Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Publishers Weekly called Jim Harrison "an untrammeled renegade genius," a poet who performed "absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."
An ant to the stars or stars to the ant—which is more irrelevant? Weekend Jet Skiers— rude to call them idiots, yes, but facts are facts. Clamor of seabirds as the sun falls—I look up and ten years have passed." —from "Dawn Notebook" Such is the expansive terrain of Seven Notebooks: the world as it is seen, known, imagined, and dreamed; our lives as they are felt, thought, desired, and lived. Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incantatory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.
How to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book and provides some basic operating principles for applying the seven steps. In each subsequent chapter, the step is introduced and explained, relevant points of interpretative theory and methodology are discussed and illustrated with multiple examples, and the step is put into practice in a final section. Through these final sections, step by step, the book develops an extended reading of a single poem, Letitia Landon’s "Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter" from 1822. That reading is sustained across the whole arc of the book, providing a detailed worked example of how to read a poem. This accessible and enjoyable guide is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching the detailed study of poetry for the first time and offers valuable theoretical insights for those more experienced in the area.
Greg Whincup offers a varied and unique approach to Chinese translation in The Heart of Chinese Poetry. Special features of this edition include direct word-for-word translations showing the range of meaning in each Chinese character, the Chinese pronunciations, as well as biographical and historical commentary following each poem.
In The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems, veteran poet David R. Slavitt touches on topics from the mundane to the mysterious with his signature wit and intelligence. In OC Stupid, OCO for instance, he transforms a simple head cold into an appreciation for the richness of consciousness, and in OC Waking, OCO the very effort of rising from bed becomes something like a miracle: OC I heave myself up to a sitting position, pause / a moment, and am amazed by what I have done. . . .OCO Slavitt explores the range of the human condition with such ease and insight that readers cannot help but ponder what life isOCoand what it could be. What ifOColike the mythic sea creature in OC The DogfishOCOOCohumans could return to the womb when frightened? In the collectionOCOs title poem, Slavitt gives a voice to the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which claims, persuasively, to possess a value to humans that is seldom noticed or appreciated. Slavitt has a unique ability to examine an ideaOCobe it virtue or vice, dark or blitheOCoand offer perspective and wisdom about the conundrums of our existence."
Although editions of Nemesianus have been surprisingly numerous, very few have contributed appreciably to our understanding of this author, and most texts have been based on a very limited number of manuscripts. There has been no commentary of any length since that of Burman (1731) and there has never before been one in English covering the whole corpus. This book is an attempt to remedy those deficiencies. The text is the first to have been based on an examination of all the known manuscripts, and a detailed and accurate apparatus criticus is provided. The textual history of both poems is thoroughly discussed. The question of the authenticity of the Eclogues is examined and Nemesianus' authorship is held to be proved. The commentary is mainly concerned with textual and grammatical matters. There is also a bibliography.
"Harrison's poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life."—The Texas Observer The title Dead Man's Float is inspired by a technique used by swimmers to conserve energy when exhausted, to rest up for the long swim to shore. In his fourteenth volume of poetry, Jim Harrison presents keen awareness of physical pains, delights in the natural world, and reflects on humanity's tentative place in a universe filled with ninety billion galaxies. By turns mournful and celebratory, these fearless and exuberant poems accomplish what Harrison's poems always do: wake us up to the possibilities of being fully alive. "Forthright and unaffected, even brash, Harrison always scoops us straight into the world whether writing fiction or nonfiction. This new collection [Dead Man's Float] takes its cue from a technique swimmers use to conserve energy in deep water, and Harrison goes in deep, acknowledging our frailness even as he seamlessly connects with a world that moves from water to air to the sky beyond."—Library Journal “Harrison pours himself into everything he writes… in poems, you do meet Harrison head-on. As he navigates his seventies, he continues to marvel with succinct awe and earthy lyricism over the wonders of birds, dogs, and stars as he pays haunting homage to his dead and contends with age’s assaults. The sagely mischievous poet of the North Woods and the Arizona desert laughs at himself as he tries to relax by imagining that he’s doing the dead man’s float only to sink into troubling memories…Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit, from the wailing precincts of a hospital to a “green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek” to the moon-bright sea.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist "Harrison doesn't write like anyone else, relying entirely on the toughness of his vision and intensity of feeling."—Publishers Weekly Warbler This year we have two gorgeous yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush. The other day I stuck my head in the bush. The nestlings weigh one twentieth of an ounce, about the size of a honeybee. We stared at each other, startled by our existence. In a month or so, when they reach the size of bumblebees they'll fly to Costa Rica without a map. Jim Harrison, one of America's most versatile and celebrated writers, is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—including Legends of the Fall, the acclaimed trilogy of novellas. With a fondness for open space and anonymous thickets, he divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.
