- Table View
- List View
Songs of Kabir
by Rabindranath Tagore KabirA weaver by trade and a mystic by nature, the 15-century poet Kabir created timeless works of enlightenment that combine the philosophies of Sufism, Hinduism, and the Kabbala. Expressed in imagery drawn from common life and the universal experience, Kabir's poems possess an appealing simplicity. This collection of 100 songs reflects nearly every aspect of the mystic's thought and emotions: ecstasy and despair, tranquil beatitude and fervid illumination, and moments of intimate love. The acclaimed translation is by Rabindranath Tagore, a popular Indian poet and Nobel laureate.
Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry
by Sayd MajrouhThe authors of oral literature in the Pashtun language create their work at a far remove from any books. Generally deprived of the support of schools and universities, their compositions are inseparable from song. Their poetry is never declaimed; rather, their rhyme and rhythm have melodic value.These popular improvisations do not exalt mystic love. In them there is no aspiration whatsoever to an unfathomable and incommunicable heaven, nor devotion to the lord, nor praise for an absolute master, nor any Adonis. To the contrary, they are songs of the earth. They celebrate nature, mountains, rivers, dawn and night&’s magnetic space. They are songs of war and honor, shame and love, beauty and death. The repression of Afghan women has caused untold suffering, particularly through moral subjugation. Infant daughters and their mothers are received with scorn and shame, and lead lives of subordination and humiliation. Their rebellion against these tribal codes comes only through suicide and song. Translated from the Pashtun into French by the eminent Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, the greatest Afghan poet of the twentieth century, his text has been rendered into English in the expert hands of Marjolijn de Jager of the Translation Department at NYU.
Songs of Love, Moon, & Wind: Poems from the Chinese
by Kenneth Rexroth Eliot Weinberger"Nothing stands still in this poetry: the wind blows the trees, the lake water ripples and the ever-present road runs in and out of the hills."--American Poetry Review Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies, Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows. I envy you, drunk with flowers, Butterflies swirling in your dreams. --Ch'ien Ch'i This exquisite gift book offers a wide sampling of Chinese verse, from the first century to our own time, beginning with the lyric poetry of Tu Fu, moving to the folk songs of the Six Dynasties Period, on to the Sung Dynasty, and to the present. Also represented are some of the best-known women of Chinese poetry, including Li Ching-chao and Chu Shu-chen. These simple, accessible but profound poems come through to us with a breathtaking immediacy in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions--a wonderful gift for any lover of poetry.
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
by AdonisA brilliant new translation of the landmark poetry collection by “the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity” (Edward Said) Written while Adonis was on a scholarship in Paris from 1960 to 1961, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world. Drawing not only on Western influences, such as T. S. Eliot and Nietzsche, but on his own culture’s deep poetry traditions, Adonis single-handedly accomplished a masterful and radical transformation of the rigid formal structures and themes of Arabic poetry. The name “Mihyar” has no inherent meaning in Arabic, though its root letters mean “to destroy, topple, demolish.” Mihyar is Adonis’s poetic alter ego, his Zarathustra figure (in his own words), who has come to smash through any monolithic vision of Arab culture—including certain orthodox Islamic views—in favor of a more diverse and open-ended outlook. Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites—through Mediterranean myths and renegade Arabic mystics—what it means to be an Arab in the modern world.
Songs of Milarepa (Dover Thrift Editions)
by MilarepaA Buddhist holy man whose songs have been sung and studied since the twelfth century, Milarepa exchanged a life of sin and maliciousness for one of contemplation and love, eventually reaching—according to his disciples—the ultimate state of enlightenment. His thousands of extemporaneously composed songs communicate complex ideas in a simple, lucid style. This volume features the religious leader's best and most highly esteemed songs of love and compassion. Sure to inspire and provide reading pleasure to a wide audience.Considered by many of his followers to be another St. Francis, Milarepa exchanged a life of sin and maliciousness for one of contemplation and love, eventually reaching a state of enlightenment. His thousands of extemporaneously composed songs have been widely sung and studied since they were first recorded and disseminated centuries ago by his disciples. This volume features the best and most highly esteemed of the religious leader's songs of love and compassion that include lessons on the negative aspects of ambition and the importance of finding inner peace. In addition, he stresses the briefness of life: ". . . so apply yourself to meditation. Avoid doing evil, and acquire merit, to the best of your ability, even at the cost of life itself. In short: Act so that you have no cause to be ashamed of yourselves and hold fast to this rule."
Songs of My Grandmother: On Finding Ourselves, Each Other and the Things That Make Us Come Alive
by Sara SuraniA collection of poetry and prose that offers comfort, community, and belonging through stories of love, loss, change, and rebirth.In this collection of poetry and prose, Sara Surani weaves together the universal songs of her ancestors, voices of women she has met across the world, and her own reflections. These are not songs with music, but melodies of memory and spirit–of love and laughter. Of curiosity and wonder. Of healing and hope. Of the little moments when time slows down.The daughter of Pakistani-Muslim immigrants who moved to South Texas to give their daughter a better life, Surani draws on her roots to create a tapestry of stories; comforting and deeply familiar. Throughout the book, she braids shared struggles with collective joy, reminding us of all that we hold in common while conjuring a deep sense of belonging–one that is needed now, more than ever.
Songs of Unreason
by Jim Harrison#1 Poetry Foundation BestsellerMichigan Notable Book"A beautifully mysterious inquiry... Here Harrison-forthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerning-a gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico García Lorca to how he touched a bear's head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual musings, Harrison celebrates movement as the pulse of life, and art, which 'scrubs the soul fresh.'" -Booklist"Harrison has written a nearly pitch-perfect book of poems, shining with the elemental force of Neruda's Odes or Matisse's paper cutouts....In Songs of Unreason,, his finest book of verse, Harrison has stripped his voice to the bare essentials--to what must be said, and only what must be said." -The Wichita Eagle"Songs of Unreason, Harrison's latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living.... His are hard won lines, but never bitter, just broken in and thankful for the chance to have seen it all." -The Industrial Worker Book Review"Unlike many contemporary poets, Harrison is philosophical, but his philosophy is nature-based and idiosyncratic: 'Much that you see/ isn't with your eyes./ Throughout the body are eyes.'... As in all good poetry, Harrison's lines linger to be ruminated upon a third or fourth time, with each new reading revealing more substance and raising more questions." -Library Journal"It wouldn't be a Harrison collection without the poet, novelist, and food critic's reverence for rivers, dogs, and women...his poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison's voice." -Publishers WeeklyJim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns-creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial love-emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.
Songs of a Returning Soul: Poems
by Elizabeth LibbeyThis slim volume of poems includes: Song Of The Secouddi Tribe, Psyche at the Graveside, A Riddle in Honor of the New Year, Juncture, Thinking into Birds...
Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha: Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha
by Andrew Schelling Anne WaldmanA lyrical translation of an inspired selection of verses from the earliest Buddhist monks and nuns.More than two thousand years ago, the earliest disciples of the Buddha put into verse their experiences on the spiritual journey--from their daily struggles to their spiritual realizations. Over time the verses were collected to form the Theragatha and Therigatha, the "Verses of Elder Monks" and "Verses of Elder Nuns" respectively. In Songs of the Sons and Daughters of the Buddha, renowned poets Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman have translated the most poignant poems in these collections, bringing forth the visceral, immediate qualities that are often lost in more scholarly renditions. These selections reveal the fears, loves, mishaps, expectations, and joys of the early monks and nuns, when, struck by wild insight, they cried out the anguish or solace they knew in their lives.
Sonnet's Shakespeare
by Sonnet L'AbbeBronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form.How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon.In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.
Sonnets
by William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare is thought to have written his sonnets for a private audience over several years before they were first published in 1609. The verses that compose the sonnets are often subversive, elusive and intimate, shaping an erotic body of poetry in the pursuit of the depths of emotion. Shakespeare's Sonnets express both the narrator's pure love for a 'fair youth , and his uncontrollable desire for a dark lady. There has been much debate concerning the identity of the individuals to whom the sonnets are addressed, and the mysterious dedication "To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W Hall happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth", which appears in the 1609 edition, offers no clear evidence. Shakespeare's sonnets are among the finest ever written in English.
Sonnets
by William ShakespeareWritten primarily in four-line stanzas and iambic pentameter, William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets address such themes as love, beauty, honesty, and the passage of time, and are now recognized as some of the most enduring poetry of all time.
Sonnets
by William Shakespeare‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom’Sonnets are for romantics, starry-eyed lovers and ardent hearts. And Shakespeare’s sonnets are the best ever written.But this is why they are also for cynics, for star-crossed lovers and for those who know the anguish of unrequited love. Some of them are written to a young man, some of them to a woman. And although the poems are full of mystery – why did Shakespeare write them, what was his sexuality? – each one speaks to us from across the centuries of love, hate and the intensity of being alive.Includes exclusive content: In the 'Backstory' you can find a short, handy, funny guide to everything you might want to know about Shakespeare and his sonnets.‘This is a crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, full-strength intensity; an adolescent love’ Don Paterson, Guardian
Sonnets from a Cell
by Bradley PetersWinner 2023 Alcuin AwardLonglisted 2024 Raymond Souster and Gerald Lampert AwardsPoems for and about the incarcerated. Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters' debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters' own days "caught between the past and nothing" and to the structures that sentence so many "to lose." Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace. Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.
Sonnets of Louise Labé
by Alta Lind Cook Louise LabéThe love sonnets of Louise Labé of Lyons and the gilded legend of her life in the early years of the French Renaissance have appealed to the imagination of four centuries.Printed here beside the text of the 1556 edition, the translations of the sonnets by Alta Lind Cook follow closely the original version and admirably retain its sweep and movement, its simplicity and melody. The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet has been preserved with variations and corresponding to those of the French. With the poems, the translator presents a sketch of the circumstances and background of this unique literary figure of the Sixteenth Century, known in France and outside of France as La Belle Cordière. These translations by Alta Lind Cook are fine poetry; in English as in French the reader finds "present reality in their hope and their despair, their independence and their impertinence, their tears and their sparkle."
Sonnets of Michelangelo: Michelangelo
by MichelangeloFirst published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke M. D. NortonOne of the literary masterpieces of the century, this translation is now presented with facing-page German. To Rilke himself the Sonnets to Orpheus were "perhaps the most mysterious in the way they came up and entrusted themselves to me, the most enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and achieved; the whole first part was written down in a single breathless act of obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February, without one word being doubtful or having to be changed." With facing-page German.
Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke Willis BarnstoneWritten during an astonishing outburst of creativity during a period of only two weeks in February 1922, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is one of the great poetic works of the twentieth century. Willis Barnstone brings these striking poems into English with an approach honed through years of work on the philosophy of translation, about which he has written extensively. This dual-language edition allows readers to compare versions face-to-face to get a clear sense of the nuances of the translation. Also included is an extensive introduction from the translator that offers a biographical sketch of Rilke and reflects upon the ever-present tension between the poet's passion for life, romance, and adventure, and his yearning for the solitude he desperately needed to dedicate himself fully to his art.
Sonnets to Orpheus (Wesleyan Poetry in Translation)
by Rainer Maria RilkeSonnets to Orpheus is Rainer Maria Rilke's first and only sonnet sequence. It is an undisputed masterpiece by one of the greatest modern poets, translated here by a master of translation, David Young.Rilke revived and transformed the traditional sonnet sequence in the Sonnets. Instead of centering on love for a particular person, as has many other sonneteers, he wrote an extended love poem to the world, celebrating such diverse things as mirrors, dogs, fruit, breathing, and childhood. Many of the sonnets are addressed to two recurrent figures: the god Orpheus (prototype of the poet) and a young dancer, whose death is treated elegiacally.These ecstatic and meditative lyric poems are a kind of manual on how to approach the world – how to understand and love it. David Young's is the first most sensitive of the translations of this work, superior to other translations in sound and sense. He captures Rilke's simple, concrete, and colloquial language, writing with a precision close to the original.
Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies: New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets To Orpheus And Others (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Rainer Maria RilkeDuring three feverish weeks in 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke composed the 55 sonnets that constitute Sonnets to Orpheus. Inspired by the death of a friend's daughter, the poet felt that he was being compelled to write by the girl's ghost. At about the same time he also completed Duino Elegies, which he had begun ten years earlier. Intimately connected to the Sonnets in themes and sensibilities, the Elegies offer meditations on love, death, God, and life's meaning that express Rilke's irresolvable conflict between a longing for solitude and a painful loneliness. Although his poetry was recognized and admired by leading European artists, the Austro-Bohemian poet was virtually unknown during his lifetime, achieving international acclaim only with these final masterpieces. This edition presents translations by Jessie Lemont, praised by London's Times Literary Supplement for their presentation of Rilke as "a writer of short individual lyrics, often of incomparable, impressionist vividness, plastic vitality and symbolic suggestiveness."
Sonnets to Orpheus: (bilingual Edition)
by Rainer Maria Rilke Daniel Joseph PolikoffCOMPOSED IN A BURST of inspiration near the end of the poet's life, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus represents the consummation of the writer's career, distilling the essence of his poetic wisdom in a gem-like sequence. This new translation--with the original German on facing pages--offers a clear window into the world of this endlessly scintillating cycle of poems. "Daniel Polikoff's English version of Rilke's last sonnet sequence, perhaps his greatest work, is wholly admirable. Rilke's late work is extremely difficult to penetrate. Both its conceptual nature and Rilke's unique use of the German language tend to resist interpretation. Astonishingly, Polikoff has found ways of rendering Rilke's complexities into English and also preserving his metrical and rhyme schemes. Such an accomplishment is possible only with a deep understanding of Rilke's vision and a knowledge of the root structure of German. Daniel Polikoff gives us Rilke in word and spirit in these splendid Sonnets."--LISEL MUELLER, National Book Award for Poetry (1981) for The Need to Hold Still; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1997) for Alive Together: New & Selected Poems "Daniel Polikoff is the first to achieve the unimaginable: an English translation which brings the form and content of these Sonnets together into an organic confluence. These new translations lift our understanding of Rilke's spiritual and aesthetic inspiration up to a whole different level, one accessible for the first time to the English reader. As a professor of German literature who has taught these sonnets for over thirty years, I can only thank Daniel Polikoff for this phenomenal accomplishment. His version should serve as the new standard for Rilke translations and belongs on the bookshelves of every poetry lover."--LUDWIG MAX FISCHER, author of Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance of Herman Hesse "This is a uniquely faithful, skillful, and eloquent translation of one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I salute Daniel Polikoff and recommend his wonderful work to all seekers and lovers of poetry."--ANDREW HARVEY, author of Teachings of Rumi
Sonnets to Orpheus: (bilingual Edition)
by Rainer Maria RilkeBreathing, you invisible poem!World-space in pure continuous interchangewith my own being. Equiposein which I rhythmically transpire.Written only four years before Rilke's death, this sequence of sonnets, varied in form yet consistently structured, stands as the poet's final masterwork. In these meditations on the constant flux of our world and the ephemerality of experience, Rilke envisions death not only as one among many of life's transformations but also as an ideally receptive state of being. Because Orpheus has visited the realm of death and returned to the living, his lyre, a unifying presence in these poems, is an emblem of fluidity and musical transcendence. And Eurydice, condemned to Hades as a result of Orpheus's backward glance, becomes in Rilke's universe a mythical figure of consolation and hope.Edward Snow, in his translations of New Poems, The Book of Images, Uncollected Poems, and Duino Elegies, has emerged as Rilke's most able English-language interpreter. Adhering faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English, Snow's Sonnets to Orpheus should serve as the authoritative translation for years to come.