Facing Mecca / Poems
Facing Mecca / Poems

Author: Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0578146371

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As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in the solitude of our nights, knowing the plumb line goes straight through to the next world, and its rising to the holy heights.

In the Mecca
In the Mecca

Author: Gwendolyn Brooks

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Published: 1968

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.

New Poems from the Third Coast
New Poems from the Third Coast

Author: Michael Delp

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780814327975

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An anthology that offers a sampling of the best poetry written by Michigan writers.

The Blind Beekeeper
The Blind Beekeeper

Author: Daniel Moore

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

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This collection provides an introduction to the work of an American Arabist and Sufi poet. Ranging from the personal and lyrical to full narratives and the ever-present mystical elements, the poems explore the inter-cultural, traditional and postmodern world.

Brave to be Involved
Brave to be Involved

Author: Yomna Mohamed Saber

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9783034305044

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Although Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2004) was the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, she occupies a curious position in the larger black canon. Despite her importance, with the exception of very few critical accounts of her work, she has been usually treated in critical isolation from her black peers, be they male or female. Brooks's earlier stages were discarded by many black critics as works directed to white audiences, whereas black critics who became interested in her nationalist phase limited her to the Black Aesthetic perspective. Such approaches to Brooks's opus fail to do justice to her work which stood on equal footing with other groundbreaking works in terms of her pioneering themes and techniques. This book examines all of Brooks's stages while tracing the changes that marked her voice throughout. By comparing and contrasting her work to Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, it becomes possible to highlight the distinct poetic legacy of Brooks. The aim of this book is to assess the extent to which Brooks participated in the black canon and to examine how far her realistic settings and individualised characters resulted in a poetry capable of providing accurate reflections of black life in America throughout five very vibrant decades.

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems

Author: Forough Farrokhzad

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0811232387

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A ravishing new translation of Iran’s trailblazing, feminist poet in an indispensable collection In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.” This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad’s poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

Author: Pádraig Ó. Tuama

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 132403548X

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“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

Arabic Poetry
Arabic Poetry

Author: Muhsin J. al-Musawi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1135989257

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Since the late 1940s, Arabic poetry has spoken for an Arab conscience, as much as it has debated positions and ideologies, nationally and worldwide. This book tackles issues of modernity and tradition in Arabic poetry as manifested in poetic texts and criticism by poets as participants in transformation and change. It studies the poetic in its complexity, relating to issues of selfhood, individuality, community, religion, ideology, nation, class and gender. Al-Musawi also explores in context issues that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shi’i poetics, Sufism, women’s poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness. Arabic Poetry employs current literary theory and provides comprehensive coverage of modern and post-modern poetry from the 1950s onwards, making it essential reading for those with interests in Arabic culture and literature and Middle East studies.

The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry
The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry

Author: Jane Gentry

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0813174090

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This definitive anthology assembles a wide-ranging retrospective of Gentry’s most celebrated poems alongside new, previously unpublished works. Jane Gentry (1941–2014) possessed an uncanny ability to spin quietly expansive and wise verses from small details, objects, and remembered moments. The hallmarks of her work are insight into nature, faith, the quotidian, and?perhaps most prominently?the grounding of her home and family in the state of Kentucky. This innovative poet and critic was for many years one of the animating spirits of literary life in the region. Gentry and her daughters collaborated with editor Julia Johnson to organize this definitive collection. Johnson uses Gentry’s own methodology to arrange the poems in sequences comparable to those found in her previous collections. This organization showcases the range of the poet’s work and the flexibility of her style, which is sometimes ironic and humorous; sometimes poignant; but always clear, intelligent, and revelatory. This volume includes two full-length collections of poetry in their entirety?A Garden in Kentucky and Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. The final section features Gentry’s unpublished work, bringing together her early poems, verses written for loved ones, and a large group of more recent work that may have been intended for future collections. Alternately startling and heart-wrenching, The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry offers a valuable retrospective of the celebrated poet’s work.

City Poems and American Urban Crisis
City Poems and American Urban Crisis

Author: Nate Mickelson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1350055808

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From William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg to Miguel Algarín and Wanda Coleman, this groundbreaking book explores the ways in which contemporary poets have engaged with America's changing urban experience since 1945. City Poems and American Urban Crisis brings post-war American poetry into conversation with developments in city planning, activism, and urban theory to demonstrate that taking city poetry seriously as a mode of analysis and critique can enhance our attempts to produce more just and equitable urban futures. Poets covered include: Miguel Algarín, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman, Allen Ginsberg, Lewis MacAdams, Charles Olson, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams.