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Oltre lo Specchio Infranto: Una raccolta di Poesia Oscura.
by A. L. ButcherUna collezione di poesia oscura sulla guerra, l'avvento del cancro e i capricci della vita.
Omens in the Year of the Ox
by Steven PriceSteven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.” The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.
Omeros
by Derek WalcottA poem in 7 books, of circular narrative design. Omeros is the Greek name for Homer, invoked here by a Greek girl in exile in America, the invocation marking the beginning of a long journey home, through an intricate web of places, histories and associations, for the poem's characters. Achille and Philoctete are simple fishermen, but they and their tribulations take on the specific gravity and resonance of their mythic Greek counterparts.
Ommateum: With Doxology: Poems
by A. R. Ammons“Oracular, almost biblical at times, and as deeply embedded in the particulars of nature as the superb later poetry.”—John Ashbery This reissue of A. R. Ammons’s debut, published five decades ago in a rare edition, with its penetrating “Whitmanian chants . . . holds in it the mystery of his gradual development into a major American poet, who will be read by the most discerning until the last syllable of recorded time” (Harold Bloom).
On a Stair
by Ann LauterbachAnn Lauterbach's fifth collection takes its title from Emerson's great essay, Experience: "Where do we find ourselves?" he asks. Lauterbach's stair sits precariously between a quest for spiritual vitality and a sense of the overwhelming materiality of our world. Identifying with the clown, the nomad and the thief figures whose ghostly marginality haunt this book, Lauterbach brings us, with a dazzling range of formal and imagistic resources, to a new understanding of how language inscribes the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning. .
On a Summer Night
by Deborah HopkinsonStep into the quiet magic of this celebration of summer nighttime and the mystery of a world lit differently by the moon.On a summer night, the world is still. Even the crickets think it’s too hot to sing. But all at once, a girl wakes. In the kitchen, the cat rolls onto its soft paws. A neighbor’s small white dog yaps, a brown rabbit peeks from a hedge, and the leaves of a cherry tree begin to stir in the breeze. Readers witness and wonder: Who has woken them all? In this soothing bedtime story, the quiet of a warm summer night is brought to vivid, magical life with the soft steps of bare feet, the padding of paws, and the bright, golden light of the moon. One by one, each creature is roused and then gently returned to sleep in a lovely and lyrical exploration of wakefulness, restfulness, and the mysterious calm of the night.PERFECT FOR BEDTIME . . . OR ANYTIME: This beautifully illustrated children's book is ideal for soothing young readers to sleep—or encouraging a contemplative break in an energetic day. The story’s engagement with the wonders of nighttime will help children feel comforted by the dark and the prospect of going to sleep rather than afraid of them.READ-ALOUD READINESS: With its lyricism and short refrains, this gentle story is just right for sharing.CONNECTION TO NATURE: This magical book gradually reveals the moon as a character as it wakes girl, cat, dog, rabbit, tree, air, and cloud in turn—and connects them to one another through the welcoming quiet and wonder of a world gilded by moonlight.THE POWER OF SLOWING DOWN: Picture books are often wonderful excuses to slow down and share a moment of gentleness in kids' (and parents') busy lives; this book feels like a deep breath and offers a chance to wonder and reflect.Perfect for:Kids who can't sleep on hot summer nightsParents, grandparents, and caregivers seeking a sweet bedtime bookLibrarians and storytime leaders looking for a summer read-aloudGift givers who want to share a beautiful, lyrical book with someone specialReaders of such classic bedtime stories for kids as Goodnight Moon and The Going to Bed Book
On Beyond Zebra!
by Dr SeussChildren learn a list of make-believe words that prove the alphabet doesn't end at Z in a poem format.
On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking About Poetry (Poets On Poetry)
by Sandra GilbertThe highly esteemed literary critic and poet Sandra M. Gilbert is best known for her feminist literary collaborations with Susan Gubar, with whom she coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, as well as the three-volume No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. The essays assembled in On Burning Ground display Gilbert's astonishing range and explore poetics, personal identity, feminism, and modern and contemporary literature. Among the pieces gathered here are essays on D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glü ck, as well as reviews and previously unpublished articles. Sandra M. Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships and is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 and, most recently, Belongings. Praise for Sandra M.Gilbert "Sandra Gilbert's poems are beautifully situated at the intersection of craft and feeling. Belongings is a stellar collection by a virtuoso with heart." ---Billy Collins ". . . brilliantly combines literary and cultural criticism with the intimacy of memoir." ---Joyce Carol Oates "An enduring contribution to the literature of grief." ---New York Times Book Review Poets on Poetry collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe (Writers on Writers #14)
by Eva HoffmanA compelling personal introduction to the life and work of Nobel Prize–winning writer Czesław Miłosz from his fellow Polish exile and acclaimed writer Eva HoffmanCzesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he produced an important body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including classics such as The Captive Mind, a reflection on the hypnotic power of ideology, and Native Realm, a memoir. In this book, Eva Hoffman, like Miłosz a Polish-born writer who immigrated to the West, presents an eloquent personal portrait of the life and work of her illustrious fellow exile.Miłosz experienced the horrors of World War II in Warsaw—the very epicenter of the inferno—and witnessed the unfolding of the Holocaust from up close. After the war, he lived as a permanent exile—from Poland, communism, and mainstream American culture. Hoffman explores how exile, historical disasters, and Miłosz’s origins in Eastern Europe shaped his vision, and she occasionally compares her own postwar trajectory with Miłosz’s to show how the question of “the Other Europe” is still with us today. She also examines his later turn to the poetry of memory and loss, driven by the need to remember and honor his many friends and others killed in the Holocaust.Combining incisive personal and critical insights, On Czesław Miłosz captures the essence of the life and work of a great poet and writer.
On Earth and in Hell
by Peter Waugh Thomas BernhardThe first English translation of the earliest poetry of brilliant and disruptive Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, widely considered one of the most innovative and original authors of the twentieth century and often associated with fellow mavericks Beckett, Kafka and Dostoevsky. A master of language, whose body of work was described in a New York Times book review as "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," Bernhard's ON EARTH AND IN HELL offers a distilled perspective on the essence of his artistry and his theme of death as the only reality. A remarkable achievement by highly-respected translator Peter Waugh.
On Elizabeth Bishop (Writers on Writers)
by Colm TóibínA compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelistsIn this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín.For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop&’s famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop&’s attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents—and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín&’s life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín&’s travels to Bishop&’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today&’s most acclaimed novelists.
On Empson (Writers on Writers)
by Michael WoodFrom one of today's most distinguished critics, a beautifully written exploration of one of the twentieth century's most important literary criticsAre literary critics writers? As Michael Wood says, "Not all critics are writers—perhaps most of them are not—and some of them are better when they don't try to be." The British critic and poet William Empson (1906–84), one of the most important and influential critics of the twentieth century, was an exception—a critic who was not only a writer but also a great one. In this brief book, Wood, himself one of the most gifted writers among contemporary critics, explores Empson as a writer, a distinguished poet whose criticism is a brilliant literary performance—and proof that the act of reading can be an unforgettable adventure.Drawing out the singularity and strength of Empson's writing, including its unfailing wit, Wood traces the connections between Empson's poetry and criticism from his first and best-known critical works, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, to later books such as Milton's God and The Structure of Complex Words. Wood shows why this pioneer of close reading was both more and less than the inventor of New Criticism—more because he was the greatest English critic since Coleridge, and didn't belong to any school; and less because he had severe differences with many contemporary critics, especially those who dismissed the importance of an author's intentions.Beautifully written and rich with insight, On Empson is an elegant introduction to a unique writer for whom literature was a nonstop form of living.
On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems
by Helen H. VendlerThough Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme-the worth of the imagination-remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description-which must be repetitive-of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work. "
On Foot, in Flames
by Robert McdowellWorking in the narrative tradition of Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers, Robert McDowell is a leading figure in the expansive poetry movement. His narrative poems deliver the depth and complexity of a novel with a cinematic swiftness. They are accessible, graceful, spiritual without pretension, inhabited by characters tethered to the world.
On Haiku
by Hiroaki SatoEverything you want to know about haiku written by one of the foremost experts in the field and the “finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English” (Gary Snyder) Who doesn’t love haiku? It is not only America’s most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere—Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark’s made millions off them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form originate? Who were the original Japanese poets who wrote them? And how has their work been translated into English over the years? The haiku form comes down to us today as a cliché: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. And yet its story is actually much more colorful and multifaceted. And of course to write a good one can be as difficult as writing a Homeric epic—or it can materialize in an instant of epic inspiration. In On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato explores the many styles and genres of haiku on both sides of the Pacific, from the classical haiku of Basho, Issa, and Zen monks, to modern haiku about swimsuits and atomic bombs, to the haiku of famous American writers such as J. D. Salinger and Allen Ginsburg. As if conversing over beers in your favorite pub, Sato explains everything you wanted to know about the haiku in this endearing and pleasurable book, destined to be a classic in the field.
On High (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #43)
by Neil SurkanAll songs have skin, / all skin has holes. On High, Neil Surkan's debut collection of poetry, searches for spirits in myriad places. Wondering how, why, and when to act with a conscience, speakers try out steep hikes, strong drugs, and earnest meditations as they attempt to make meaning in a divided and distracting world. Careful and tense, On High balances on all kinds of tightrope-like lines: a trout fisher revels after riding a moose, a buzzed lover speculates about human connection, new condo owners toast from balcony to balcony, a young woman kicks a hornet's nest into her hometown library's erotica/poetry/religion section. Reaching for the sprigs of our shared humanity, Surkan's poems offer courage and compassion in violent times. As the speaker in "The Branch Breaker" muses, "sarcasm won't dissolve our enemies." On High is a book for the contemporary moment.
On Jupiter Place: New Poems
by Nicholas ChristopherBest known as a novelist, Nicholas Christopher began publishing poems in The New Yorker in his twenties, and has published eight collections, praised over the years by poets and critics as being among America's most important poets. Reviewing his selected poems, Crossing the Equator, published eight years ago, The Washington Post said, "To read his richly honed and sensuous work, which has so much tensile strength, is to visit other worlds and then to return to our own disturbed by time, but also refreshed and reawakened."On Jupiter Place is his first book since that collection, and it contains material that is perhaps his most personal, autobiographical and intimate work yet. Beautifully made and carefully constructed, one might be reminded of Keats thinking that his poems were "little machines" of feeling. And everywhere in this book are moments of disorientation, where the wonder of the poem transcends understanding and leads its readers back into themselves slightly startled and richer for the effort. As Merwin has written, "his poems are vibrant with light and the surprise of recognition. He shows us again and again the luminous nature of the familiar."The Washington Post, reviewing his Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, reported that "Nicholas Christopher is a fabulist...His fiction often puts me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, two time-travelers who are his great precursors. His poetry tends to build on the work of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Like them, he has a taste for the exotic, the faraway, the displaced, the imaginary.
On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility
by G. Douglas AtkinsThis accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats's poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to "the responsible poet. " Focusing on Keats's sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T. S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot's treatment of similar subjects; "The Eve of St. Agnes" by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem an addendum outlining a bold new reading; "Lamia" by focusing on its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot, poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats's successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas, accentuating the image of him as "the responsible poet. "
On Love
by Edward Hirsch"Life has to have the plenitude of art," Edward Hirsch affirms in his fifth volume of poems,On Love, which further establishes him as a major artist. From its opening epigraph by Thomas Hardy and an initiating prayer for transformation,On Lovetakes up the subjects of separateness and fusion, autonomy and blur. The initial progression of fifteen shapely and passionate lyrics (including a sonnet about the poet at seven, a villanelle about the loneliness of a pioneer woman on the prairie, and an elegy for Amy Clampitt) opens out into a sequence of meditations about love. These arresting love poems are spoken by a gallery of historical figures from Denis Diderot, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Zora Neale Hurston, and Colette. Each anatomizes a different aspect of eros in poems uttered by a chorus of historical authorities that is also a lone lover's yearning voice. Personal, literary,On Loveoffers the most formally adept and moving poetry by the author Harold Bloom hails as utterly fresh, canonical, and necessary.
On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho
by Matsuo BashoBasho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature. Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a life free from possessions, and his haiku are the work of an observant eye and a meditative mind, uncluttered by materialism and alive to the beauty of the world around him.
On Malice
by Ken BabstockThe fairground screamed. The mountains and valley were gone. The fire was gone too. The hanging 'because' was gone too. The men were away and my heart already dead and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth. A spectre haunts a derelict nsa surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. Our posthumous selves cry to us from the Cloud. We've internalized the panopticon, but it still feels good to buy. On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, undirected prayer and meta-chatter into a quartet of delirious song, a diorama of our new, totalized and ubiquitous armour. Channelling Spicer and Berryman, data-mining and inverting Hazlitt, Donne and Walter Benjamin's son, these extended ghost-essays are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and repurposed illusions. 'Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good. --Peter Gizzi 'The flavor of this poetry is complex--it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.' --Ange Mlinko
On Malice
by Ken Babstock"Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."--Peter Gizzi"The flavor of this poetry is complex--it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge."--Ange MlinkoWith poems on perfect blue and a sonnet sequence situated on a derelict NSA surveillance station on a Berlin hill, On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, prayer, and perverse chatter into poems that enact our paranoia. Channeling Walter Benjamin's son, William Hazlitt, John Donne, and Dick Cheney, they are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and illusions.You finish reading it. You cannotfinish reading it. Ice caughtin the can, later, the well. Whatshall I be worried about,the coward well and the ice doessuch a lot. They know nothingof cantilevered blown-out shellswho feed their worrylike veal barns. The dome's aerialmy lodestar and icon, the squirrelat dusk in the post-informational gloamingcan never not finish reading it as songKen Babstock is the author of Methodist Hatchet, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous titles, Mean, Days into Flatspin, and Airstream Land Yacht, hold nominations for the Governor General's Award and the Winterset Prize. Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
On Malice
by Ken Babstock"Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."--Peter Gizzi"The flavor of this poetry is complex--it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge."--Ange MlinkoWith poems on perfect blue and a sonnet sequence situated on a derelict NSA surveillance station on a Berlin hill, On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, prayer, and perverse chatter into poems that enact our paranoia. Channeling Walter Benjamin's son, William Hazlitt, John Donne, and Dick Cheney, they are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and illusions.You finish reading it. You cannotfinish reading it. Ice caughtin the can, later, the well. Whatshall I be worried about,the coward well and the ice doessuch a lot. They know nothingof cantilevered blown-out shellswho feed their worrylike veal barns. The dome's aerialmy lodestar and icon, the squirrelat dusk in the post-informational gloamingcan never not finish reading it as songKen Babstock is the author of Methodist Hatchet, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous titles, Mean, Days into Flatspin, and Airstream Land Yacht, hold nominations for the Governor General's Award and the Winterset Prize. Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
On Malice
by Ken Babstock"Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."--Peter Gizzi"The flavor of this poetry is complex--it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge."--Ange MlinkoWith poems on perfect blue and a sonnet sequence situated on a derelict NSA surveillance station on a Berlin hill, On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, prayer, and perverse chatter into poems that enact our paranoia. Channeling Walter Benjamin's son, William Hazlitt, John Donne, and Dick Cheney, they are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and illusions.You finish reading it. You cannotfinish reading it. Ice caughtin the can, later, the well. Whatshall I be worried about,the coward well and the ice doessuch a lot. They know nothingof cantilevered blown-out shellswho feed their worrylike veal barns. The dome's aerialmy lodestar and icon, the squirrelat dusk in the post-informational gloamingcan never not finish reading it as songKen Babstock is the author of Methodist Hatchet, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous titles, Mean, Days into Flatspin, and Airstream Land Yacht, hold nominations for the Governor General's Award and the Winterset Prize. Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
On Modern Poetry
by Guido MazzoniAn incisive, unified account of modern poetry in the Western tradition, arguing that the emergence of the lyric as a dominant verse style is emblematic of the age of the individual. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, poetry in the West was transformed. The now-common idea that poetry mostly corresponds with the lyric in the modern sense—a genre in which a first-person speaker talks self-referentially—was foreign to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetics. Yet in a relatively short time, age-old habits gave way. Poets acquired unprecedented freedom to write obscurely about private experiences, break rules of meter and syntax, use new vocabulary, and entangle first-person speakers with their own real-life identities. Poetry thus became the most subjective genre of modern literature. On Modern Poetry reconstructs this metamorphosis, combining theoretical reflections with literary history and close readings of poets from Giacomo Leopardi to Louise Glück. Guido Mazzoni shows that the evolution of modern poetry involved significant changes in the way poetry was perceived, encouraged the construction of first-person poetic personas, and dramatically altered verse style. He interprets these developments as symptoms of profound historical and cultural shifts in the modern period: the crisis of tradition, the rise of individualism, the privileging of self-expression and its paradoxes. Mazzoni also reflects on the place of poetry in mass culture today, when its role has been largely assumed by popular music. The result is a rich history of literary modernity and a bold new account of poetry’s transformations across centuries and national traditions.