A NCTE Notable Poetry Book Twenty-two poems capture the amazing power of writing and will inspire even the most reluctant writer to begin putting words to paper. Write! Write! Write! is a poetry collection that explores every stage and every aspect of the writing process, from learning the alphabet to the thrilling moment of writing a thought for the first time, from writer's block to finding inspiration, and from revision to stapling your finished work into a book. These poems also celebrate how writing teaches patience, helps express opinions, and allows us to imagine the impossible. This book, brimming with imagination and wonder, will leave readers eager to grab a pen, pencil, or keyboard--and write!
Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart." This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.
Poet, teacher, essayist, anthologist, songwriter and singer, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the country's most acclaimed writers. Her voice is generous; her vision true; her subjects ordinary people, and ordinary situations which, when rendered through her language, become remarkable. In this, her fourth full collection of poetry, we see with new eyes-a grandmother's scarf, an alarm clock, a man carrying his son on his shoulders. Valentine for Ernest Mann You can’t order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter and say, "I’ll take two" and expect it to handed back to you on a shiny plate. Still, I like you spirit. Anyone who says, "Here’s my address, write me a poem," deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them. Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn’t understand why she was crying. "I thought they had such beautiful eyes." And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them as valentines and they became beautiful. At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet. Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite. And let me know.
International award-winning and best-selling author, Canadian cultural icon, feminist role model, "man-hater," wife, mother, private citizen and household name -- who is Margaret Atwood? Rosemary Sullivan, award-winning literary biographer, has penned The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, the first portrait of Canada's most famous novelist, focusing on her childhood and formative years as a writer and the generation she grew up in. When Margaret Atwood was a little girl in 1949, she saw a movie called The Red Shoes. It is the story of a beautiful young woman who becomes a famous ballerina, but commits suicide when she cannot satisfy one man, who wants her to devote her entire life to her art, and another who loves her, but subjugates her to become his muse and inspiration. She struggles to choose art, but the choice eventually destroys her. Margaret Atwood remembers being devastated by this movie but unlike many young girls of her time, she escaped its underlying message. Always sustained by a strong sense of self, Atwood would achieve a meteoric literary career. Yet a nurturing sense of self-confidence is just one fascinating side of our most famous literary figure, as examined in Rosemary Sullivan's latest biography. The Red Shoes is not a simple biography but a portrait of a complex, intriguing woman and her generation. The seventies in Canada was the decade of fierce nationalist debate, a period during which Canada's social imagination was creating a new tradition. Suddenly everyone, from Robertson Davies to Margaret Laurence was talking, and writing, about a Canadian cultural identity. Margaret Atwood was no exception. For despite her tremendous success that transcends the literary community, catapulting into the realm of a "household name," Margaret Atwood has remained very much a private person with a public persona. Rosemary Sullivan reveals the discrepancy between Atwood's cool, acerbic, public image and the down-to-earth, straight-dealing and generous woman who actually writes the books. Throughout, she weaves the issues of female creativity, authority and autonomy set against the backdrop of a generation of women coming of age during one of the most radically shifting times in contemporary history.
From pulitzer prize winner Jorie Graham, an indispensable volume of poems selected from almost four decades of work Much awaited and long needed, From the New World—a sequence of poems from Jorie Graham’s prior eleven books—creates a startlingly fresh trajectory through books whose brilliance and far-reaching innovations have been a significant influence on the landscape of contemporary poetry, both in the United States and abroad. Part spiritual autobiography, part survival manual, From the New World tracks what it is to attempt wakefulness in this our unprecedented historical, social, and ecological crisis. Life as we have known it, both in our persons and on the globe, rises in all its terror and deep mystery from these pages. How are we to be responsible, the book asks; how attend to drastic disappearance and still love? We finally have, in one volume, the stunning story Graham has written to keep both art and the human spirit instantaneously yet enduringly alive. “From the New World is an indispensable addition to any literary library, a tour de force selection of Jorie Graham’s critically important poems to date.”—New York Journal of Books “Graham’s great body of work, summarized in From the New World, her new career-spanning selected poems...has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing....Graham is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: She changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.”—New York Times “Graham’s poems make use of all the old lyric technologies, as ancient as the breath and the beating of the heart—rhythm, the managed intervals of line and stanza, the play of language against silence, and the transformations enacted by metaphor—enlisting them to measure a world of spawning complexity and change. But because she finds herself gauged by the world she gauges, a poetry that would seem almost too fine-grained for politics has become, in the past twenty years or so, a sui-generis account of global ills like species extinction and climate change.”— The New Yorker “Like the greatest filmmakers, Graham is miraculously gifted at tracing those inexplicable moments that carry a thing—a crow, the sun, a snowflake—from stillness to motion, from wholeness to disintegration and back again....I know of no living poet whose work so aligns with their reason for writing; I know of no living poet with a better reason for writing poetry. In Jorie Graham’s vision of a new world, poetry—thought in motion—is faster and more powerful than money, argument, or destruction. Take me there.”—Flavorwire “Graham’s is the best poetry written in English in the last forty years. The achievement of her verse is not only to make something happen: Graham’s poetry is something happening....We will always need to read Jorie Graham, and to read her closely, if we want to understand the last forty years of poetry in America (as well as abroad, where her reputation is only growing)....From the New World is now the place to start.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
In Bad Red Shoes, her first collection of poetry, Betty delves into intimate recollections. Drive with her as she delivers her father's ashes to their final destination, feel the chills as she recalls the fateful words of a murdered friend. Whether she's proclaiming a new holiday - "Mother-less-day", chastising an ex-lover, or dancing with her first grandchild in her arms, Betty's poems tell stories that will touch you at the very core of your heart. She sings of her childhood and love for West Virginia, recalling her trek through Catholic schools to painting her very own rainbow stones on a wall in her back yard. There is humor and satire, as evidenced by the poem Bad Red Shoes, and it is up to you, the reader, to determine just where the truth ends and fiction begins. Happy reading!
