Incisively capturing the oddities of our logic and the whimsies of our reason, the poems in Whereas show there is always another side to a story. With graceful rhythm and equal parts humor and seriousness, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn examines the difficulties of telling the truth, and the fictions with which we choose to live. Finding beauty in the ordinary, this collection considers the superstition and sophistry embedded in everyday life, allowing room for more rethinking, reflection, revision, prayer, and magic in the world.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.
Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,
Head Clerk of Closed Files,
a department of one,
work...
in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother's diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.
Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,
Head Clerk of Closed Files,
a department of one,
work...
in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother's diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.
Throughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall's celebrated career, and includes poems recently published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. It is Hall's first selected volume in fifteen years, and the first to include poems from his seminal bestseller Without. Those who have come to love Donald Hall's poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In "White Egrets," Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career--the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world--with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language.
"White Egrets "is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century--a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and--perhaps most surprisingly--getting older.
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career--the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world--with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century--a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and--perhaps most surprisingly--getting older.White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins' childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poet's life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and "found" material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white--to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.
David Lazar extends the language of prose poetry, mixing the classical and the high modern, the song and dance man and the Odyssean. Nothing, he finds, is as far apart as we think, except for the chaos and order, innocence and experience. Lazar's voice is a sacred last resort: something's gotta give.
The voice in these poems is semi-autobiographical and performative: masked yet emotionally raw. Each poem draws on the features of modernist poetry, using an arch, cadenced sentence as its primary unit, but drawing on the Iliad, Odyssey , and other classical myths as part of its internal cosmos.
saucers of mountain sway. deities spill, shining & suffering ...
not forgetting we can't ever--whose fury sings like eagles--
skeletons unlean from fruit trees, falling
like white gunsmoke, we want/ to be here. listen.
the wind has blown all the birds from our hair.