- Table View
- List View
Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (African Poetry Book)
by Patricia Jabbeh WesleyBreaking the Silence is the first comprehensive collection of literature from Liberia since before the nation&’s independence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has gathered work from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders. In this collection, Liberia&’s founding settlers wrestle with their identity as African free slaves in the homeland from which their ancestors were captured, and writers of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries find themselves navigating a landscape at odds with itself. From poets of Liberia&’s past to young writers of the present, the contributors to this volume celebrate the beauty of their nation while mourning the devastation of a long, bloody civil war.
Breath: Poems
by Philip LevineAlways a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born "early in the final industrial century" to help us envision an America he's known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist Russia, a father who survived unspeakable losses, the artists and musicians who inspired him, and fellow workers at the factory who shared the best and worst of his coming of age. Throughout the collection Levine rejoices in song-Dinah Washington wailing from a jukebox in midtown Manhattan; Della Daubien hymning on the crosstown streetcar; Max Roach and Clifford Brown at a forgotten Detroit jazz palace; the prayers offered to God by an immigrant uncle dreaming of the Judean hills; the hoarse notes of a factory worker who, completing another late shift, serenades the sleeping streets. Like all of Levine's poems, these are a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit, the persistence of life in the presence of the coming dark.From the Hardcover edition.
Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit: A Reflection of Creativity and Faith
by Luci Shaw“The double question we must always ask is,‘How does faith inform art?’ and ‘How can art animate faith?’”Imagination, appreciation of beauty, creativity: all of these qualities have been given to us by God. For the Christian artist, the drive to create something wonderful is also a means to glorify and better understand our Lord. Using excerpts from her own works as well as those of writers who have gone before her—Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, C.S. Lewis, and others—poet and writer Luci Shaw proves that symbolism and metaphor provide ways for humans to experience God in new and powerful ways.Shaw offers a rich and thought-provoking exploration of art, creativity, and faith. Believing that art emanates from God, she shows how imagination and spirituality “work in tandem, each feeding on and nourishing the other.” Faith informs art and art enhances faith. They both, for each other, are “breath for the bones.”Provocative, enlightening, and above all, inspiring, Breath for the Bones will help readers discover the artist within, and bring them further along the path to God Himself.Include s Discussion Questions and Writing Exercises
Breathe and Be: A Book of Mindfulness Poems
by Kate Coombs Anna Emilia LaitinenHear thunder crash, feel your toes touch sand, and watch leaves drift softly away on a quiet stream. The simple poems in Breathe and Be help children learn mindfulness as they connect to the beauty of the natural world. Mindfulness teaches us how to stay calm, soothe our emotions, and appreciate the world around us. Whether we’re watching tiny colored fish darting in the water or exploring the leaves, branches, and roots of a towering tree, the thoughtful words and the lovely art of Breathe and Be remind us how much joy we can find by simply living with awareness and inner peace.
Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series #26)
by Franco "Bifo" BerardiThe increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.Since the hopeful days of the Occupy movement, many things have changed in the respiration of the world, and we have entered a cycle of spasm, despair, and chaos. Breathing is a book about the increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, about the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere.“I can't breathe.” These words panted by Eric Garner before dying, strangled by a police officer on the streets of Staten Island, capture perfectly catching the overall sentiment of our time. In Breathing, Franco "Bifo" Berardi comes back to the subject that was the core of his 2011 book, The Uprising: the place of poetry in the relations between language, capital, and possibility. In The Uprising, he focuses on poetry as an anticipation of the trend toward abstraction that led to the present form of financial capitalism. In Breathing, he tries to envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos. The Uprising was a genealogical diagnosis. Breathing is an essay on poetical therapy. How we deal with chaos, as we know that those who fight against chaos will be defeated, because chaos feeds upon war? How do we deal with suffocation? Is there a way out from the corpse of financial capitalism?
Breathing Room
by Peter Davison"Peter Davison, for years, has pondered with clear insight the perspectives of affection, attachment, loss, and memory, his language spare and his tone classical and deceptively quiet. The poems of this new collection look at the same world with surprise and speak of it with a startled and startling freedom, feeling 'entitled to / the liberty of breathing easy'--a freedom that brings with it the old clarity and eloquence."--W. S. MerwinThe poems in Peter Davison's exuberant new collection contemplate the paradox of growing old--of having a mind still "a juicy swamp of invention" in a body beginning to falter.Both intimate and generous, these poems celebrate the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth: snapping turtles lay their eggs and new ones hatch; a ruffed grouse drums his spring mating dance. Memory is central: a mother's lost face; a father's voice that "plumbed the marrow of poetry as tenderly / as if a darling had crept into his arms"; a wife's "rueful eyes, cornflower blue." And the poet pays tribute to the literary life--to reading, to the precise moment a word rises to consciousness, to getting over Robert Frost, to the mind of Sylvia Plath. These are poems that expand time for us and deepen place, whether Davison is taking us on a path along a limestone cliff under canopies of holly and ivy, or is revisiting the instant while recovering from surgery when it becomes clear he is going to heal. "To learn poetry," Davison writes in his foreword, "we need to take poems into our breath and blood, and that requires us to hear them as we read them, to learn to read with all the senses, especially with the ear." Breathing Room gives us a splendid array of poems that we want to read with all our senses.
Breezeway: New Poems
by John AshberyA bold, striking new collection of poems from one of America’s most influential and inventive poets.With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.
Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Colorado Prize for Poetry)
by Craig Morgan TeicherWinner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Brenda Is in the Room & Other Poems
by Craig Morgan TeicherThe winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, this is a beautiful and original work that appears to be, on first impression, a light-hearted and amusingly self-conscious account of daily life, but reminds us that our mundane lives are utterly strange and magical.
Breviario de nostalgia
by Nicolás MuñozUn poemario de madurez que se demora con acierto en la melancolía de una vida revisada. Breviario de nostalgia es el primer libro de Nicolás Muñoz, un poemario de madurez que se demora con acierto en la melancolía de una vida revisada. <P><P> Siendo esa su idea vertebradora, no deja de surgir, al tiempo, una variedad temática producto de una mirada vuelta hacia el pasado. En sus páginas, el lector se encontrará invadido por una atmósfera que le hará partícipe y cómplice del universo del protagonista-poeta. <P>Cada texto va desvelando parte de su identidad: los recuerdos de la infancia, los éxitos y los fracasos, la búsqueda del interlocutor, la vida, quizá un poco más canalla, la escritura misma... <P>Hay intensidad y también calma, un juego de contrapesos entre la cara amarga y el amor en su faceta más amable, salvífica. Muñoz apresa la nostalgia y se ocupa de los motores emocionales de su vida en un canto de reconciliación. Comoreza uno de los versos, «¡Qué placer haber nacido!».
Brewster the Rooster
by Devin ScillianWhat has gotten into Brewster the rooster? The Macintosh family can't understand why their barnyard pet is crowing at the darnedest things. "I'm worried about Brewster," Magnolia said, mixing carrot cake batter with raisins. "Something has changed. It seems so strange, but he's crowing at the oddest occasions." Whether it's the children playing catch in the yard, Zeb painting the barn red, or Grandma Pearl flipping hotcakes, Brewster can't stop himself from letting out an earsplitting cock-a-doodle-doo that sends the Macintosh family head-over-heels. When the barnyard brouhaha gets too much, even Doc Sawyer is consulted. But can he figure out how to help Brewster? Readers of all ages will be charmed by the perfect solution to Brewster's problem.
Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems
by Elaine Feinstein Marina TsvetaevaIntensely emotional and honest, this collection of searing poems about love, loss, jealousy, and fear, explores the literary and social landscape of post revolutionary Russia. Sharply addressing the conflicts between the life of a poet and that of a mother and wife, this enlarged volume, masterfully translated, includes five major poem sequences, one of which was written in 1915 for the poet's lover Sofia Parnok and another in response to poet Rainer Maria Rilke's death. Invoking Stalinist Russia as an underlying theme, this compilation also covers politics and history.
Bridestones (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Miranda PearsonCome, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”
The Bridge
by Hart CraneBegun in 1923 and published 1930, The Bridge is Crane's major work. "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' ... The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity."
Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation #154)
by Fabio PusterlaAward-winning new translations of a major contemporary Italian poetBrief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems collects forty-five poems by Fabio Pusterla, one of the most distinguished Italian-language poets writing today. Born in Switzerland and resident in Italy, Pusterla engages the pressing moral concerns of his age and excavates the hidden realities of our concrete world. These are poems of disquieting Alpine landscapes and rift zones, filled with curious fauna, lanced with troubling memories, built “from the bottom, from the margins, from outside” the mainstream.Pusterla is the author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry and has received several major literary prizes. Selected and translated by Will Schutt, himself an award-winning poet, this volume draws from Pusterla’s six most recent collections to capture a wide range of the poet’s work. With English translations and Italian originals on facing pages, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems deftly introduces one of Europe’s most ambitious, imaginative, and humane poets to English-speaking readers.
Briefings: Poems Small And Easy
by A. R. AmmonsBriefings brings together more than eighty short lyrics that, as Harold Bloom writes, "maintain an utterly consistent purity of detached yet radiant vision." Bloom continues, "There are other American poets since Stevens who have composed a handful of memorable poems, but only Ammons has begun to show us a whole poetic world. More than his contemporaries, he has perfected a voice that, to cite Emerson, is 'ready to render an image of every created thing.'" David Kalstone says, "The poems are, by and large, tough or wry meditations, striking out into strange landscapes, dreams or nightmares, which are seen with entire clarity, no blurring, as if this were the only way the mind could be unwound on the page. The book forms a journal of mental states, each poem finding a form and a scene for a very exact mental encounter of discovery. . . . 'Small and Easy' is the way everything is finally made to seem, like the rarest dancing, in which briefly and freshly the dancer shows us what space is like by showing how much he can possess."
Bright Dead Things
by Ada Limón'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.
Bright Dead Things: Poems
by Ada Limón<P>Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." <P>A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact-tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous and accessible-though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Bright Existence (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Brenda HillmanThe poems in Brenda Hillman's new collection, a companion volume to her recent Death Tratates, offer a dynamic vision of a universe founded on the tensions between light and dark , existence and non-existence, male and female, spirit and matter. Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.
Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Kazim AliThis groundbreaking, transgenre work--part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past--is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. <p><p> Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country.
Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po
by Li Po J. P. SeatonLi Po (701-762) is considered one of the greatest poets to live during the Tang dynasty--what was considered to be the golden age for Chinese poetry. He was also the first Chinese poet to become well known in the West, and he greatly influenced many American poets during the twentieth century. Calling himself the "God of Wine" and known to his patrons as a "fallen immortal," Li Po wrote with eloquence, vividness, and often playfulness, as he extols the joys of nature, wine, and the life of a wandering recluse. Li Po had a strong social conscience, and he struggled against the hard times of his age. He was inspired by the newly blossoming Zen Buddhism and merged it with the Taoism that he had studied all his life. Though Li Po's love of wine is legendary, the translator, J. P. Seaton, includes poems on a wide range of topics--friendship and love, political criticism, poems written to curry patronage, poems of the spirit--to offer a new interpretation of this giant of Chinese poetry. Seaton offers us a poet who learned hard lessons from a life lived hard and offered his readers these lessons as vivid, lively poetry--as relevant today as it was during the Tang dynasty. Over one thousand poems have been attributed to Li Po, many of them unpublished. This new collection includes poems not available in any other editions.
Bright Moves
by J. Allyn RosserBefore our overheated hearts cool off, We'll beat them back in shape to be recast In the mall of ever after for more true love, One thing we never thought we would need two of. From "Equitable Distribution". Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Bright Scythe: Selected Poems By Thomas Tranströmer
by David Wojahn Patty Crane Tomas TranströmerTomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is Sweden's most acclaimed poet. Known for sharp imagery, startling metaphors and deceptively simple diction, his luminous poems offer mysterious glimpses into the deepest facets of humanity, often through the lens of the natural world. These new translations by Patty Crane, presented side by side with the original Swedish, are tautly rendered and elegantly cadenced. They are also deeply informed by Crane's personal relationship with the poet and his wife during the years she lived in Sweden, where she was afforded greater insight into the nuances of his poetics and the man himself.
Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters
by John KeatsWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DIRECTOR JANE CAMPIONJohn Keats died in penury and relative obscurity in 1821, aged only 25. He is now seen as one of the greatest English poets and a genius of the Romantic age. This collection, which contains all his most memorable works and a selection of his letters, is a feast for the senses, displaying Keats' gift for gorgeous imagery and sensuous language, his passionate devotion to beauty, as well as some of the most moving love poetry ever written.