Download or read book This Time written by Gerald Stern and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." -- Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." -- C. K. Williams

Download or read book New and Selected Poems 1974 1994 written by Stephen Dunn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1995-05-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

Download or read book A Certain Clarity written by Lawrence Joseph and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer Drawing from his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to his most recent, So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph’s "poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness” (John Ashbery), each poem “an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth” (Yusef Komunyakaa). Joseph’s poems constitute one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the territory Joseph does. His ever-new interactions of thoughts, voices, and languages—influenced by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comes—bear witness, on multilayered spatial and temporal planes, to the velocities of global and historical change, and to power structures embodied in endless wars, unleashed capital, racism, and ecological destruction, presenting an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. But also integral to Joseph’s poetry is a sensual intimacy, passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable. Meticulously formed, emotionally fierce, intellectually challenging, Joseph’s poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.

Download or read book Times Alone written by Antonio Machado and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain's foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearly and without narcissism: "Just as before, I'm interested/in water held in;/ but now water in the living/rock of my chest." "Machado has vowed not to soar too much; he wants to 'go down to the hells' or stick to the ordinary," Robert Bly writes in his introduction. He brings to the ordinary—to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams—magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake&…are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said. In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way. This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 – 1939).

Download or read book Selected Poems written by Robert Pinsky and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street—these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry." That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.

Download or read book Rococo and Other Worlds written by Afzal Ahmed Syed and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afzal Ahmed Syed holds a unique place among contemporary poets of the Urdu language, as an acknowledged master of both the classical and modern Urdu poetic forms. The poems in Rococo and Other Worlds explore the mythology and historical realities of South Asia and the Middle East; their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young observer of the violent separation of East Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s sensitive translations bring this extraordinary work to English readers for the first time.

Download or read book Gary Soto written by Gary Soto and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soto writes with a pure sweetness free of sentimentality that is almost extraordinary in modern American poetry. -- Andrew Hudgins. Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world. -- Publishers Weekly. Soto has it all -- the learned craft, the intrinsic abilities with language, a fascinating autobiography, and the storyteller's ability to manipulate memories into folklore. -- Library Journal.

Download or read book In a Time of Distance written by Alexander McCall Smith and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beloved author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series comes a beautiful and transporting volume of poems brimming with warmth and humanity. What matters most in life? For Alexander McCall Smith, it is friendship, love, and travel— the themes found throughout his work that have made him a cherished writer the world over. This first collection of McCall Smith’s poems reflects on these topics with all his characteristic wit and charm. In this delightful work, McCall Smith takes us on a captivating journey from Africa to Greece, London, Canada, Mumbai, and back home to Scotland, celebrating people, places, animals, and books. There are moments of sweeping insight and soaring feeling, and moments that will have you laughing along as they subtly shift your worldview. This inimitable writer shares his distinctively astute and good-natured observations on life, love, and beauty, reminding us of the deep satisfaction that can be found when we open ourselves up to the world with our whole heart, and watch as it takes on a kinder and gentler shape.

Download or read book Time and Other Selected Poems written by Jayne Blair and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall Poems at the Extremes of Feeling written by Robert Pinsky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.

Download or read book New Selected Poems written by Ron Padgett and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1995 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive selection of work by one of the wittiest, most inventive poets currently writing. Ron Padgett, author of Great Balls of Fire, Triangles in the Afternoon, and other highly acclaimed books, stands alongside his fellow New York School associates John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler as a major voice of American modernism. His work runs the gamut from popular humor to intellectual elegance to wild ricochets of the imagination. The heady circumvolutions of his poems are never less than surprising, and are frequently breathtaking in their ability to blend comedy and pathos in a graceful, mercurial lyricism.

Download or read book One at a time written by Ishan Khurana and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wheel With a Single Spoke written by Nichita Stanescu and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2012-07-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Herder Prize, Nichita Stanescu was one of Romania’s most celebrated contemporary poets. This dazzling collection of poems – the most extensive collection of his work to date – reveals a world in which heavenly and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound, where love and a quest for truth are central, and urgent questions flow. His startling images stretch the boundaries of thought. His poems, at once surreal and corporeal, lead us into new metaphysical and linguistic terrain.

Download or read book History and Other Poems written by Brenda Marie Osbey and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. African American Studies. HISTORY AND OTHER POEMS takes as its task nothing less than an examination and mapping of the never-ending evil of history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the still-palpable effects of European and American colonialism some seven centuries after the making of the New World. Making, breaking and rebuilding language and languages to suit the needs of her characters and the worlds they struggle to survive in and against, Brenda Marie Osbey has created a compelling study of human will and the determination to wrest life and liberty from destinies long ago written out of history as we know it. Aided by an extensive glossary and notes, this volume takes the reader on a series of gruesome journeys across the Americas, from Columbus's first encounter with the Guanahani Indians to the author's native New Orleans, trailing violence, destruction and oppression with every step, marking the geography of evil on the map of this New World. HISTORY AND OTHER POEMS moves from present to past and back again to reveal the trauma of hearts and lives broken even as it underscores the heroic endurance, resilience and agency of the enslaved and their descendants.

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 Devotions written by Mary Oliver and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller, chosen as Oprah's "Books That Help Me Through" for Oprah's Book Club “No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.” —The Washington Post “It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.” —Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

Download or read book 100 Selected Poems written by e. e. cummings and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.