Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death—and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful and scornful songs that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably bracing body of work. As Amis writes: “Beauty, they tell me, is a dangerous thing, / Whose touch will burn, but I’m asbestos, see?”
"Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme, and language."--BOOK JACKET.
A collection of poetic works by the eminent playwright features substantial piece variants, poems from his plays, and accompanying explanatory notes, in a volume that is complemented by a CD recording of the author's reading of his "Blue Mountain Ballads" and other works.
Culled from four decades of writing, a volume of multicultural poetry offers insight into the MacArthur fellow's spiritual and political beliefs as well as his journeys throughout America, Japan, Africa, and other regions, in an anthology that includes pieces on such topics as war, prejudice, and George W. Bush.
This volume contains all of Owen's best known work, only four of which were published in his lifetime. His war poems were based on his acute observations of the soldiers with whom he served on the Western front, and reflect the horror and waste of World War One.
Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."
A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing task if we mean to represent her work as a poet in a way that gives us a complete picture. New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create. William Carlos Williams, remarking on the impeccable precision of Moore’s poems, praised “the aesthetic pleasure engendered when pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” It is only in New Collected Poems that we can understand her later achievements, see how she refashioned her earlier work, and get a more complete understanding of her consummate craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to detail. Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.
The creative world of the writer is uncovered in this captivating exploration of the techniques of poetry revision. An in-depth look at the writing processes of 54 poems, each by a different modern author, is provided, complete with early drafts, subsequent revised versions, and short essays from the poets themselves revealing how and why they made specific changes, as well as their editing secrets. Poetry lovers will enjoy browsing through their favorite works and authors, and budding writers will learn the skills needed to grow a first draft into a polished final piece.
