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Poetry
Legendary fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating, and teaching the ancient tales of northern Europe at Oxford and drew on them for his own writing. These epic stories, with their wizards and knights, dragons and trolls, cursed rings and magic swords, are as fascinating today as they were thousands of year ago. Reading them brings us as close as we will ever get to the magical worlds of the Vikings and the origins of their twentieth-century counterpart: Tolkien's Middle Earth. In this collection of the earliest verse in English, heroic poems celebrate the courage, loyalty, and strength of the ancient world: in "The Battle of Maldon" a brave Anglo-Saxon army attempt to fend off a Viking invasion; "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" reflect on exile, loss and destiny; and The Exeter Riddles are witty linguistic puzzles that directly influenced Golum's famous riddles in Tolkien's The Hobbit. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
of which we glimpse but a hint,
but to amaze and rejoice and lift
one's brush, one's voice, one's pen. To praise Him, to please Him, for Him.
So humbly, woefully, artfully we try.
Why art but to remind us all of His glory?
Michael Finch is a passionate advocate of preserving America's freedom and liberties. In his second collection of poetry, Finch touches on love and loss, America, God, and our place in the world.
Finch's poems reflect on a variety of relatable topics that lament a different America, community, nature, and our changing and trying times. His verse explores the Lord's embrace on a heavenly day; a smile that carries all the worries away; a wind-whispered valley of bluegrass, wild oak, and willows that weep in the fading sun of a cooling autumn calm; and the gentle reminders of all of God's glory.
Wanderings in Place is a volume of inspirational poems that transport us back to a lost America that hopefully will be awakened one day again.
Evoking the landscapes and surroundings of war, as well as its effects on both US military service members and civilians in war-stricken countries, The War Makes Everyone Lonely is a challenging, nuanced look at the ways American violence is exported, enacted, and obscured by a writer poised to take his place in the long tradition of warrior-poets.
A remarkable hybrid of translation, adaptation, and invention
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.
"This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you."--NPR.org
In reviewing Richard Siken's first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse. In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions--such as, Why paint a bird?--are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its--and our own--invention.
* Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read.--Library Journal, starred review
[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create.--Vanity Fair
Siken's stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art.--Booklist
"Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken's sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency."--Publishers Weekly
War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken's first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases--the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion.--The Rumpus
The Museum
Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.
He saw a painting and stood in front of it
for too long. It was a few minutes before she
realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking
at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his
face and then the face in the painting. What do you
see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't
know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was
looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.
This is where everything changed . . .
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
As Muldoon writes, It's almost impossible to think of a world in which The Waste Land did not exist. So profound has its influence been not only on twentieth-century poetry but on how we've come to view the century as a whole, the poem itself risks being taken for granted. Famously elliptical, wildly allusive, at once transcendent and bleak, The Waste Land defined modernity after the First World War, forever transforming our understanding of ourselves, the broken world we live in, and the literature that was meant to make sense of it. In a voice that is arch, ironic, almost ebullient, and yet world-weary and tragic, T. S. Eliot mixes and remixes, drawing on a cast of ghosts to create a new literature for a new world. In the words of Edmund Wilson, Eliot...is one of our only authentic poets...[The Waste Land is] one triumph after another.
A Penguin Classic
While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective. This edition includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Gerontion," and more. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Introduction by Mary Karr
First published in 1922, "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a potent new poetic language. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, Eliot "articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression." As commanding as his verse, Eliot's criticism also transformed twentieth-century letters, and this Modern Library edition includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.
In the masterly cadences of T. S. Eliot's verse, the 20th century found its definitive poetic voice, an incredible image of its accelerated grimace, in the words of Eliot's friend and mentor, Ezra Pound. This volume is a rich collection of much of Eliot's greatest work.
The title poem, The Waste Land (1922), ranks among the most influential poetic works of the century. An exploration of the psychic stages of a despairing soul caught in a struggle for redemption, the poem contrasts the spiritual stagnation of the modern world with the ennobling myths of the past. Other selections include the complete contents of Prufrock (1971), including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Mr. Apollinax, and Morning at the Window. From Poems (1920) there are Gerontion, The Hippopotamus, Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, and more.
An indispensable resource for all poetry lovers, this modestly priced edition is also an ideal text for English literature courses from high school to college. Includes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
When the New York Public Library announced in October 1968 that its Berg Collection had acquired the original manuscript of The Waste Land, one of the most puzzling mysteries of twentieth-century literature was solved. The manuscript was not lost, as had been believed, but had remained among the papers of John Quinn, Eliot's friend and adviser, to whom the poet had sent it in 1922.
If the discovery of the manuscript was startling, its content was even more so: the published version of The Waste Land was considerably shorter than the original. The manuscript pages illuminate how the famously elliptical poem was reduced and edited through the handwritten notes of Ezra Pound; of Eliot's first wife, Vivien; and of Eliot himself. So that this material could be made widely available, the poet's widow, Valerie Eliot, prepared the facsimile edition for publication in 1971, reproducing each page of the original manuscript with a clear transcript, an enlightening introduction, and explanatory notes.
In celebration of the centenary of the poem, published in the United States by Boni & Liveright in 1922, Eliot's manuscript pages are presented in vivid color for the first time. The updated facsimile edition also offers a new appendix--including a sheet of Valerie Eliot's corrections discovered in the Faber archive in 2021--and an insightful afterword from Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis. Complete with the text of the first published version of The Waste Land, this definitive volume reveals the evolution of a landmark work of the twentieth century and its enduring legacy.
Featured in the book are Lawrence Rainey's groundbreaking account of how The Waste Land cameto be composed; a history of the reactions of admirers and critics; and full annotations to the poem and Eliot's essays. The edition transforms our understanding of one of the greatest modernist writers and the magnificent poem that became a landmark in literary history.
A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.
Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."
Christian Aldana's debut poetry collection, The Water We Swim In, is an ode to radical care. Through community organizing and deeply held love, Aldana follows in the footsteps of Grace Lee Boggs against a carceral state. They champion safety for all who need it while challenging the waters of our time, this state in which protection is needed. Aldana questions the broken system and shows us an alternative future well within our grasp. As she gives to others, she also gives to herself, allowing space for grief, acknowledging the distances between us in the diaspora. Unapologetically queer and neurodivergent, Aldana's writing exudes power and teaches us we will never drown as long as we have each other. Empowering, mobilizing, and unrelenting, The Water We Swim In is a poetic revolution, a manifesto for all who believe in fighting for more.