THE BLUE MORNING RIVER poetry collection includes poems of love, nature, social identity, loss and spirituality creating poetic vignettes through the geography of personal experience and personal philosophy. Poems happen at the hang bar waiting for decompression, shoaling rapids to see the melting of the iced Phoenix, hearing the Overture at the Piano, or hanging out in the Kitchen Cafe. Poems dance a traditional waltz, a Cajun two-step and a Native American Feather Dance. Even a "Heartbeat" that has been a moan achieves "Precious Flight.""
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters. In his poetry, Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, and in the process created a new and arresting language for madness. Here Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, illuminating not only the relationships between mania, depression, and creativity but also how Lowell’s illness and treatment influenced his work (and often became its subject). A bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
The Oxford poetry anthologies ('Oxford Books') are traditionally considered an establishment in attitude. They have been edited by well-known poets and distinguished academics. In the perspective of canon-formation, they have been retrospective and well-researched. Table of Contents: The Oxford Book of Latin Verse: Nvma Pompilivs The Arval Brotherhood Anonymous CN. Naevivs T. Maccivs Plavtvs Marcivs Vates Q. Ennivs M. Pacvvivs L. Accivs Pompilivs Valerivs Aeditvvs Q. Lvtativs Catvlvs Porcivs Licinvs Laevivs M. Fvrivs Bibacvlvs Oracvlvm M. Tvllivs Cicero C. Helvivs Cinna M. Tvllivs Lavrea Q. Tvllivs Cicero C. Ivlivs Caesar C. Licinivs Macer Calvvs T. Lvcretivs Carvs C. Valerivs Catvllvs L. Varivs C. Cilnivs Maecenas P. Vergilivs Maro Q. Horativs Flaccvs Albivs Tibvllvs Domitivs Marsvs Sextvs Propertivs Lygdamvs Svlpicia Panegyristae Messallae Cornelivs Severvs M. Manilivs Albinovanvs Pedo P. Ovidivs Naso... The Oxford Book of English Verse: Robert Mannyng of Brunne John Barbour Geoffrey Chaucer Thomas Hoccleve John Lydgate King James I of Scotland Robert Henryson William Dunbar Anonymous John Skelton Stephen Hawes Sir Thomas Wyatt Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Nicholas Grimald Alexander Scott Robert Wever Richard Edwardes George Gascoigne... The Oxford Book of Ballads: Thomas the Rhymer Tam Lin Sir Cawline Sir Aldingar Cospatrick Willy's Lady The Queen of Elfland's Nourice Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight The Riddling Knight May Colvin The Wee Wee Man Alison Gross Kemp Owyne The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea King Orfeo King Henry The Boy and the Mantle King Arthur and King Cornwall The Marriage of Sir Gawain... Modern Oxford Poetry: Oxford Poetry 1917 Oxford Poetry 1919 Oxford Poetry 1920 Oxford Poetry 1921 Oxford Lectures on Poetry: Poetry for Poetry's Sake The Sublime Hegel's Theory of Tragedy Wordsworth Shelley's View of Poetry The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth The Letters of Keats The Rejection of Falstaff Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra' Shakespeare the Man Shakespeare's Theatre and Audience
"Comfortably intimate—classically adroit in its formal wit and invention—altogether unique yet in no way excluding, this meticulously edited edition of a master poet’s collected works gives us the defining bridge from the 'New American Poetry' of the ’50s to that poetry now contemporary on both coasts and in all conditions. No one ever recognized the people with whom he lived more particularly than did Ted Berrigan, and no one ever brought them home to a reader with such unaggressive and persistent power. This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley "Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself. It is wonderful to have his Collected Poems in print."—John Ashbery "A comprehensive and carefully chronicled volume that puts Ted Berrigan in historical context as one of the most influential poets of his generation. His poems: deft, light, definitely humorous, irreverent, poignant, ‘marvelous and tough.’ The truth doing its work, ‘the great man doing the ordinary thing,’ with a quick ear and a quick tongue, revealing the personal in the universal. He gives you his full attention—‘about to be born again thinking of you.’ "—Joanne Kyger "In a life devoted to experimental art, Ted Berrigan shaped his poetry and the space he occupied with a bold artistry based on his playful but powerfully skeptical view of the world. He wondered what might actually be captured within the pages of a book, but The Collected Poems allows us to again enjoy Ted Berrigan’s delightfully demanding presence."—Lorenzo Thomas "A singular balance of personal-historical vision and sentiment both sweet and sour, developed within the fractured verbalism of the late twentieth century found lyric, creates in Ted Berrigan's poems the unique colors of a particularly lived (and still intensely living) ensemble of moments."—Tom Clark, author of Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan "Some people are just more real than others. I don't know another way to say it. Ted Berrigan is totally real and he has fashioned an important sound for all of us to listen to. He put it all together just before everyone else in his time, our time, got going. America is lucky to count him as one of its great poets."—Peter Gizzi
Winner, Montana Book Award-Honor Book, 2019 The River Where You Forgot My Name travels between early 1800s Virginia and Missouri and present-day western Montana, a place where “bats sail the river of dark.” In their crosscutting, the poems in this collection reflect on American progress; technology, exploration, and environment; and the ever-changing landscape at the intersection of wilderness and civilization. Three of the book’s five sections follow poet Corrie Williamson’s experiences while living for five years in western Montana. The remaining sections are persona poems written in the voice of Julia Hancock Clark, wife of William Clark, who she married soon after he returned from his western expedition with Meriwether Lewis. Julia lived with Clark in the then-frontier town of St. Louis until her early death in 1820. She offers a foil for the poet’s first-person Montana narrative and enriches the historical perspective of the poetry, providing a female voice to counterbalance the often male-centered discovery and frontier narrative. The collection shines with all-too human moments of levity, tragedy, and beauty such as when Clark names a river Judith after his future wife, not knowing that everyone calls her Julia, or when the poet on a hike to Goldbug Hot Springs imagines a mercury-poisoned Lewis waking “with the dawn between his teeth.” Williamson turns a curious and critical eye on the motives and impact of expansionism, unpacking some of the darker ramifications of American hunger for land and resources. These poems combine breathtaking natural beauty with backbreaking human labor, all in the search for something that approaches grace.
These eleven short stories cover a wide range of territory - from Toronto to Cuba to Eastern Europe. And, wide-ranging over geography as they are, they also cover an array of characters and situations that can only be situated in the twenty-first century.
