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Poetry
A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems--about London, terror, new motherhood, the Grenfell Tower fire, and how we live now.
Hannah Sullivan's first collection, Three Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book's project, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time. But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic event and present disaster. "Tenants," the first poem, is an elegy for Grenfell, written from the uneasy perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting. Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, from the thin concrete pillars of a flyover to an elderly peacock's broken train. There is a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.
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.
The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best poetry collection
It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
--from "The Dipper"
For more than twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.
Waterlight at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry--rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the descriptive bursts of a naturalist's field guide --confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.
