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Poetry
This collection, which won the 2015 Costa Poetry Award, is an exhibition of the Dundee-born poet's stunningly accomplished adoption of the sonnet's ancient structure
This collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward Prize-winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty luminous sonnets. Some take a traditional form, while others experiment with the reader's conception of the sonnet, but they all share the lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has made Paterson one of our most celebrated poets.
Addressed to friends and enemies, the living and the dead, children, musicians, poets, and dogs, these poems are as ambitious in their scope and tonal range as in the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coal shed, the war, the highway, the forest, and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance and darkness, which ring with the "sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call."
In 40 Sonnets, Paterson returns to some of his central themes--contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self--in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems of his career.
"The overarching metaphors of film and movie-going appear gracefully" (Lauren Kane, Paris Review) in the poems of 4:30 Movie--by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender. Award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, the preoccupations of our daily lives, and the consolations of art as she brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind.
Their verse . . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality. --The New Yorker
Identical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters--landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare.
Lucky in Kansas
Judy Garland: This is always the worst part
Tin Man: The coming back
Judy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shit
The Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farm
Straw Man: I wouldn't call it lucky
The Lion: We were lucky to get back
Straw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky means
Judy Garland: It's funny what you miss
Tin Man: The running
Judy Garland: The flying
Tin Man: The flying monkeys
Judy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green world
Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.
A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A spooky collection in the words of Robert Lowell-a maddening work of genius.
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax. Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: We touch at certain points, Berryman claimed, of Henry, But I am an actual human being.
Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, Life, friends, is boring, these poems never are. Henry lusts: seeing a woman Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika he can barely restrain himself: only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her. Henry despairs: All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry's side. / Then came a departure. Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself: Nobody is ever missing.
77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berryman's formal and emotional innovations-he cracks the language open, creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings-remain as alive and immediate today as ever.
Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde.--Peter Gizzi
Clark Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation--as many as ten sonnets in a single day--marries the stunning variety of his intellect on the mountaintop of formal inquiry.
LIBRARY OF HAY
So slow death oft the onyx dolls
each in its own lab colors rollicking encores
who's there? do you want your museum
room infiltrated? only the singing parts
terrible loss of air raid powder
entanglements poled on kapok
the last to be heard? this ploy of dolls
irradiated heads and curls of coffin wood
death is always plural here? stolid
anyway someway still enters the frontway
through the water door to Manikin Lake
the throttles held down there you went to
hair school against my wisdom thus the
remnants spelled out there then coded there
Clark Coolidge was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Though associated with the Language Poets, his work predates the movement and despite close contact with many of them he remains distinct from any movement, literary or political. The author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, he is also the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations.
Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.
"Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns," Suárez writes in "River Fable," and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suárez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems.
At once meditative, confessional, and political, Suárez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed.
Courageously prolific, Virgil Suárez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.
Now in paperback, a major career retrospective by the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia
So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
--from "Unsaid"
Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.
Eeva Kilpi is one of Finland's best-loved writers, and a Nobel Prize nominee. Her work has been published in sixteen languages, but this is her first full-length poetry collection in English.
Kilpi's poems, which encompass everything from bawdy humour to compassionate irony, and from haunting expressions of love and loss to an obvious passion for the natural world, have a shamanistic, shape-shifting quality about them. They explore different ways of being: they serve both as companions on the life-journey and as a representation of the journey itself.
Donald Adamson's translations, produced in collaboration with the author, are a memorable introduction for new readers to the wisdom of this mature, sure-footed poet with her wholly individual voice.
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.
An exhalation of love, loss, and heartbreak, Abandoned Breaths is a poetic work of catharsis. From the acclaimed author of I Find You in the Darkness, Alfa's writing is at once deeply personal and universal--resulting in an emotive force that stays with you. This new edition of Abandoned Breaths includes an updated introduction and a brand-new chapter of modern poetry. Find respite, resilience, and rejuvenation from the moving poetry of Abandoned Breaths.
There are wordsthat need to be said.
Buried beneath pride and fear.
Rejection has suffocated
their tenacity to bloom.
So, they stay dormant
and fester.
Dwelling in the darkest
and dusty corners of a crying soul.
Unseen, yet felt.
Not alive, but not dead.
Abandoned breaths.
Words that need to be said.
-Alfa
