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The Late Parade: Poems
by Adam FitzgeraldA debut collection that welcomes a new modernist aesthetic for the twenty-first century. Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power. "The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet's love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone--part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide. Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."
The Late Poems of Meng Chiao (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation #149)
by Meng ChiaoLate in life, Meng Chiao (A.D. 751--814) developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This is truly major work-- work that may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition. And though written more than a thousand years ago, it is remarkably fresh and contemporary. But, in spite of Meng's significance, this is the first volume of his poetry to appear in English. Until the age of forty, Meng Chiao lived as a poet-recluse associated with Ch'an (Zen) poet-monks in south China. He then embarked on a rather unsuccessful career as a government official. Throughout this time, his poetry was decidedly mediocre, conventional verse inevitably undone by his penchant for the strange and surprising. After his retirement, Meng developed the innovative poetry translated in this book. His late work is singular not only for its bleak introspection and "avant-garde" methods, but also for its dimensions: in a tradition typified by the short lyric poem, this work is made up entirely of large poetic sequences.
The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih
by David Hinton Wang An-ShihA selection of poems by the ancient Chinese poet and statesman Wang Ah-Shih, translated by David Hinton. Wang An-shih (1021-1086 C.E.) was a remarkable figure--not only one of the great Sung Dynasty poets, but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. Although Wang had little interest in the grandeur of high office and political power, he took the responsibility of serving the people seriously. He rose to become prime minister, and in this position he instituted a controversial system of radically egalitarian social reforms to improve the lives of China's peasants. Once those reforms were securely in place, Wang retired to a reclusive life of artistic and spiritual self-cultivation. It was after his retirement, practicing Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, that Wang An-shih wrote the poems that made his reputation. Short and plainspoken, these late poems contain profound multitudes-the passing of time, rivers and mountains, silence and Buddhist emptiness. They won him wide acclaim in China and beyond across the centuries. And in Hinton's breathtaking translations, Wang feels like a major contemporary poet with deep ecological insight and a questioning spirit.
The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets
by Tim FulfordThe long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake Poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets' rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake Poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work as well as the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art, the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake Poets' later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism.
The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens
by Edward ClarkeSurveying the later work of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets.
The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Denise D. KnightThis book features 167 of Charlotte Gilman's favorite poems, including some of her finest satirical verse, philosophical poems, nature poems, light verse, and occasional poems. The edition is complete with a critical introduction recounting the history of the volume, explanatory notes, and primary and secondary bibliographies.
The Latest Illusion
by Donald Everett AxinnA poet and novelist, Donald Everett Axinn is also a major real estate developer in the New York area who personally experienced the dizzying heights and gaping depths of business in the 1980s and survived to tell the tale.
The Latin Deli
by Judith Ortiz CoferA community transplanted from what they now view as an island paradise, these Puerto Rican families yearn for the colors and tastes of their former home. As they carve out lives as Americans, their days are filled with drama, success, and sometimes tragedy.
The Latin Poetry of English Poets (Routledge Revivals)
by J. W. BinnsThomas Campion, Milton, Crashaw, Herbert, Bourne, Walter Savage Landor – all these poets, between them spanning the period from the Elizabethan to the Victorian age, wrote a substantial body of Latin verse in addition to their better-known English poetry, representing part of the vast and almost unexplored body of Neo-Latin literature which appealed to an international reading public throughout Europe. The Latin poetry of these English poets is of particular interest when it is set against the background of their writings in their own tongue: this collection examines the extent to which our judgment of a poet is altered by an awareness of his Latin works. In some we find prefigured themes which were later treated in their English verse; others wrote Latin poetry throughout their lives and give evidence in their Latin poetry of interests which do not find expression in their English compositions. This volume is a valuable resource for students of both Latin and English literature.
The Laugh We Make When We Fall (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry)
by Susan FirerIn Susan Firer&’s The Laugh We Make When We Fall, peonies; snow drops, &“with all their survivor ecstasies&”; &“windy caravans of lilacs&”; and &“Dali Lama-robed &“ daylilies act as magnets to attract history—personal and historical—myths, language, facts, love, gratitude, prayers, beauty, and &”all the colors of death and sex.&” Family oddities appear in this collection, as well as Catholic rituals, saints, and ghost poets. Always ghost poets: Whitman, Neruda, Thoreau, and Saint Francis. In these poems, &“toads/ pull their finished skins off/ delicately as evening gloves,&” and in &“Birds&” you can look into an injured bird&’s neck and see &“everywhere it had ever flown…&” see &“insects, & seeds, & amphibians,/ & even a piece or two of snake.&” Using list poems, exploded elemental odes, lyrics, and American sonnets, Firer writes her own survivor ecstasies: &“I was buried under/deaths: mother&’s, father&’s, sisters&’ deaths wrapped me/ like surgical wrap. And who and where would I be/ when all their gauzy deaths were removed?&” In poem after poem in this collection, Firer begins to explore and to answer that question. This collection is "a wild generosity of spirit," creating an effect that is "sacramental."
The Laughter of Mothers
by Paul Durcan'Thank you, O golden mother, / For giving me a life,' says Paul Durcan in this brilliant new collection, a poignant tribute to 'the first woman I ever knew'. Sheila MacBride came from a political family – her uncle John MacBride was executed in 1916 for his part in the Easter Uprising – but when Sheila married into the 'black, red-roaring, fighting Durcans of Mayo' she was obliged to give up a promising legal career. These poems commemorate his mother as Paul Durcan remembers her playing golf, reading Tolstoy, and initiating him in the magic of the cinema. He recalls her compassion and loyalty when he was committed to a mental hospital in adolescence and how she endured the ordeal of her old age.Durcan also muses upon the beauty of Greek women and questions our need for newspapers and the new religion of golf. He is beguiled by a beggar woman, enraged by a young man picking his nose on the Dublin–Sligo commuter train, and gets into difficulty at the security gate of Dublin airport.
The Laughter of the Sphinx
by Michael PalmerA powerful, indelible new collection by Michael Palmer--"one of America's most important poets" (The Harvard Review) Michael Palmer's new book--a collection in two parts, "The Laughter of the Sphinx" and "Still (a cantata--or nada--for Sister Satan)"--contains 52 poems. The title poem begins "The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed" and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx--between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance--glow in Palmer's lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: "Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire."
The Laundress Catches Her Breath
by Paola CorsoThis powerful collection of poetry features a chain-smoking, working-class Italian American woman struggling to support herself and find meaningful work in a depressed mill town. She endures the indignity of a low-paid job that she can't afford to leave. The poems follow her tumultuous relationship with her father, a retired mill worker, her love for her educated uncle dying of cancer, and her escape from this soiled life through her ritual of doing laundry.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805): Poetry
by Walter ScottSir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. Scott's novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.
The Lays of Beleriand (The History of Middle-earth Volume #3)
by J. R. R. Tolkien Christopher Tolkien[from the book jacket] This is the third volume of the History of Middle-earth, which comprises heretofore unpublished manuscripts that were written over a period of many years before Tolkien's Silmarillion was published. Volumes 1 and 2 were The Book of Lost Tales, Part One and The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Together, these volumes encompass an extraordinarily extensive body of material ornamenting and buttressing what must be the most fully realized world ever to spring from a single author's imagination. "I write alliterative verse with pleasure," wrote J. R. R. Tolkien in 1955, "though I have published little beyond the fragments in The Lord of the Rings, except The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth." The first of the poems in The Lays of Beleriand is the previously unpublished Lay of the Children of Hurin, his early but most sustained work in the ancient English meter, intended to narrate on a grand scale the tragedy of Turin Turambar. It was left incomplete but includes a powerful account of the killing by Turin of his friend Beleg, as well as a unique description of the great redoubt of Nargothrond. The Lay of the Children of Hurin was supplanted by the Lay of Leithian, "Release from Bondage," in which another major legend of the Elder Days received poetic form, in this case in rhyme. The chief source of the short prose tale of Beren and Luthien is The Silmarillion. This, too, was not completed, but the whole Quest of the Silmaril is told, and the poem breaks off only after the encounter with Morgoth in his subterranean fortress. Many years later, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, J. R. R. Tolkien returned to the Lay of Leithian and started on a new version, which is also given in this book. Accompanying the poems are commentaries on the evolution of the history of the Elder Days, which was much developed during the years of the composition of the two Lays. Also included is the notable criticism in detail of the Lay of Leithian by C. S. Lewis, Tolkien's friend and colleague, who read the poem in 1929. By assuming that this poem is actually a fragment from a past lost in history, Lewis underlined the remarkable power of its author's imaginative talents and academic competence. Before the Contents is a list of the accented words in the text with a key enabling braille readers to identify the specific accents.
The Lays of Marie de France
by David R. SlavittThe twelve “lays” of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France’s series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choices that women make, startling in the late twelfth century and challenging even today. Combining a woman’s wisdom with an impressive technical bravura, the lays are a minor treasure of European culture.
The Lease
by Mathew HendersonDistilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men.
The Least Important Man
by Alex BoydThe least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather's letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he's still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other.The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, it's a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life.Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
The Leather Apron Club: Benjamin Franklin, His Son Billy & America's First Circulating Library
by Jane YolenA powerful celebration of libraries from master storyteller Jane Yolen. Benjamin Franklin introduces his son Billy to the Leather Apron Club, where it's love at first page.When Billy's father Benjamin Franklin announces that Billy and his lazy cousin James will soon have a tutor, Billy is initially dismayed. But his tutor awakens him to the power of story and books, and when Billy accompanies his father to the Leather Apron Club (which Franklin started in 1727), he decides to do more with his education and life. Best-selling author Jane Yolen introduces readers to the Leather Apron Club. Not only was the Club the first successful lending library in the United States--it also exists to this day as the Library Company of Philadelphia! Careful readers will notice that the story cleverly incorporates famous sayings from Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, underscoring the lasting impact of words.
The Ledge
by Michael CollierMichael Collier's much acclaimed fourth collection of poetry poises experience on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown. In THE LEDGE, the poems are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. The world is rendered beautifully mysterious as the poems slide into unexpected emotional territory. The artistry and directness of THE LEDGE confirm Collier's place among the most significant poets of his generation.
The Legend of Death: Two Poetic Sequences
by John MilbankThe eight poetic diagonals are culture, the preternatural, religion, synesthesia, onomatopoeia, the imagination, spatio-temporal synthesis, and justice.
The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (Gender and Genre #12)
by Sarah ParkerThroughout history the poetic muse has tended to be (a passive) female and the poet male. This dynamic caused problems for late Victorian and twentieth-century women poets; how could the muse be reclaimed and moved on from the passive role of old? Parker looks at fin-de-siècle and modernist lyric poets to investigate how they overcame these challenges and identifies three key strategies: the reconfiguring of the muse as a contemporary instead of a historical/mythological figure; the muse as a male figure; and an interchangeable poet/muse relationship, granting agency to both.
The Lesbian Sex Haiku Book (with Cats!)
by Anna PulleyLesbian sex has been confounding people since the dawn of time. What is it that two women do together exactly? The Lesbian Sex Haiku Book (with Cats!) is a humorous guide to lesbian sex, dating rituals, and relationships, and aims to dispel all myths. Haiku paired with hilarious watercolor illustrations of cats in various stages of sexual awkwardness will enlighten, demystify, remystify, and most importantly entertain as you learn about all the aspects involved in girl-on-girl action. From lesbian pick-up lines: Pronounce Annie Proulx's name correctly—watch lady's cargo pants fall off. To icebreaker haiku for first dates: It has been MANY years, but I'm not done griping about The L Word. To, of course, the mechanics of lesbian sex: It's like straight sex but afterwards we ask ourselves, "We just had sex, right?" Lesbian sex is like water polo—no one really knows the rules. This laugh-out-loud book is the perfect gift to amuse and educate your friends, loved ones, and lovers.
The Lesser Fields
by Rob Schlegel"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation-our world, the world of human mortality-feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The Lesser Fields is a guide-book to the world we've always known but never truly seen." --James Longenbach, final judge "In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers-fish, sea, trees, birds-are made disquietingly strange: 'Before my mind / Can shape it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers.' The natural world of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the heat is unmistakable."--Elizabeth Robinson
The Lesser Fields (Colorado Prize for Poetry)
by Rob SchlegelWinner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University