A recent study shows that poets are thirty times more likely to suffer from depressive illness than the rest of the population. Editors Smith and Sweeney state in their Introduction that: "It is the unconscious that drives poetry, the jumps and sudden lurches that forge new connections with things not connected before, new ways of seeing. And it is also the unconscious where the voices of the irrational lurk". Witty, brittle, serene, remote, here is poetry that is testament to the transforming power of the imagination, poetry that catches the reader in the full glare of its light, challenging ... View More...
Once upon a time men and women of sense and sensibility knew by heart dozens of poems - Shakespeare's sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. Poems are meant to be voiced and A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new - one for each day of the year - worth learning by heart. Only two criteria were demanded of each poem for inclusion in this collection - it had to be short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand among the great poetry of the English language, from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath. A Poem a ... View More...
In his controversial 1857 work, Les Fleurs du mal, the 19th-century decadent poet addresses the conflict of good and evil by rejecting conventional distinctions to pursue beauty in perversity. This volume features selections from Baudelaire s masterpiece, perhaps the most influential French poetry ever written, in an inexpensive edition that invites readers to explore the remarkable sensuality, depths of thought, and feeling in one of the most original and influential books of the age. " View More...
John Betjeman's verse autobiography has sold more copies than any other English poem of its length this century. The touching story of a boy's growth to early manhood and the mixed joys and guilt of youth, it is also supremely a poem about places, buildings and surroundings - Highgate and Pooterland, t Cornish seaside and Chelsea, Marlborough among its Downs, the quads of Oxford, parish churches and tin advertisements on railway platforms. Who better to illustrate this autobiography than Hugh Casson, architect and former President of the Royal Academy, who has already delighted us with illustr... View More...
Gustave Dore's magnificent engravings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are among the later works of the great French illustrator. The intensely evocative poem provided Dor with the long-awaited opportunity to convey limitless space on a gigantic scale, and he exploited the poem's fantastic range of atmosphere to the limits of its possibilities. The terrifying space of the open sea, the storms and whirlpools of an unknown ocean, the vast icy caverns of Antarctica, the hot equatorial sea swarming with monsters, all of the amazing visual elements that make Coleridge's masterpiece one of the m... View More...
A Billy Collins poem is instantly recognizable. "Using simple, understandable language," notes "USA Today," the two-term U.S. Poet Laureate "captures ordinary life-its pleasure, its discontents, its moments of sadness and of joy." His everyman approach to writing resonates with readers everywhere and generates fans who would otherwise never give a poem a second glance. Now, in this stunning new collection, Collins touches on a greater array of subjects-love, death, solitude, youth, and aging-delving deeper than ever before. "Ballistics" comes at the reader full force with moving and playful ta... View More...
In No More Time, Greg Delanty offers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection's long sequence, "A Field Guide to People," is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct. Evoking an earthly heaven, purgatory, and hell for plants and animals, these poems function also as love letters to the biosphere as they connect the past with the present in both form and content. In the middle of this sonnet sequence, a section labeled "Breaking New... View More...
Considered by many critics the foremost English "metaphysical" poet, John Donne (1572-1631) earned renown for both sacred and secular verse, his love poems in the latter genre ranking among his most original and popular works. Brilliant and wide-ranging, Donne's verse is distinguished by its passion, insight, and inspired use of striking metaphors or "conceits." This volume contains a rich selection of the poet's best work, including, from the Songs and Sonnets "The Good Morrow," "The Canonization," "The Relic," and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"; from the Elegies "On His Mistress" and "... View More...
Through the smoke-lit pool halls, back roads, rehab centers, truck stops, and diners of the still industrial world, Sean Thomas Dougherty offers us the stories he has lived and collected of men and women barely working, just getting by, but every morning still going on, even if unsure.Unsung unbearably blue, even frighteningin how they leave us, our responsibilitiesamong the debris, these utteranceswe cannot hold.Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches w... View More...
Volume 3 of Robert M. Drakes entries. This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute to the common youth and society as a whole. In his writing, Robert M. Drake hauntingly describes the issues we are all facing today. We all are broken and broken is its own kind of beautiful. View More...
A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal." View More...
Poetry. I like the arrogant flick of love in these words. Tactile, muscled, and angry with desire, these poems reach for you. If you're alone at the end of this book it's because you dove from love's edge and you have chosen your loneliness. --Emily Kendal Frey View More...
