Poems from the Hillside is a compilation of poems from the side of beautiful Agbonna Hills in Okemesi, Ekiti State of Nigeria. The poems are an expression of various moods of the author as well as a reflection on the world around us.
From the New York Times best-selling author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion, and belonging through a modern lens Fans of Colm Tóibín’s novels, including The Magician, The Master, and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a wide range of subjects—politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-traveled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Tóibín’s unique lens. Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion, and humor, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder, and cherish.
Open Secrets is Richard Lischer's story of his early career as a Lutheran minister. Fresh out of divinity school and full of enthusiasm, Lischer found himself assigned to a small conservative church in an economically depressed town in southern Illinois. This was far from what this overly enthusiastic and optimistic young man expected. The town was bleak, poor, and clearly not a step on his path to a brilliant career. It's an awkward marriage at best, a young man with a Ph.D. in theology, full of ideas and ambitions, determined to improve his parish and bring them into the twenty-first century, and a community that is "as tightly sealed as a jar of home-canned pickles." In their own way, they welcome him and his family, even though they think he's "got bigger fish to fry." Thus begins Richard Lischer's first year as a pastor: bringing communion to the sick (but forgetting to bring the wafers); marrying two unlikely couples--a pregnant teenager and her boyfriend, and two people who can't stop fighting. Often he doesn't understand his congregation, and sometimes they don't understand him; for instance, why does his wife hire a baby-sitter and instead of leaving, put on her bathing suit, grab a stack of novels, and hide from the kids? Or why can't Pastor Lischer see how important it is for a woman with little money to buy an elaborate coffin to bury her husband in? There are also the moments of grace, when pastor and parishioner unite for a common goal: when he asks for prayers for his infant son, and can feel everyone in the congregation ministering to him; when old hurts are put aside to help a desperate young woman finish college and raise her baby; or when he helps save a woman from dying of a drug overdose. In Open Secrets Lischer tells not only his own story but also the story of New Cana and all of its inhabitants--lovable, deeply flawed, imperfect people that stick together. With his sharp eye and keen wit, Lischer perfectly captures the comedy of small town life with all of its feuds, rumors, scandals, and friendships. In the end he learns to appreciate not only the life New Cana has to offer, but also the people who have accepted him, at last, as part of themselves.
Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After World War II, Arendt became one of the most prominent—and controversial—public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems, and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.
The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman’s electrifying and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. “Stunning.” —CNN “Dynamic.” —NPR “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.
The devotional poems of Annamaya (15th century) are perhaps the most accessible and universal achievement of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India. Annamaya effectively created and popularized a new genre, the short padam song, which spread throughout the Telugu and Tamil regions and would become an important vehicle for the composition of Carnatic music - the classical music of South India. In this book, Rao and Shulman offer translations of 150 of Annamaya's poems. All of them are addressed to the god associated with the famous temple city of Tirupati-Annamaya's home-a deity who is sometimes referred to as "god on the hill" or "lord of the seven hills." The poems are couched in a simple and accessible language invented by Annamaya for this purpose. Rao and Shulman's elegant and lyrical modern translations of these beautiful and moving verses are wonderfully readable as poetry in their own right, and will be of great interest to scholars of South Indian history and culture.
Angela Voras-Hills’s Louder Birds, her debut collection of poetry, is a beautiful study of the natural world, motherhood, and the inherent desire for meaning. This collection of complex lyric poems holds a haunting absence at its center, an absence that is “impossible to navigate.” Yet Voras-Hills presses on, untangling the distinctions that surround her (human and animal, domestic and wild) with both bravery and respect. She writes, “The boundaries between home and the road / are insecure: it’s impossible to navigate this landscape. / We’ve all been in the presence of something dark / and have chosen not to seek shelter.” As the poet hones in on naming the void, her surroundings grow more threatening—but not once does she surrender or turn back. Voras-Hills’s poems are smart enough to know the distinctions themselves are tenuous at best, and wise enough to know that we must always pay our dues to the world beyond our door. Wondrous, ruminative, and revelatory, Louder Birds is a collection that is not to be missed.
At his death in 2016, Geoffrey Hill left behind The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, his last work, a sequence of more than 270 poems, to be published posthumously as his final statement. Written in long lines of variable length, with much off-rhyme and internal rhyme, the verse-form of the book stands at the opposite end from the ones developed in the late Daybooks of Broken Hierarchies (2013), where he explored highly taut constructions such as Sapphic meter, figure-poems, fixed rhyming strophes, and others. The looser metrical plan of the new book admits an enormous range of tones of voices. Thematically, the work is a summa of a lifetime's meditation on the nature of poetry. A riot of similes about the poetic art makes a passionate claim for the enduring strangeness of poetry in the midst of its evident helplessness. The relation between art and spirituality is another connecting thread. In antiquity, Justin's gnostic Book of Baruch was identified as the 'worst of heresies, ' and the use of it in Hill's poem, as well as the references to alchemy, heterodox theological speculation, and the formal logics of mathematics, music, and philosophy are made coolly, as art and as emblems for our inadequate and perplexed grasp of time, fate, and eternity. A final set of themes is autobiographical, including Hill's childhood, the bombing of London, his late trip to Germany, his alarm and anger at Brexit, and his sense of decline and of death close at hand. It is a great work, and in Hill's oeuvre it is a uniquely welcoming work, open to all comers.