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Collected Later Poems
by Anthony HechtAnthony Hecht, now in his eightieth year, has earned a place alongside such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs,andThe Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to hisCollected Earlier Poems(continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream;from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater. He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks, Comes to a minute point, Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes, Large Palmer cursives and smoothentrelacs, Preoccupied, intent On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script Incised with twin steel blades and qualified Perfectly to express, With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed, A glancing happiness. From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Longer Poems
by Kenneth RexrothThis is a companion volume to the Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth which was published in 1967. This is a companion volume to the Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth which was published in 1967. All of the long poems written over the past forty years are included: The Homestead Called Damascus (1920-25), A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy (1925-27), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-44), The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-50) and The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967-68). As we read the long poems together and in sequence we can see that Rexroth is a philosophical poet of consequence who offers us a comprehensive system of values based on the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility. He is concerned, above all, with process: the movement from the Dual to the Other. "I have tried," Rexroth writes," to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of creative process. I hope I have made it clear that the self does not do this by an act of will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it."
Collected Novels and Plays
by James MerrillFollowing the widely celebrated Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of James Merrill's works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form.Merrill's first novel, The Seraglio, is a daring roman à clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America's most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American's adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill's plays, including the one-act comedy of manners The Bait and the Chekhovian The Immortal Husband--a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth--are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill's short play The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic, The Changing Light at Sandover.From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Poems
by Alan SillitoeA sweeping collection of poetry from one of Great Britain&’s most celebrated postwar writers. Bestselling British novelist Alan Sillitoe delves into the profound and personal world of poetry in this collection of two hundred poems written between 1950 and 1990. Culled from seven previously published volumes of verse—and including twenty-one newly collected works—Sillitoe employs wit, humor, aggression, and longing to take readers into the depths of his perceptions and philosophical musings. The compilation begins with Sillitoe&’s early poems, which first appeared in The Rats and Other Poems (1960) while the writer was at work on his acclaimed novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In &“Shadow&” a castaway meets a gentleman whom he recognizes as his own death. Meanwhile, a temperate climate renders death powerless in &“Poem Written in Majorca.&” And in &“Excerpts from &‘The Rats&’,&” themes of mental exile, isolation, and the proliferation of corruption echo the sentiments of Arthur Seaton, the hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Proceeding chronologically, the next section includes works from A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems (1964). Here, the reader encounters a haunting confrontation with suicide in &“Poem Left by a Dead Man,&” a meditation on the elemental yet incomparable suffering of a poet in &“Storm,&” and a description of metaphysical chores in &“Housewife.&” Selections from Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems (1968) and Storm and Other Poems (1974) follow, including such works as &“Baby&” and &“Smile,&” which ponder questions of inevitability and impossibility in everyday life. Unexpected perspectives on the Devil appear in the poems from Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (1979). Sun Before Departure (1974–1982) features the surreal and atmospheric &“Horse on Wenlock Edge.&” And the selections from Tides and Stone Walls (1986), including the koanlike &“Receding Tide,&” were inspired by a series of sea landscapes by photographer Victor Bowley. In the final section, New Poems (1986–1990), Sillitoe contemplates hope in the aftermath of war in &“Hiroshima,&” and deciphers an uncanny Morse code message in &“Noah&’s Arc.&” At once dark and luminous, Collected Poems offers both a departure from and insight into the &“kitchen sink realism&” Sillitoe is famous for. These pages impart an intimate look into the heart and mind of one of England&’s most celebrated authors, and convey a profound vision of life—one in which death is close, but laughter is never far away.
Collected Poems
by Allan AhlbergAllan Ahlberg's five poetry books, written over a period of twenty-five years – Please Mrs Butler, Heard it in the Playground, Friendly Matches, The Mighty Slide and The Mysteries of Zigomar – have delighted generations of children and received many accolades and prizes. Allan has sifted through them and chosen a collection to delight and entrance a new generation of readers and their parents. Here are all the trials and tribulations of childhood, embracing school, quarrels, friendships, football and storytelling from a much-loved author and poet.Charlotte Voake's black-and-white illustrations enchance the charm of this handsome and definitive collection.
Collected Poems
by Arnold Rampersad Frederick Glaysher Reginald Dwayne Betts Robert HaydenAn exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century. Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden's work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice--characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern--is a seminal one in American life and literature.
Collected Poems
by Chinua AchebeA collection of poetry spanning the full range of the African-born author's acclaimed career has been updated to include seven never-before-published works, as well as much of his early poetry that explores such themes as the African consciousness, the tragedy of Biafra, and the mysteries of human relationships.
Collected Poems
by E. L. Mayo David RayIn a collection of poems, E.L. Mayo explores metaphysical themes and the wonders of nature.
Collected Poems
by Donald JusticeThis celebratory volume gives us the entire career of Donald Justice between two covers, including a rich handful of poems written sinceNew and Selected Poemswas published in 1995. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens. ” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns. ” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration. School Letting Out (Fourth or Fifth Grade) The afternoons of going home from school Past the young fruit trees and the winter flowers. The schoolyard cries fading behind you then, And small boys running to catch up, as though It were an honor somehow to be near— All is forgiven now, even the dogs, Who, straining at their tethers, used to bark, Not from anger but some secret joy. From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Poems
by Douglas Lochhead Isabella Valancy Crawford James ReaneyThis volume established Isabella Valancy Crawford as one of Canada's principal poets. Coupled with an introductory collage of viewpoints and reactions to her work by James Reaney its provides a vivid glimpse into the literary past of this country.Although her poetry reflects the patterns of her time, Isabella Valancy Crawford was able to accept the raw and vigorous Canadian landscape on its own terms. She was the first of our poets for whom it became the setting for struggle, passion, love, and death. She celebrated the young land with an imagery enriched by allusions to North American Indian lore reflected in such lines as these:From his far wigwam sprang the strong North Wind And rushed with war-cry down the steep ravine, And wrestled with the giants of the woods; And with his ice-club beat the swelling crests Of the deep water courses into death.'These verses bear the stamp of genius and show a true poetic instinct,' said a critic in The Canadian Magazine in 1895. The poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford forms a vital part of the body of Canadian writing.
Collected Poems
by Edna St. Vincent MillayEdna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes plays, essays, short stories, songs, and the libretto to an opera that premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera House to rave reviews. Millay infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing new hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women's sexuality in her poems and prose. In the 1920s and '30s, Millay was considered a spokesperson for personal freedom in America, particularly for women, and we turn to her lines to illuminate the social history of the period and the Bohemian lifestyle she and her friends enjoyed. Yet Millay's poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world. Collected Poems features Millay's incisive and impassioned lyric poetry and sonnets, many of which are considered among the finest in the language, as well as the poet's last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay.
Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt“Careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found.” —Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review A monumental celebration of “one of the most significant poets writing today” (David Baker, Los Angeles Review of Books). In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review). From “Apple Tree” O my soul, it is not a small thing, to have made from three, this one, this one life.
Collected Poems
by Galway KinnellThe essential collection by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner who was &“one of the true master poets of his generation&” (The New York Times). In the words of Galway Kinnell, it is &“the poet&’s job to figure out what&’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.&” With this deeply probing and restlessly curious sensibility, Kinnell spend decades producing some of American poetry&’s most beloved and revered works. This comprehensive volume includes Kinnell&’s expansive poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, &“The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,&”; his incantatory book-length poem, The Book of Nightmares; and a searing evocation of Hiroshima in &“The Fundamental Project of Technology.&” It covers the iconic themes of Kinnell&’s middle years—eros, family, and the natural world—in works such as &“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,&” &“The Bear,&” &“Saint Francis and the Sow,&” and &“Blackberry Eating.&” And includes the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of Galway Kinnell: &“a poet of the rarest ability…who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart&” (Boston Globe).
Collected Poems
by Jack GilbertGathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work. There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience. Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert's work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
Collected Poems
by John BetjemanCome, friendly bombs, and fall on SloughTo get it ready for the plough.The cabbages are coming now;The earth exhales.--from "Slough"When the beloved English poet John Betjeman's Collected Poems first appeared in 1958, it made publishing history, and has now sold more than two million copies to a steadily expanding readership. Betjeman is almost unique among poets in that his work appeals equally strongly to those who love poetry and to those who rarely read it. This volume, the first American edition of the Collected Poems, incorporates all the poems that Betjeman published after the original Collected Poems and includes a new foreword by Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion.
Collected Poems
by John FullerJohn Fuller is one of the most accomplished, prolific and popular of contemporary poets. His Collected Poems brings together most of his poems, from his first collection, Fairground Music (1961) to Stones and Fires (winner of the 1996 Forward Poetry Prize), and enables us to appreciate the full extent of his remarkable talents. From his strikingly assured early poems - dramatic monologues and playful rewritings of myth and fairytale - to his more complex, discursive later work, Fuller displays his virtuosity with a wide variety of subjects, moods and forms. Here are fantasies, poems about nature, riddles and nonsense poems; tender love poems and philosophical meditations; sombre, wistful sonnets and the lightest, most charming songs. But there are consistent themes: romantic love, a potent sense of the physical world, and a constant shifting between exuberant irreverence and the yearning for moral and metaphysical truths. Throughout, the poems are steeped in humour and learning, and display Fuller's easy command of the of the whole scope and richness of the English language.
Collected Poems
by Marie PonsotMarie Ponsot's Collected Poems is the stunning lifework of the prizewinning poet, gathered in one volume: the world she has made of life's fire for sixty years. The present celebratory volume covers nearly all of her published work, from True Minds (1956), which was number five in the famous City Lights Pocket Poets series, through the 2009 Easy, her most recent collection; it also includes some new work, written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot's gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the "hand-span skill" that is the poem. In examining the powerful life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound. "Go to a wedding / as to a funeral," she advises us. "Bury the loss." (And adds: "Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.") Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot's sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we've never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience "language as the primitive dialect of our human race," as she has described it--to gradually enter a state that is "what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention."From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Poems
by Marie PonsotMarie Ponsot’s Collected Poems is the stunning lifework of the prizewinning poet, gathered in one volume: the world she has made of life’s fire for sixty years. The present celebratory volume covers nearly all of her published work, from True Minds (1956), which was number five in the famous City Lights Pocket Poets series, through the 2009 Easy, her most recent collection; it also includes some new work, written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot’s gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the “hand-span skill” that is the poem. In examining the powerful life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound. “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral,” she advises us. “Bury the loss.” (And adds: “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.”) Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot’s sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we’ve never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience “language as the primitive dialect of our human race,” as she has described it—to gradually enter a state that is “what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention.”From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Poems
by Mark StrandLonglisted for the 2014 National Book Award Gathered here is a half century's magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: "And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns." In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.From the Hardcover edition.
Collected Poems
by Peter RedgrovePeter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me. You've no idea how much - right from the first time we met.'In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse - from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet's art. In Redgrove's poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.
Collected Poems
by Sonia SanchezA representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career.Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez&’s poetry, this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work, including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969), through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse, from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation, social equality, and women&’s rights is evident throughout, as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: &“Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature&’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.&”
Collected Poems
by Tony HarrisonTony Harrison published his first pamphlet of poems in 1964 and for over fifty years has been a prominent force in modern poetry. His poetic range is truly far-reaching, from the intimate tenderness of family life and personal love, to war poems written from Bosnia and savage public outcries against politicians. In The Collected Poems, Harrison draws deeply both on classical tradition and on the vernacular of the street. Combining the private and the public in a way Harrison has made distinctly his own, and drawing on his working-class upbringing in Leeds, these are powerful poems for modern times.This is the first complete paperback collection of one of Britain's most controversial and critically acclaimed poets.'Tony Harrison is the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century. . . He writes brilliantly about class, love and Britain' Daniel Radcliffe'Harrison is a masterly technician, and the most fiery and indelible English poet of the age. This book is a vineyard on a volcano' Paul Farley
Collected Poems
by Vikram SethWidely celebrated as the author of the worldwide bestselling novels A SUITABLE BOY and AN EQUAL MUSIC, Vikram Seth is also a highly acclaimed poet with a substantial body of work. Here, for the first time in one volume, readers can appreciate the beauty and scope of his poetic vision.
Collected Poems
by William Blake W. B YeatsWilliam Blake is a poet without parallel, who remains a source of wisdom and inspiration to countless individuals throughout the world. This selection was commissioned in 1905 by the firm of George Routledge from W.B. Yeats, who had previously been one of the pioneer editors of Blake's prophetic books. Yeats, one of the few poets whose work could be compared with that of Blake, prepared a unique selection of his poetic and prose writings. There is no better way to encounter the work of one poetic genius than as it is presented by another, and Yeats understood Blake in a way few others did.
Collected Poems
by William Alexander PercyNothing would have given Will Percy greater delight--he died in January 1942--than this Collected Poems, for although he was lawyer, soldier, cosmopolitan, plantation-owner, and patriot, it was as a poet that he chose to think himself. And indeed this is a volume to be treasured by those whose memories go fondly back to days of quieter, more contemplative living. For Percy was not in any sense a modernist; his love of tradition is as evident in these poems as it was in his prose. Here again is the same gentle quality of nostalgia which has made Lanterns on the Levee one of the most charming and authentic pictures of the old South at its best.Percy's first book of poems, Sappho in Levkas, was issued in 1905 and was followed by three others: In April Once (1920), Enzio's Kingdom (1924), and Selected Poems (1930). In all of his poetry, Percy's phrasing is lyric and dramatic; his verse forms subtly musical and finely regular--truly the work of a man who dreamed of the past and feared--all too prophetically--a dark and ominous future.