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Poetry
Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well. Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms and heroism--the searching portrait of a man caught between love and duty, human feeling and the force of fate--that has influenced writers for over 2,000 years. Filled with drama, passion, and the universal pathos that only a masterpiece can express. The Aeneid is a book for all the time and all people.
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems. Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.
In the nineteenth century, abolitionist and African-American periodicals printed thousands of poems by black men and women on such topics as bondage and freedom, hatred and discrimination, racial identity and racial solidarity, along with dialect verse that mythologized the Southern past. Early in the twentieth century, black poets celebrated race consciousness in propagadistic and protest poetry, while World War I helped engender the outpouring of African-American creativity known as the "Harlem Renaissance."
A spirited collection of poems inspired by the Zen practice of one of America's most celebrated authors, Jim Harrison, a New York Times best-selling author. The popular novels of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) represent only part of his literary output--he was also widely acclaimed for the "renegade genius" of his powerful, expressive poems. After Ikkyū is the first collection of Harrison's poetry directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice. The writing here is at once thought-provoking and passionate, immortalizing a celebrated American writer's relationship to Zen in beautiful verse. These short, spirited poems will inspire you to look at life differently with a newfound sense of wonder and gratitude for everyday moments.
This collection of Zen-inspired poems is the ninth book of poetry by the highly acclaimed author of Legends of the Fall, Wolf, and numerous other novels, essays, and screenplays.
After Nature, W. G. Sebald's first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind's place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, "an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance." The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author's position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.
A truly moving book. --John Ashbery Jana Prikryl's The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City, from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl's ambitious experimentation with style. "Thirty Thousand Islands," the second half of the collection, presents some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices. Rooted in one place that fragments into many places--the remote shores of Lake Huron in Canada, a region with no natural resources aside from its beauty--these poems are an elegy that speaks beyond grief. Penetrating, vital, and visionary, The After Party marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.
This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert's exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as 'the church's banquet', 'reversed thunder', 'the Milky Way', 'the bird of paradise' and 'something understood'. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm's sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions. Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.
*Starred Booklist Review*
After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío. Whether it's biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragón has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua. Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short: a book that is both trajectory & mosaic, complicating the conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas--above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.
After the Reunion is an intensely lyrical collection of love poems and elegies from "the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright," as Marilyn Hacker has described him. In these quiet, powerful, and eloquent poems, David Baker explores the kinship of love to loss, discovering that each is an inevitable component of the other. The final movement of the book is a unification of these two modes and becomes a celebration of continuities, kinships, and renewals.
Hasan Sijzi, also known as Amir Hasan Sijzi Dehlavi, is considered the originator of the Indo-Persian ghazal, a poetic form that endures to this day--from the legacy of Hasan's poetic descendent, Hafez, to contemporary Anglophone poets such as John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Agha Shahid Ali, and W. S. Merwin.
As with other Persian poets, Hasan worked within a highly regulated set of poetic conventions that brought into relief the interpenetration of apparent opposites--metaphysical and material, mysterious and quotidian, death and desire, sacred and profane, fleeting time and eternity. Within these strictures, he crafted a poetics that blended Sufi Islam with non-Muslim Indic traditions. Of the Persian poets practiced the ghazal, Hafez and Rumi are best known to Western readers, but their verse represents only a small fraction of a rich tradition. This collection reveals the geographical range of the literature while introducing an Indian voice that will find a place on reader's bookshelves alongside better known Iranian names.
"You fetch / the daily things. You go on. There's nothing else to do." In Afterswarm, Margot Schilpp reveals and revels in the deep comfort we take in the common objects, people, and circumstances of our lives. She draws our attention back to those that have grown invisible in their familiarity, asking us to pause and weigh the significance of what we regularly encounter. The poems in this volume question and insist, return and twist, and ultimately point us toward the grace we can find in what's often overlooked. "Afterswarm is a collection of powerful, sometimes kaleidoscopic meditations on the human condition in a universe akin to Stephen Crane's, one which has 'no sense of obligation' for our existence. The trials of mutability, heartbreak, alienation, and mundanity are met with stoical tenacity (and, occasionally, wry humor) while 'shimmerings' of beauty and love are 'syncopated against loss.' These poems strike deep. And Schilpp's unembellished eloquence, musician's ear, and eye for evocative detail energize every page of this extraordinary book."--William Trowbridge, author of Vanishing Point
This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes its impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecth: "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times." Bearing witness to extremity - whether of war, torture, exile or repression - the volume encompasses more than 140 poems from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine.
Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions--those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and "one of the undisputed master poets of our time" (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)
Words, voices reek of the worlds from which theyemerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words--there is a gap, nonetheless always
and forever, between words and the world-- slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.
-
Set up a situation, --
. . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner's eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth--with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and "one of the undisputed master poets of our time" (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)
Words, voices reek of the worlds from which theyemerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words--there is a gap, nonetheless always
and forever, between words and the world-- slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.
-
Set up a situation, --
. . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner's eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth--with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
The poems in Against the Current expose a mind moving fast as water. Tedi López Mills renders a river as a cool but contaminated space, propelling its detritus through a hybrid rural/urban zone that is inhabited by allegory and rife with collision. As the poems swim upstream, they accrue the impurities and complicities of memory, embodied in the central figure of the brother who is also the other. Wendy Burk reproduces the baroque, occasionally frenetic rhythms of the abecedarian original with lucidity, in these poems that underscore that Mexico is defined by physical and philosophical contrast.