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The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poetry At The Extremes Of Feeling
by Robert PinskyA bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.
The Mind-Body Problem: Poems
by Katha PollittPollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poetAntarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. Shore Road just rewrites Bishop's Filling Station (somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass. . . puts out the plastic lawn chairs). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop's prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop's careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: Old Sonnets, for example, recalls Pollitt's undergraduate poetic ambitions; Always Already considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles. No one is likely to call Pollitt's verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays
by Garrett HongoA volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which 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. The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai`i and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the mosaic of American identities—personal, cultural, and poetic—in the context of a postmodern diaspora. Hongo’s essays attest to the breadth of what he considers his cultural inheritance and literary antecedents, ranging from the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Charles Olson. He explains free-verse prosody by way of John Coltrane’s jazz; praises his contemporaries, poets David Mura, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Jarman; and acknowledges his mentors, Bert Meyers and Charles Wright. In other pieces he engages with controversies and contestations in contemporary Asian American literature, confronts the politics of race and the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, offers paeans to the Hawaiian landscape, and addresses immigrants newly arrived in America with a warm welcome. The Mirror Diary is the work of a poet fully engaged with contemporary politics and poetics and committed to the study and celebration of diverse traditions.
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
by Dick DavisAn anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis.A Penguin ClassicThe Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe'eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society's social extremes--many were princesses, some were entertainers, but many were wives and daughters who wrote simply for their own entertainment, and they were active in many different countries - Iran, India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. From Rabe'eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, the women poets found in The Mirror of My Heart write across the millennium on such universal topics as marriage, children, political climate, death, and emancipation, recreating life from hundreds of years ago that is strikingly similar to our own today and giving insight into their experiences as women throughout different points of Persian history. The volume is introduced and translated by Dick Davis, a scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right.
The Mirrormaker: Poems
by Brian LaidlawThe author of The Stuntman melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota&’s Iron Range. Songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw follows up The Stuntman with another collection that fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song &“Girl from the North Country.&” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction. In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—&”The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea&” —and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download. Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love. &“Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century&’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out . . . living proof that the bard is still with us.&” —Gillian Conoley
The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)
by Michael CollierA collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop, his father’s encounter with Charles Lindbergh, Lebanese beekeepers, a mother’s sewing machine, or a piano in the woods, he does so with the syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and a flawless ear that has made him one of America’s most distinguished poets. These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history. The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier’s long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of is passions and concerns.
The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)
by Michael CollierA collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop, his father’s encounter with Charles Lindbergh, Lebanese beekeepers, a mother’s sewing machine, or a piano in the woods, he does so with the syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and a flawless ear that has made him one of America’s most distinguished poets. These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history. The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier’s long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of is passions and concerns.
The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
by Bianca Stone"Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation's emerging pathology and sensibility." —John Ashbery A Paris Review Staff Pick and Most Anticipated Book of 2018 at NYLON, Bustle, Autostraddle, and more. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay—dearly, with both money and conscience—to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes. I’ll hold your hand in my own,” one ghost says. “I’ll tell you you were good to me.” Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poem “The Mobius Strip of Grief,” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.
The Model of Poesy
by William Scott Gavin AlexanderThe Model of Poesy is one of the most exciting literary discoveries of recent years. A manuscript treatise on poetics written by William Scott in 1599, at the end of the most revolutionary decade in English literary history, it includes rich discussions of the works of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. Scott's work presents a powerful and coherent theoretical account of all aspects of poetics, from the nature of representation to the rules of versification, with a commitment to relating theory to contemporary practice. For Scott, any theory of literature must make sense not of the classics but of what English writers are doing now: Scott is at the same time the most scholarly and the most relevant of English Renaissance critics. In this groundbreaking edition, Gavin Alexander presents a text of The Model of Poesy framed by a detailed introduction and an extensive commentary, which together demonstrate the range and value of Scott's thought.
The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
by Adam KirschA collection of bold, insightful, and controversial essays by "a poetry critic of the very first order" (New York Times). Over the last ten years, through essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, Adam Kirsch--"one of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times)--has established himself among the most controversial and fearless critics writing today. Sure to cause heated debate, this collection of essays surveys the world of contemporary poetry with boldness and insight, whether Kirsch is scrutinizing the reputation of popular poets such as Billy Collins and Sharon Olds or admiring the achievement of writers as different as Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Frederick Seidel. For readers who want an introduction to the complex world of contemporary American poetry, from major figures like Jorie Graham to the most promising poets of the younger generation, Kirsch offers close readings and bold judgments. For readers who already know that world, The Modern Element will offer a surprising and thought-provoking new perspective.
The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Tara Guissin-StubbsThe Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet.
The Monsters' Guide to Choosing a Pet
by Roger McGough Brian PattenRoger McGough and Brian Patten have selected the very best of their animal poems in order to help two loveable monsters from outer space who visit Earth in search of a pet and need a bit of guidance...Split into sections, the monsters are introduced to animals that fly, swim, crawl and purr by two of our greatest childrens poets. Illustrated in Guy Parker-Rees' lively and intimitable style.
The Moon Reflected Fire
by Doug AndersonOf The Moon Reflected Fire and its subject, the Vietnam War, poet James Tate writes: "These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects."
The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems
by Hala AlyanFrom the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?
The Moon's Time to Shine (Step into Reading)
by StorybotsJust in time for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing! The inquisitive crew from the award-winning StoryBots apps, videos, and Emmy Award-winning Netflix show star in a Step 1 reader that is over the moon!Children will recognize the signature catchy rhymes and colorful art from the StoryBots' popular YouTube video "The Moon's Time to Shine." They will learn that the moon orbits Earth, that--in spite of glowing brightly--it doesn't make its own light, and more! Step 1 readers feature big type and easy words for children who know the alphabet and are eager to begin reading. Rhyming text is paired with picture clues to help children decode the story.
The Moon: 365 reflections
by PyramidThroughout history, legend and myth, the Moon has symbolized immortality and eternity, enlightenment and adventure and has inspired poets, philosophers, astronomers and artists. Reflections upon the Moon from literature, philosophy, science and ancient wisdom are gathered together in this enchanting collection.
The Moonflower Monologues
by Tess GuineryFrom celebrated Australian artist Tess Guinery comes The Moonflower Monologues, her second book of beautifully designed poetry and prose. This collection is many things: an exploration of strength and femininity, an invitation to let things go wrong, a reminder that growth comes in many forms, and an acknowledgment that &“some things can&’t be written in sugar, only salt.&” Some of the writings are extravagant, some are sparse, but all are infused with Guinery&’s introspection, stillness, and kindness.
The More Extravagant Feast: Poems
by Leah Naomi Green* One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 *Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young LeeThe More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.
The More I Owe You
by Michael SledgeIn this mesmerizing debut novel, Michael Sledge creates an intimate portrait of the beloved poet Elizabeth Bishop -- of her life in Brazil and her relationship with her lover, the dazzling, aristocratic Lota de Macedo Soares. Sledge artfully draws from Bishop's lifelong correspondences and biography to imagine the poet's intensely private world, revealing the literary genius who lived in conflict with herself both as a writer and as a woman. A seemingly idyllic existence in Soares's glass house in the jungle gives way to the truth of Bishop's lifelong battle with alcoholism, as well as her eventual status as one of modernism's most prominent writers. Though connected to many of the most famous cultural and political figures of the era, Soares too is haunted by her own demons. As their secrets unfold, the sensuous landscape of Rio de Janeiro, the rhythms of the samba and the bossa nova, and the political turmoil of 1950s Brazil envelop Bishop in a world she never expected to inhabit. The More I Owe You is a vivid portrait of two brilliant women whose love for one another pushes them to accomplish enduring works of art.
The Morning Glory
by Robert Bly(from the back cover) This book collects the prose poems Robert Bly has been writing over the last seven or eight years. The prose poem, he believes, appears whenever a country's psyche and literature begin to move toward abstraction. An ancient tradition holds that those who long for what is beyond sight have to look more closely at what the eyes can see. In daydreams we lose the visible. So these poems pay their attention to the creatures or objects immediately around the poet, whether he is in Wyoming or on his own farm in Minnesota or near a dying seal on some Pacific rocks. The world is violated by greedy observation, but the aim of gentle observation is "to enter the forest without moving a blade of grass." There turns out to be, in moments at least, no break between the energy flowing inside a man or woman and the energy flowing through plants and creatures "out there." Bly lives near where he was born in western Minnesota. He works with a Minnesota writers' collective, edits the Seventies, and has recently published translations of contemporary Swedish poets and the fifteenth-century Hindi poet, Kabir.
The Mortal Storm
by Phyllis BottomeFreya Roth has everything a young woman could want. Her father is a kind and brilliant professor, her mother loving and beautiful, and there are three fine brothers. She is studying to be a doctor, and her suitro is rich and handsome. Then Hitler comes into power. Her older half-brothers turn against their stepfather, who is Jewish, and both are members of the Nazi Party. At the same time, Freya meets a young Communist peasant with whom she falls in love. Personal and political differences destroy the family's once uncloded happiness, and danger grows for Freya. This book, written in 1938, foreshadowed the horrors of years to come. It was also a feminist statement, made in an entertaining way. A film of this story with James Steward and Margaret Sullivan radically changed the plot although some of the seeds that must have attracted the producers are still there. However, the book is much less conventional and more forthright. "The Mortal Storm" is a poignant, exciting and thought-provoking book.
The Mother Self: Poems
by Talia GutinIn this debut collection of poetry, The Mother Self guides readers along the raw and transformative path of early motherhood.The Mother Self is a collection of poetry that poignantly unveils the journey of a new mother navigating the complexities of early motherhood. Accessible and engaging, each poem captures a mother's delicate dance as she embraces her new identity and grieves her past self, all while finding solace in the sacred bond with her son. Readers are invited to explore the beauty and challenges of this period of life with grace and authenticity and to linger in the quiet spaces of a mother&’s heart, where love and loss intertwine and a meaningful journey of growth unfolds. This collection weaves the universal themes of presence, nature, loss, and transformation. It guides readers on a path of healing and empowerment and offers a comforting hand through the transformative power of words. More than a collection of poems, it is a companion for new and seasoned mothers as they turn each page, nodding in recognition. Above all, this book is a poetic testimony to every incomparable and holy step of motherhood.
The Mountain Men (Volume 1 of A Cycle of the West)
by John G. NeihardtRegarded by many as Dr. Neihardt's masterwork, the cycle as a whole "celebrates the great mood of courage that was developed west of the Missouri River in the nineteenth-century."The first volume in this two-volume edition of A Cycle of the West includes The Song of Three Friends (1919), which received the National Prize of the Poetry Society of America, The Song of Jed Smith (1941).The first two songs, in the poet's words, "deal with the ascent of the river and characteristic adventures of Ashley-Henry men in the country of the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone. The Song of Jed Smith follows the first band of Americans through South Pass to the Great Salt Lake, the first band of Americans to reach Spanish California by an overland trail."
The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan
by David Hinton Meng Hao-JanThe first full flowering of Chinese poetry occurred in the illustrious T'ang Dynasty, and at the beginning of this renaissance stands Meng Hao-jan (689-740 c.e.), esteemed elder to a long line of China's greatest poets. Deeply influenced by Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, Meng was the first to make poetry from the Ch'an insight that deep understanding lies beyond words. The result was a strikingly distilled language that opened new inner depths, non-verbal insights, and outright enigma. This made Meng Hao-jan China's first master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify ancient Chinese poetry. And as a lifelong intimacy with mountains dominates Meng's work, such innovative poetics made him a preeminent figure in the wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition, and that tradition is the very heart of Chinese poetry.This is the first English translation devoted to the work of Meng Hao-jan. Meng's poetic descendents revered the wisdom he cultivated as a mountain recluse, and now we too can witness the sagacity they considered almost indistinguishable from that of rivers and mountains themselves.
The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse
by Red Pine"The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse [is] a tough-spirited book of enlightened free verse. "#151;Kyoto Journal The Zen master and mountain hermit Stonehouse#151;considered one of the greatest Chinese Buddhist poets#151;used poetry as his medium of instruction. Near the end of his life, monks asked him to record what he found of interest on his mountain; Stonehouse delivered to them hundreds of poems and an admonition: "Do not to try singing these poems. Only if you sit on them will they do you any good. " Newly revised, with the Chinese originals and Red Pine's abundant commentary and notes, The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse is an essential volume for Zen students, readers of Asian literature, and all who love the outdoors. After eating I dust off a boulder and sleep and after sleeping I go for a walk on a cloudy late summer day an oriole sings from a sapling briefly enjoying the season joyfully singing out its heart true happiness is right here why chase an empty name Stonehouse was born in 1272 in Changshu, China, and took his name from a cave at the edge of town. He became a highly respected dharma master in the Zen Buddhist tradition. Red Pine is one of the world's leading translators of Chinese poetry. "Every time I translate a book of poems," he writes, "I learn a new way of dancing. And the music has to be Chinese. " He lives near Seattle, Washington.