes (1850 – 1936). Alongside a generous selection from Holmes’s six volumes of poetry there is also a full reproduction of Holmes’s essay What is Poetry which served to delineate his thinking on the discipline. Supporting these original works is both a lengthy scholarly introduction and extensive endnotes which serve to locate Holmes’s poetry not merely within the context of its time and amongst his own contemporaries but also to make a case for the importance of this body of work in its own right particularly in its promulgation of original and innovative ideas. Holmes’s poetry represents a particularly unique combination of traditional verse form coupled with innovative and esoteric subject matter (often drawing upon Eastern Buddhist philosophy as well as Western Romanticism and Pantheism) and so deserves to be more widely recognized as being wholly distinctive within the canon of Victorian and Modern poetry.
Download or read book School of Udhra written by Nathaniel Mackey and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1993-08 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, "when loving die." Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a "bedouin" impulse of their own-fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book's cross-cultural weave. The poems track variances of union and disunion- social, sexual, mystic, mythic- both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance-chant, cante jondo, and other musics.
Download or read book Vito Loves Geraldine written by Janice Eidus and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1990-03 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these eighteen stories Janice Eidus, with comic and tender irony, casts a sharp eye upon contemporary myths of romance, rebellion, and self-discovery.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by Robert Bly and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-12-18 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathering more than sixty years of poetry, Collected Poems showcases the brilliant career of a "great American transcendentalist" (New York Times). 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.
Download or read book Front Lines written by Jack Hirschman and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2002-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark. Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some forty-five translations from a half a dozen languages, as well the editor of anthologies and journals.
Download or read book Bender written by Dean Young and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Young's work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."—Toronto Star "Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."—Booklist Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today." From "Even Funnnier Looking Now": If someone had asked me then, Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said or No way! Never would I have said, What could you possibly be talking about? I had just gotten to the twentieth century like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower. My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch. I knew I was made of glass but I didn't yet know what glass was made of: hot sand inside me like pee going all the wrong directions, probably into my heart which I knew was made of gold foil glued to dust . . .
Download or read book Variations on Dawn and Dusk written by Dan Beachy-Quick and published by Omnidawn. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The poems that comprise Variations on Dawn and Dusk are best considered as a single inquiry broken into discrete parts--they don't build exactly one upon another, they aren't a progressive series, but each is a meditation gathered around fundamental points of concern: light, dark, sky, cloud, faith, doubt, thought, care, memory, dust, and more. The project as a whole is meant as an imitation of so deep it becomes a participation in Robert Irwin's untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX"--
Download or read book San Francisco Beat written by David Meltzer and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah and the Internet. Diane di Prima, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen " . . . as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it’s exhilarating to have this squall line of Beats pass through our consciousness."—Kirkus Reviews " . . . fierce engagement executed with humor and vernacular sensitivity."—Dale Smith, Austin Chronicle David Meltzer (1937-2016) was the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992 and Two-Way Mirror (City Lights). He was the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, "Serpent Power."
