Books by Mark Strand
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century
by Mark Strand
The last century's 100 most enduring poems, selected and introduced by former Poet Laureate Mark Strand. Accounting for the great range of style and content with which poets such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges responded to the changes and challenges of the twentieth century, 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century is intended as both a unique compendium for the already well-versed and as an engaging introduction for those new to the expansive world of poetry. Alan Ginsberg's struggle―"What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman....In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!"―is echoed by other remarkable poets in this international collection of exciting and moving poems that are alike not in their length or for their status as seminal texts but because they are impossible to forget.
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MR & MRS BABY DELX ED (Art of the Story)
by Mark Strand
Back in print in this deluxe edition, the former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s only collection of short fiction, now part of the Ecco Art of the Story series.
“Imagine a writer who combines Woody Allen’s sense of exaggeration—his ability to extrapolate situations to their funniest extremes—with the perspective and self-consciously elegant language of John Updike. That’s right, you’d have a creature who is never very likely to walk the face of the earth. But Strand, the prize-winning Canadian-born poet and professor of English at the University of Utah, comes close to that model. The stories in this first collection, originally printed in Vogue, The New Yorker, and Michigan Quarterly Review, vary widely. Yet several of them share a spirit of stubborn determination in the pursuit of idiosyncratic meanings of happiness. In one story a U.S. President noted mainly for reading Chekhov to his Cabinet and creating the ‘National Museum of Weather,’ resigns. . . . Another tale is about a man who says he has been married five times and in love six, with none of the 11 experiences overlapping. Then there’s Stanley R., the killer poet who murders his parents so he can write a poem about the experience. . . . . Few writers, though, can manage to make one of man’s favorite pastimes’ futile longing seem to be so hilarious, touching and ultimately admirable as Strand does, in very succinct ways” (People magazine).
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
More than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Selected Poems, we at last have a magnificent new gathering of Mark Strand’s work, one that spans and celebrates his entire remarkable career to date. From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes The Continuous Life (1990), and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (1998) and his most recent collection, Man and Camel (2006), this book makes a crucial selection of Strand’s always beautiful and by turns humorous and melancholy poems.
Over the decades Strand’s identity as a poet has remained firm: he is existential, playful, mysterious, a poet of simple words and sentences that somehow add up to powerful universal experiences. With his incantatory language and radiant, commanding imagery, he creates mythic scenes and vistas that, however otherworldly, are ultimately of this earth: their underlying subject the pain and pleasure of being mortal.
Here is an essential compilation from one of the most beloved and honored American poets at work today, without which no modern poetry collection is complete.
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
A fresh selection of the finest poems―some previously uncollected―by one of our finest English-language poets
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence.
―from "The Instrument"
New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry―from the 1960s through Taller When Prone (2004) and including previously uncollected work.
One of the finest poets writing today, Murray reinvents himself with each new collection. Whether writing about the indignities of childhood or the depths of depression, or evoking the rhythms of the natural world; whether writing in a sharply rendered Australian vernacular or a perfectly pitched King's English, his versatility and vitality are a constant. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential works: an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those who are new to it.
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
In this condensed edition of Selected Poems, Robert Lowell’s poems are brought together from all of his books of verse. Chosen and introduced by Katie Peterson on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a perfectly chosen and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
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Hopper
by Mark Strand, Rolf G. Renner
Now in rich color, thirty of American painter Edward Hopper’s masterpieces with critiques from acclaimed poet Mark Strand. Strand deftly illuminates the work of the frequently misunderstood American painter, whose enigmatic paintings—of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias, and hotel rooms—number among the most powerful of our time.
In brief but wonderfully compelling comments accompanying each painting, the elegant expressiveness of Strand’s language is put to the service of Hopper’s visual world. The result is a singularly illuminating presentation of the work of one of America’s best-known artists. Strand shows us how the formal elements of the paintings—geometrical shapes pointing beyond the canvas, light from unseen sources—locate the viewer, as he says, “in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feeling predominate.”
An unforgettable combination of prose and painting in their highest forms, this book is a must for poetry and art lovers alike.
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Hopper
by Mark Strand, Rolf G. Renner
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is something of an American success story, if only his success had come swifter. At the age of 40, he was a failing artist who struggled to sell a single painting. As he approached 80, Time magazine featured him on its cover. Today, Hopper is considered a giant of modern expression, with an uncanny, unforgettable, and utterly distinct sense for mood and place.
Much of Hopper's work excavates modern city experience. In canvas after canvas, he depicts diners, cafes, shopfronts, street lights, gas stations, rail stations, and hotel rooms. The scenes are marked by vivid color juxtapositions and stark, theatrical lighting, as well as by harshly contoured figures, who appear at once part of, and alien to, their surroundings. The ambiance throughout his repertoire is of an eerie disquiet, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension, although his rural or coastal scenes can offer a counterpoint of tranquility or optimism.
This book presents major works from Hopper's œuvre to introduce a key player not only in American art history but also in the American psyche.
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Almost Invisible: Poems
by Mark Strand
From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.
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Blizzard of One: Poems
by Mark Strand
Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry.
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The Story of Our Lives, with the Monument and the Late Hour
by Mark Strand
Mark Strand is the author of nine books of poems, including Blizzard of One, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.
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Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua
by Mark Strand
A uniquely appealing collection that reflects the variety and richness of South American poetry.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a native-born Brazilian, is universally recognized as the finest and most accessible modern Portugese-language poet and, along with Pablo Neruda, a poet of the common man, writing of home, family, friends, and love.
Rafael Alberti--an elegist primarily--came to Argentina (where he wrote many of his poems) in exile from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The effects of that experience wind through the poet's work in poems about the survival of the spirit in the face of personal and political tragedy.
Looking for Poetry also contains the simple and haunting poems of the Quechua Indians.
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Man and Camel: Poems
by Mark Strand
This eleventh collection by Mark Strand is a toast to life’s transience and abiding beauty. He begins with a group of light but haunting fables, populated by figures like the King, a tiny creature in ermine who has lost his desire to rule, and by the poet’s own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery of the title poem: “I sat on the porch having a smoke / when out of the blue a man and a camel / happened by.” The poet has Arctic adventures and encounters with the bearded figure of Death; in his controlled tone, he creates his bold visions and shows us, like a magician, how they vanish in a blink. Gradually, his fancies give way to powerful scenes of loss, as in “The Mirror,” where the face of a beautiful woman stares past him
into a place I could only imagine . . .
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.
Man and Camel concludes with a small masterpiece of meditations crafted around the Seven Last Words of Christ. Here, this secular poet finds resonance in the bedrock of Christ’s language, the actual words that have governed so many generations of thought and belief. As always with Mark Strand, the discovery of meaning in the sound of language itself is an act of faith that enlightens us and carries us beyond the bounds of the rational.
From the Hardcover edition.
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New Selected Poems of Mark Strand
by Mark Strand
From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes The Continuous Life (1990) and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (1998) and his most recent new collection, Man and Camel (2006), this book gives us an essential selection of Mark Strand’s poetry from across the entire span of his remarkable career to date.
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The Weather of Words: Poetic Inventions
by Mark Strand
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a brilliant and witty collection of writings on the art and nature of poetry -- a master class both entertaining and provocative.
The pieces have a broad range and many levels. In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed.
Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences.
We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet.
Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.
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Almost Invisible
by Mark Strand
From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.
From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
“Careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found.” ―Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review
A monumental celebration of “one of the most significant poets writing today” (David Baker, Los Angeles Review of Books).
In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review). From “Apple Tree”
O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three,
this one, this one life.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
“One of the greatest American poets of her time.”—New York Times
Collected Poems features Edna St. Vincent Millay’s incisive and impassioned poetry and sonnets, as well as the poet’s last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay. Alongside Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings, Millay remains among the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century for her uniquely lyrical explorations of love, individuality, and artistic expression.
Millay, winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes plays, essays, short stories, and songs. She infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women’s sexuality in her poems and prose.
Yet Millay’s poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world.
This invaluable compendium of her work is not only an essential addition to any collection of the world’s most moving and memorable poetry but an unprecedented look into the life of Millay.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
“First Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.
This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."
This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.
Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Gathered here is a half century’s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.
Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
William Blake is a poet without parallel, who remains a source of wisdom and inspiration to countless individuals throughout the world.
This selection was commissioned in 1905 by the firm of George Routledge from W.B. Yeats, who had previously been one of the pioneer editors of Blake's prophetic books. Yeats, one of the few poets whose work could be compared with that of Blake, prepared a unique selection of his poetic and prose writings. There is no better way to encounter the work of one poetic genius than as it is presented by another, and Yeats understood Blake in a way few others did.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
A compelling anthology of poetry, translations, and composition notes by the author of The Book of Illusions features selections from Spokes, Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, White Spaces, and other works, along with biographical details and the author's own thoughts on his writing.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
None
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The definitive collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award winner Galway Kinnell.
“It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.” —Galway Kinnell
This long-awaited volume brings together for the first time the life’s work of a major American voice.
In a remarkable generation of poets, Galway Kinnell was an acknowledged, true master. From the book-length poem memorializing the grit, beauty, and swarming assertion of immigrant life along a lower Manhattan avenue, to searing poems of human conflict and war, to incandescent reflections on love, family, and the natural world—including "Blackberry Eating,” "St. Francis and the Sow," and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”—to the unflinchingly introspective poems of his later life, Kinnell’s work lastingly shaped the consciousness of his age.
Spanning 65 years of intense, inspired creativity, this volume, with its inclusion of previously uncollected poems, is the essential collection for old and new devotees of a “poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.” (Boston Globe)
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
The life’s work of “one of the true master poets of his generation,”* whose poetry helped shape the consciousness of an age
For Galway Kinnell, it was “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” This comprehensive volume includes “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” Kinnell’s stunning poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, the incantatory book-length poem The Book of Nightmares, the searing evocation of Hiroshima in “The Fundamental Project of Technology,” the iconic themes of his middle years—eros, family, the natural world (“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” “The Bear,” “Saint Francis and the Sow,” “Blackberry Eating”)—and the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of “a poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.”**
*New York Times
**Boston Globe
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
Jane Kenyon is considered one of America's best contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon's Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
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Collected Poems
by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies
All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
―from "Twilight: After Haying"
Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes―From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
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The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
"Concise, learned, revisionary... should enrich the passionate conversation about poetic forms for years to come."― Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.
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$18.95
City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide
Called "the best literary gift to travelers since the Baedeker and Henry James" (Financial Times), City Secrets guides are charming companions to the world’s most fascinating destinations, from cities to movies, offering discoveries from internationally renowned authors, artists, and historians. Books takes this intimate, insider’s approach to literature, featuring 200 brief essays and recommendations by 150 esteemed figures in the literary world, including authors, writers, journalists, scholars, and critics. The list of contributors includes: Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author; John Guare, playwright; Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker columnist and author; poet laureates Mark Strand and Robert Pinsky; and Kenneth Turan, NPR and the Los Angeles Times film critic, among many others. Fang Duff Kahn Publishers will donate 2% of the purchase price of each book to First Book, a national organization that gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. It has distributed more than 65 million books to children.
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Collected Poems of Mark Strand
by Mark Strand
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Gathered here is a half century’s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.
Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.
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Best New Poets 2008: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers
by Mark Strand
The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it’s being practiced today.
Distributed for the Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia
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One for Each Night: The Greatest Chanukah Stories of All Time (A Very Christmas)
by Elie Wiesel, Mark Strand, Chaim Potok, A. B. Yehoshua, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Joanna Rakoff, Sholom Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon, Emma Lazarus, I. L. Peretz, Theodor Herzl, Emma Green
"Uniformly excellent."—The Jewish Standard
This rich medley of stories, poems, and essays features evocations of Chanukah by classic and contemporary authors including Sholom Aleichem, Nobel laureates S. Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel, I. L. Peretz, Emma Lazarus, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Potok, Mark Strand, A. B. Yehoshua, Emma Green, Joanna Rakoff, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. There are humorous as well as meditative tales from Israel, Central Europe, and the United States—works that capture the Festival of Lights as observed on Manhattan's Upper West Side alongside accounts of celebrations in shtetls of the Old Country and far reaches of the Diaspora including Africa. The writings underscore what it means to be Jewish in a world that’s not always welcoming and include intriguing commentary about Chanukah's origins and what it means now.
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$26.95
Reasons for Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Not: Poems
by Mark Strand
Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration." And Harold Bloom wrote, "these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America."
These key books in the career of a recent Poet Laureate of the United States are now reissued in one volume together with a private-press book of aphorisms dating from the same time. An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets.
Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist.
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Mark Strand - Selected Poems
by Mark Strand
In this compilation of older and newer poems, Strand demonstrates his mastery of cadence and narrative style.
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The Continuous Life,: Poems
by Mark Strand
Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.
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Dark Harbor A Poem
by Mark Strand
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that—despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone—is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality:
Is what exists a souvenir of the time
Of the great nought and deep night without stars
The time before the universe began?
When we look at each other and see nothing
Is that not a confirmation that we are less
Than meets the eye and embody some of
The night of our origins?
A timeless pursuit of timeless questions, Dark Harbor centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets.
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Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More
by Mark Strand
"Startling visions, unexpected truths, an aura of wistfulness, and trills of playful humor waft from every page . . ." --Booklist Mark Strand, Former Poet Laureate, Pulitzer and MacArthur recipient "startles with his image evoking language" (Rain Taxi) in these vivid kaleidoscopic one line meditations.
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