Download or read book Telephone Poles and Other Poems written by John Updike and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second collection of John Updike's poetry is equally divided between poems that, in their verbal jugglery and humorous bias, seem to qualify as “light” and poems that, one way or other, cross the problematic border into the general realm of poetry. The distinction cannot be clear-cut. The poet is consistently concerned with Man’s cosmic embarrassment, and the same vision illuminates the creatures of “The High Hearts” and “Seagulls.” Science and religion, so frequently and variously invoked, frame a single paradox, the paradox of the mundane; and each poem, whether inspired by an antic headline or a suburban landscape, rejoices in the elusive surface of created things. When The Carpentered Hen, John Updike’s first collection of verse, was published, Phyllis McGinley wrote: “I have been happily reading Mr. Updike in The New Yorker for some time and am happy, now, to own him collected. When he first appeared in that magazine, I was so elated to see a new name in light verse that I felt like crying with the Ancient Mariner ‘A Sail, A Sail!’ His is what poetry of this sort exactly out to be—playful but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty.” In the Saturday Review, David McCord wrote: “Furthermore, he is a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been; as Betjeman and McGinley frequently are.”
Download or read book Light Gathering Poems written by Liz Rosenberg and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ... poems, gathered from all peoples and traditions, that blaze, inspire, and bring forth light.
Download or read book The Light and Other Collected Poems written by Janet Scott McDaniel and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ms. McDaniel's first book of poetry- reflects the wide range of human emotions: love and loss in all its manifestations, redemption and discovery, ultimate joy and the depths of introspection. The reader is invited behind closed doors to witness the passions and the gut-wrenching spirit of that which is a personal and protected space. Ms. McDaniel's poems weave a rich tapestry, clear and eloquent, of life in all its wonder and challenge. Photographs and background stories make this an even more intimate journey as the voice of the poet emerges from conflict and struggle stronger than ever. Many of the pieces, while profoundly moving to any reader, are particularly empowering to women. Her poems strike the heart and reach into the soul, charting a unique new path into contemporary poetry. THE LIGHT leaves us touched by the mastery of the words and the emotions they invoke.
Download or read book Half light written by Frank Bidart and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience. Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.” Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
Download or read book The Philosopher s Window written by Allen R. Grossman and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The speaker of The Philosopher's Window and Other Poems, Allen Grossman tells us, is "an old man compelled by the insistent questioning of the children to explain himself"--and in this way, the world. He begins with creation ("The Great Work Farm Elegy"), recalls the romantic quest of youth ("The Philosopher's Window"), returns to reality ("The Snowfall" and "Whoever Builds"). His tales told, the old man wakes in a stormy springtime ("June, June"), "when the lilacs are gone." Grossman's allegory of life's journey, at once sonorous and antic, takes in the high and the low in these new visionary songs of innocence and experience. Allen Grossman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He counts among his many honors and awards MacArthur, Guggenheim, and NEA fellowships, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, and the PEN-Sheaffer/New England Award for Literary Distinction. The Philosopher's Window is his eighth book of poetry. His previous collection, The Ether Dome & Other Poems New and Selected (1991), was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death—and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful and scornful songs that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably bracing body of work. As Amis writes: “Beauty, they tell me, is a dangerous thing, / Whose touch will burn, but I’m asbestos, see?”
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde written by Audre Lorde and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-02-17 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete collection—over 300 poems—from one of this country's most influential poets. "These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."—Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms—beautifully, forcefully—for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."—Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."—Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."—Out Magazine
Download or read book The Charge of the Light Brigade and Other Poems written by Alfred Tennyson and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1992-09-21 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treasury of verse by the great Victorian poet includes the famous long narrative poem, Enoch Arden, plus "The Lady of Shalott," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Break, break, break," "Flower in the crannied Wall" and more. Also included are excerpts from three longer works: The Princess, "Maud" and "The Brook."
Download or read book Traveling Light written by David Wagoner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Wagoner has won the acclaim of his peers and been compared with some of the most gifted poets in the English language. His collections have garnered Poetry's Levinson and Union League Prizes, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and nominations for the American Book Award and the National Book Award. For his most recent collection, Walt Whitman Bathing, Wagoner was honored with the Ohioana Book Award in the category of poetry.
Download or read book Field of Light and Shadow written by David Young and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gorgeous selection of the humane and moving poetry of David Young, a celebrated poet of the midwestern landscape and the people who live in it, with an expanded section featuring sixteen new poems exclusive to the paperback edition. A newly expanded career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language, and new poems that reflect a continued artistic interest in these subjects. Young’s settings are at once local and universal—an adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm. Here are poems on Osip Mandelstam and Chairman Mao, the meaning of boxcars on the track, the beautiful names of the months, and a fox at the field’s edge, charged in each case by Young’s fierce intelligence and candor in the face of grief and loss. “We float through space. Days pass,” Young writes in “The Portable Earth-Lamp.” “Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal / where light is sorted and stored.” His metaphysical reach, balancing remarkable humility with penetrating vision, is one of the great gifts of this exemplary career in poetry.
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 Love and Other Poems written by Alex Dimitrov and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Dimitrov’s third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure—specifically, the twelve months of the year—Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.
Download or read book Faster Than Light written by Marilyn Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities. Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by Naomi Replansky and published by Black Sparrow Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for the National Book Award in 1952, Naomi Replansky's first book Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. Here at long last is the new and collected work of a lifetime by a writer hailed as "one of the most brilliant American poets" by George Oppen. Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson, the passion of Anna Akhmatova, and the music of W.H. Auden. These poems, which Marie Ponsot calls "sixty years of a free woman's song," are Replansky's hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.
Download or read book Half of the World in Light written by Juan Felipe Herrera and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an audio CD of the author reading! For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice. Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development. The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.
Download or read book Tricks of the Light written by Vicki Hearne and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The Horse That, Trotting The horse that, trotting with open heart Against the wind, achieves bend and flow Will live forever. So far, so good, But they never do, until too late, Bend properly and time spreads from The momentary hesitations Of their spines, circles their tossing necks, Falls from their teeth like rejected oats, Litters the ground like penitence. This is where we come in, where the drop Of time congeals the air and someone Speaks to the discouraged grass . . . Tricks of the Light explores the often fraught relationships between domestic animals and humans through mythological figurations, vibrant thought, and late-modern lyrics that seem to test their own boundaries. Vicki Hearne (1946–2001), best known and celebrated today as a writer of strikingly original poetry and prose, was a capable dog and horse trainer, and sometimes controversial animal advocate. This definitive collection of Hearne’s poetry spans the entirety of her illustrious career, from her first book, Nervous Horses (1980), to never-before-published poems composed on her deathbed. But no matter the source, each of her meditative, metaphysical lyrics possesses that rare combination of philosophical speculation, practical knowledge of animals, and an unusually elegant style unlike that of any other poet writing today. Before her untimely death, Hearne entrusted the manuscript to distinguished poet, scholar, and long-time friend John Hollander, whose introduction provides both critical and personal insight into the poet’s magnum opus. Tricks of the Light—acute, vibrant, and deeply informed—is a sensuous reckoning of the connection between humans and the natural world. Praise for The Parts of Light “Hearne . . . strives to capture exactly what she knows she can't—the intense immediacy of animal consciousness, a consciousness free of the moral vagaries and intellectual preoccupations that pockmark human experience. Her style, smooth in some places, choppy in others, reflects both the wholeness of animal presence and the jarring, fragmentary nature of human reason and reflection. Hearne's poems demand participation, refuse passive enjoyment; she dares the reader to stay in the saddle.”—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book On the Way Out Turn Off the Light written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bountiful group of poems--direct, honest, and revelatory--that reflect on language, nature, old age, young love, Judaism, and our current politics, from one of our most read and admired poets "Words are my business," Marge Piercy begins her twentieth collection of poetry, a glance back at a lifetime of learning, loving, grieving, and fighting for the disenfranchised, and a look forward at what the future holds for herself, her family and friends, and her embattled country. In the opening section, Piercy tells of her childhood in Detroit, with its vacant lots and scrappy children, the bike that gave her wings, her ambition at fourteen to "gobble" down all knowledge, and a too-early marriage ("I put on my first marriage / like a girdle my skinny body / didn't need"). We then leap into the present, her "twilight zone," where she is "learning to be quiet," learning to give praise despite it all. There are funny poems about medicine ads with their dire warnings, and some possible plusses about being dead: "I'll never do another load of laundry . . ." There is "comfort in old bodies / coming together," in a partner's warmth--"You're always warm: warm hands / smooth back sleek as a Burmese cat./ Sunny weather outside and in." Piercy has long been known for her political poems, and here we have her thoughts on illegal immigrants, dying languages, fraught landscapes, abortion, President-speak. She examines her nonbeliever's need for religious holidays and spiritual depth, and the natural world is appreciated throughout. On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light is yet more proof of Piercy's love and mastery of language--it is moving, stimulating, funny, and full of the stuff of life.
