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W. S. Graham: Selected Poems
by W. S. Graham Michael HofmannAn original collection of the best and most provocative work by Scottish poet W.S. Graham, the celebrated author of "Nightfishing" and Malcolm Mooney's Land. “Does it disturb the language?” the Scottish poet W. S. Graham liked to ask about a poem. Graham’s do—strangely, comically, beautifully. His career fell into two parts. The early work is rapt and wild and incantatory, and culminates in the tour de force of 1955, The Nightfishing. Fifteen years of silence were then followed by an extraordinary late flowering: Graham’s poems became stark, quizzical, and unsettling, a continual teasing examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing investigation into the nature and power of poetry, work that is at once metaphysical and intimate, wry and elegiac. In these late poems, Graham emerges as one of the true originals of poetry in English.
W. S. Graham and Lyric Self-Consciousness (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Sam Buchan-WattsThis monograph considers the formal vitality of lyric in the face of anxieties about linguistic agency across the corpus of the British poet, W. S. Graham. A sophisticated modernist lyric originates, the book argues, in Graham’s rendering of self-consciousness at different strata across space, sound, image and form – as distinct from a more general lyric subject or ego. By listening closely to the poems, the book seeks to identify the self-sufficiency of Graham’s lyrics, and their ability to account for themselves theoretically on their own terms. Archival material – including worksheets, manuscripts and notebooks – is used to examine Graham's visual and spatial conception of verse and his ambivalent relation to verse form. Graham’s propositions are considered in the context of broader theoretical debates about modern lyric and a slipstream of mid-century poets (namely William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson). The book concludes with a sustained analysis of Denise Riley's long-term engagement with Graham’s poetry, which suggests how Graham’s generative approaches to lyric can be further politicised.
Waddle!
by Rufus Butler SederCreated by the optical genius behind the phenomenal "New York Times"-bestselling children's books "Gallop!" and "Swing!, Waddle!" teaches color and movement through the unique Scanimation process--a technique that brings the animals to life.
Wade in the Water: Poems
by Tracy K. SmithShortlisted for the T. S. Eliot PrizeFinalist for the Forward Prize for Best CollectionThe extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love’s bladeSizing up the heart’s familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.—from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.
Wade In The Water: Poems
by Tracy K. SmithIn Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. <P><P>The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. <P><P>Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. <P>Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. <P>Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems
by Scott BealWait 'Til You Have Real Problems, the emotionally charged debut poetry collection from Scott Beal, tackles love and loss in a series of thematically linked pieces that will leave readers breathless. Beal finds inspiration in everything from myth to fairytale, from old photographs to the origin of chicken noodle soup--but always, ultimately, from the core of something unmistakably human.
Waiting for the Past: Poems
by Les MurrayIn Waiting for the Past, Les Murray employs his molten sense of language to renew and transform our experience of the world. In quicksilver verse, he conjures his rural past, the life of the poor dairy boy in Australia, as he simultaneously feels the steady tug of aging, of time pulling him back to the present. Here, syntax, sense, and sound combine with such acrobatic grace that his poems render the familiar into the unknown, the unknown into the revelatory.Whether it's a boy on a walkabout hiding from grief, a sounding whale "spilling salt rain," or leaves that "tread on the sky," the great Australian poet's sense of wonder, his ear for the everyday, his swiftness of thought are everywhere in these pages. As Derek Walcott said of Murray's work, "There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures and yet so intimate and conversational."
Waiting Out the Storm
by JoAnn Early MackenWind whistles in the treetops, thunder rumbles, and lightning flashes and dashes between raindrops. Snug inside, a mother and child listen, watch, and wonder what the animals will do during the storm. Paired with beautiful illustrations evoking the moods and mysteries of the natural world, this lyrical call-and-response text is a lullaby to stormy weather — and to the warmth and safety of home.
Waiting Out the Storm (Elementary Core Reading)
by JoAnn Early Macken Susan GaberNIMAC-sourced textbook
Waiting Room
by Jennifer ZilmYou’re welcome to take a seat in (the) Waiting Room, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm. Featuring a mélange of styles and forms (sonnets, erasures, unsent emails, footnotes, session notes, CVs, tweets, and other disparate source materials—including, the Gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls), Waiting Room subverts, shares, and repurposes the vocabularies of psychiatry, dentistry, the Bible, and academia in a humorous investigation of the contained intimacy of appointments and therapeutic relationships. Ultimately interested in how we learn, the experimental and lyrical poems in Waiting Room seek lessons in what it means to wait, to be a patient and to be patient, to be a student and to be a teacher, to be a healer and to be healed. In four unique sections, Zilm invites readers to investigate the curious boundaries of various therapeutic terrains—from an exploration of the esoteric world of graduate school, where the subject is religion, to a mash-up of Dante’s vision of purgatory and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), to the improbable written intersections of van Gogh's doctors and Sylvia Plath's therapist.Lovers of avant-garde and lyrical poetry will immediately connect with Zilm's engaging, observant, and probing work, as will readers familiar with the realms of Vancouver's neighbourhoods, in particular the DTES. And because of its many idiomatic forms (e.g., emails, tweets, recipes, etc.), its integration of a wide range of source materials, and its relatable settings and subject matter, Waiting Room could serve as a "gateway collection" for readers who don’t always connect with poetry, but enjoy other forms of literature.
Waiting to Waltz: A Childhood
by Cynthia Rylant[from front flap] "Their house had no number and no street, but the girl and her mother were glad to pick up their mail at the Beaver Post Office. It was good they could do that ... meant they were known in town. The girl made poems about those who knew her: grown-ups such as Mr. Lafon, who was too timid to drive a car but brave enough to walk wearing a net mask among a thousand bees. Or Major, a collie dog; Mrs. Todd, who kept a pet monkey at her hardware store; or quiet Mr. Dill, who left Beaver three years before anyone noticed. And kids: Ronnie from next door, who played trombone, Randy who played Tarzan. Jo and Sue and Roger and Steve and Jimmy--boyfriends and girlfriends--growing together, and up, and away."
Wakefulness: Poems
by John AshberyA collection of poems that recall, in their powerful transformations of language, the moment of clarity that arrives upon waking from a dreamOne of John Ashbery&’s most critically acclaimed collections since his iconic works of the mid-1970s, Wakefulness was praised in 1999 for its beauty and alertness. In these pages, the great poet is at once luring the reader into a vivid dream and waking us up with a jolt of recognition. In poems such as &“The Village of Sleep,&” &“Shadows in the Street,&” and &“Wakefulness,&” dreams, sleeplessness, and other transformational and liminal states are revealed to be part of a ceaseless continuity of accelerating changes. Even the most seemingly familiar phrases (&“stop me if you&’ve heard this one&”) are ever in the process of changing their meanings, especially in Ashbery&’s hands. And distinctive new realities are created constantly by the power of words, in strange and beautiful combinations. With every word and every line, Ashbery questions the real and summons a new reality.
The Waker's Corridor: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)
by Jonathan Thirkield"I had a clock it woke all day," writes Jonathan Thirkield at the outset of The Waker's Corridor, a book that charts an assiduous attempt to recover lost time. Housed in elaborate and varied formal architectures, these poems navigate the disorder and gaps left by the violence of loss. All measures of time -- psychological, personal, historical, numerical -- collide and overlap in intensely lyrical verse. What results is a journey that winds through shifting lands and interiors, across theatrical stages and city streets, into voices and objects that emerge in sudden, vivid relief, and just as quickly disappear. By turns dreamlike and sternly rational, arcane and contemporary, intimate and dramatic, it is a book of blinding, austere, and beautiful awakenings.
Waking Beauty
by Leah WilcoxEveryone knows Sleeping Beauty has to be woken with a kiss, except Prince Charming. Every time the fairies watching over her try to tell him, he interrupts with his ideas of how to wake her.
Waking Occupations: Poems
by Phoebe WangThe second collection from the acclaimed author of Admission Requirements. This astonishing new collection of poems contemplates our obligations to live in a creative, generative, and revolutionary way amid a cascade of global contingencies. In a four-part meditation on what it means to live on occupied land and in colonial time, the subject of these poems has moved beyond arriving and departing and wakes each day to meet her commitments and to heal from complicities, exclusions, difficult truths and the pandemic of forgetting. It follows the figure of the female artist as a time-travelling woman, embodied by mother and daughter, through the gallery of memory. The poems enact brief encounters with objects, events, and works of art that hold us accountable. Finally, a set of shadow elegies mourn what the next generation has already lost, while searching for traces of the wild and for ceremonies that might mend us. Waking Occupations is an urgent, essential collection that considers what we carry from previous generations and our liabilities to the cyclical nature of the work that uplifts us.
Waking Up to Beauty
by Anne HayPoems are small individual vignettes. Each one telling a story and painting a picture. Poetry is a special art form. People from all walks of life can express themselves and their thoughts through poetry. Sometimes a memory triggers an emotion: if you like to write poetry, then there is no better way to express a moment in time than to write the words that give a poem life. Poetry can be funny, it can be serious, it can be about love, it can be about sorrow. Poems can be about so much: about the sea, about rivers, about snow, and the warm glow in the fireplace, at home, in the deep mid-winter. Poetry lets us feel the emotion and view the scene in our own minds, through the vision of the poet. Read on…
A Walk in Victoria's Secret: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)
by Kate DanielsWith A Walk in Victoria’s Secret, Kate Daniels crafts a bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman’s growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without. From the title poem’s unapologetic celebration of the breast to a belated apology to the girl who integrated her elementary school, to the awkward juxtaposition of elderly and young women in a gynecologist’s office on September 11, 2001, Daniels provides a rich array of meditations on what it means to be a woman in our time. Buoyant and entertaining, singular in style, and exuberant in language, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret offers an intimate look at women’s experiences.
A Walker in the City
by Méira CookShortlisted for the 2012 Aqua Lansdowne Prize for Poetry A fascinating, ambling, loitering mystery story in verse, a whoizzit rather than a whodunit. In this innovative and arresting narrative poem, Méira Cook's walker, a young woman, is a character being written by an "old city poet," who is in turn being written by another poet, for whom the young woman, "Ms. Em Cook," has been an amanuensis. Always witty and often hilarious, feather-light in touch, the book is an entertaining exploration of serious issues: youth and age; life, death and rebirth; the (dis)connection of language and reality; tradition and the now. It is an assemblage of seven nesting sections, each of them a sort of chapbook speaking to each of the others and rounding out a long poem of great freshness. A Walker in the City is one of a kind, one of the most original books Brick has ever published.
Walking and Stealing
by Stephen CainIn this triptych of serial poems steeped in baseball and Toronto, Stephen Cain considers urban affairs and culture through playful, revelatory devices.“Walking & Stealing” was composed between innings of his son’s little league baseball games. The sport becomes a site for explorations of duration, association, and subjectivity. The ninety-nine poems of “Intentional Walks” follow mapped routes throughout the city to study the relationship between thinking and walking. The nine cantos in “Tag & Run” are constructed using baseball’s magic number nine, creating a literary puzzle in which the author “tags” a series of moments in time.Together, these works skewer traditional, masculinist, and often-solipsistic perspectives on where we live and inhabit, instead offering a new way to consider the relationship between culture and space. Walking and Stealing is where memes meet psychogeography in a collection from a brilliant poet at the top of their game.
Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016
by John KoetheCollected poems from America’s searching and thoughtful philosopher-poet. . . There’s somethingComforting about rituals renewed, even adolescents’ pipe dreams:They’ll find out soon enough, and meanwhile find their placesIn the eternal scenery, less auguries or cautionary talesThan parts of an unchanging whole, as ripe for contemplationAs a planisphere or the clouds: the vexed destinies, the shared life,The sempiternal spectacle of someone preaching to the choirWhile walking backwards in the moment on a warm spring afternoon.John Koethe’s poems—always dynamic and in process, never static or complete—luxuriate in the questions that punctuate the most humdrum of routines, rendering a robust portrait of an individual: complicated, quotidian, and resounding with truth. Gathering for the first time his impressive and award-winning body of work, published between 1966 and 2016, Walking Backwards introduces this gifted poet to a new, wider readership.
Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse
by Alora YoungAn &“extraordinary&” (Laurie Halse Anderson) young poet traces the lives of her foremothers in West Tennessee, from those enslaved centuries ago to her grandmother, her mother, and finally herself, in this stunning debut celebrating Black girlhood and womanhood throughout American history.&“A masterpiece that beautifully captures the heartbreak that accompanies coming of age for Black girls becoming Black women.&”—Evette Dionne, author of Lifting as We Climb, longlisted for the National Book AwardWalking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young&’s ancestors, from the unnamed women forgotten by the historical record but brought to life through Young&’s imagination; to Amy, the first of Young&’s foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave, unlike the white man who enslaved her and fathered her child; through Young&’s great-grandmother Gentry, unhappily married at fourteen; to her own mother, the teenage beauty queen rejected by her white neighbors; down to Young in the present day as she leaves childhood behind and becomes a young woman. The lives of these girls and women come together to form a unique American epic in verse, one that speaks of generational curses, coming of age, homes and small towns, fleeting loves and lasting consequences, and the brutal and ever-present legacy of slavery in our nation&’s psyche. Each poem is a story in verse, and together they form a heart-wrenching and inspiring family saga of girls and women connected through blood and history.Informed by archival research, the last will and testament of an enslaver, formal interviews, family lore, and even a DNA test, Walking Gentry Home gives voice to those too often muted in America: Black girls and women.
Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (American Readers Series)
by Stephen DunnCommitted to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides new, expanded versions of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.
Walking On The Boundaries Of Change: Poems Of Transition
by Sara HolbrookA collection of poems for young adults about new experiences and difficult choices.
Walking on Ice: Thoughts on Life's Perilous Journey
by P A SurchLife is a journey, often perilous. We take risks, not because we want to die, but because we want to feel alive. This book explores the feelings of joy and triumph, loss and regret that we all experience along the way. Set in airports, train stations and bus stops, it captures the moments in transit and transition where we pause to reflect on our own journey, gather our thoughts and rebuild ourselves stronger and wiser to carry on.