Books by Robert Pinsky
At the Foundling Hospital: Poems
“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” ―James Longenbach, The Nation
With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from our three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from “the emanation of a dead star still alive” to the “pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”
What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.
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At the Foundling Hospital: Poems
“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” ―James Longenbach, The Nation
With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from “the emanation of a dead star still alive” to the “pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”
What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.
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The Life of David (Jewish Encounters)
Part of the Jewish Encounter series
Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David’s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David’s life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms—traditionally considered to be David’s own words—Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David’s story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative.
Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky’s erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David—both the man and the idea of the man—is brought brilliantly to life.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
The first selected poems of a major poet who "wrote with more heart than any other North American poet of the twentieth century" (Rodney Jones, Parnassus)
More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of America: its rail yards, rivers, cities, and once vast natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.
Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
tr Robin Fulton
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more—including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled "Remembering Gwen."
By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems. This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
One of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter poems such as 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Tintern Abbey', 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Michael'. Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth's astonishing range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed his work.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
This selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic "Auld Lang Syne," the romantic "A Red, Red Rose," and the patriotic "Scots What Hae." As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range—from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street―these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry."
That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.
Copies
No copies available.
Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
One of the most enduringly popular of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and his belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a rich selection from the most creative period of Wordsworth’s life—from “Tintern Abbey,” an ode on the restorative powers of nature written during his intense friendship with Coleridge, to excerpts from his epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Also included are much-loved short works such as “I wandered as lonely as a Cloud,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” and the poignant “Lucy Gray.” These poems demonstrate Wordsworth’s astonishing range, power, and inventiveness, and the sustained and captivating vision that informed his work.
The inaugural volume in a new program of selected poetry especially commissioned for Penguin Classics Includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, and an index of titles and first lines In his introduction, Wordswort biographer Stephen Gill examines the personal and political events that shaped the poet's career and traces the major themes that run through his work
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O’Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. O’Hara’s style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O’Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner:
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O’Hara’s tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as “Personism,” in which O’Hara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: “You just go on your nerve.”
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence upon modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.
Selected Poems contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of his work. Harold Bloom has contributed a new Foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The inclusion of several pivotal poems from previous editions broadens the scope of the work to represent Aiken's legacy.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Chosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet’s most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”—as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.”
This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world.
This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A sampling from the oeuvre of one of the greatest living poets of the English language
Geoffrey Hill’s poetry comprises one of the most uncompromising and visionary bodies of work written over the last fifty years. Imbued with the weight of history, morality, and language, his work reveals a deeply religious sensibility, a towering intellect, and an emotional complexity that are unrivaled in contemporary letters. Now, for the first time ever, readers can observe in one volume how Hill’s style took shape over time. This generous selection spans his career, beginning with poems from Hill’s astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, and following through to his stylistically distinct and critically acclaimed work Without Title. Including some of the poet’s strongest, most sensitive, and most brilliant pieces, this collection will reaffirm Hill’s reputation as “England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize.”
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age.
Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street―these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry."
That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.
Copies
No copies available.
Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.
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No copies available.
Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.
―from "Blood and Lead"
The leading poet of his generation, James Fenton has over the course of his career built a body of work breathtaking in its range and sensibility. From the passionate political poems that launched him into fame to the intimate illuminations of love―and loss of love―in his later work, Fenton's poetry has always been marked by formal daring, wit, and an abiding empathy for the victims of war and political oppression. With selections from all of his published work since The Memory of War, the entire text of his libretto The Love Bomb, and new, previously uncollected poems, Selected Poems is an imaginative and formal tour de force.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work.
Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his later major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem.
Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor.
Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.
Copies
No copies available.
Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn's dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco―the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped―by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift―to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Considered by Victorians as the finest contemporary poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) gained much critical favor for his mastery of poetic technique, high-mindedness, and superb natural description. This volume contains a representative selection of his best works, including the famous long narrative poem "Enoch Arden," as well as a number of important lyrics, monologues, ballads, and other typical pieces. Among these are "The Lady of Shalott," "The Beggar Maid," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Break, break, break," "Flower in the Crannied Wall," and "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." Also here are carefully chosen, uncut excerpts from three longer works: The Princess, "Maud," and "The Brook." With this inexpensive volume at their fingertips, students and lovers of poetry can enjoy a substantial sampling of Tennyson's still-admired, widely quoted verse.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
Generally considered among the greatest American poets, Emily Dickinson has been read, studied, and admired by generations of literature students and poetry lovers. This modestly priced edition presents over 100 of her best-known and most-loved poems, reprinted from authoritative early editions. Unflinchingly honest, psychologically penetrating, and technically adventurous, the poems include such favorites as "The Chariot," "I taste a liquor never brewed," "The Snake," "I'm nobody, who are you?" "A Book," "There's a certain slant of light," "Hope," and many more.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A reissue of the 1935 Selected Poems, which, with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot, brought Moore's work to the attention of a wider public.
This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten key titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China’s most acclaimed poets—now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei
One of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to American readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as “Little Siberia” with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei.
In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing with change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain about what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers. Selected Poems is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Denise Levertov's Selected Poems delivers in a single accessible volume "one of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash). Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry―the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature."
Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Acclaiming the late Eugenio Montale (1897-1981) as “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West,” the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. This selection, introduced by Glauco Cambon, presents sixty-nine poems chosen from Montale’s first three books––Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), Le occasioni (The Occasions), and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things)––as rendered by sixteen translators, many of them distinguished poets in their own right.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, first came to Kinvara, County Galway, for a year in 1990 and has long since been a distinctive presence on the Irish literary scene. He now lives in South Tipperary. Introduced by poet and critic Dennis O'Driscoll, Selected Poems is Tillinghast's tenth book of poems and gathers the poet's own choice of some forty years of his work. "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. His experiments in meter, rhyme, and free verse are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few. -Louis Simpson
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
"[Selected Poems] offers readers a chance to catch on to one of the most distinctive talents of our time, one of the few who can genuinely startle. . . . Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness."Tony Hoagland
of all things standing furthest
from what is real, stand these trees
shaking with dispensable joy . . .
Mary Ruefle is the winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award and has authored ten collections of poetry; The Most of It, a book of prose; and A Little White Shadow, a collection of erasures. She teaches at Vermont College.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
Poetry. A career-defining retrospective by a much-beloved contemporary master, SELECTED POEMS gathers together the finest work from her distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most brilliant, expert and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining, need look no further than this monolithic retrospective.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
A collection to introduce English readers to the wonders of Lorca's poetry This selection has been the introduction for generations of American readers to the mesmerizing poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1937). Lorca is admired the world over for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. Most of all, Lorca's poems are admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences ― Spanish folk traditions of his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel ― stream throughout Lorca's work.
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Selected Poems
by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast
"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."―Randall Jarrell
The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.
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Gulf Music: Poems
Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.
Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation
And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.
Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.
―from "Gulf Music"
An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).
On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.
Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.
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Proverbs of Limbo: Poems
A new book of poems by the three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer "rarely equalled" (Louise Glück).
Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.
In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. For Pinsky, they include the familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as limbal realities that are more personal―clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture―all the countless variations of in-between.
The title Proverbs of Limbo tips its hat, at an angle, to the great poet William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Blake’s jagged, contrary proverbs resist, from within, the binary rights and wrongs of conventional Christianity: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
Here, Pinsky embodies a different resistance to different conventions of understanding. “The Buddha,” begins the title poem, “is a liquor store / On a busy corner.”
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The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works.
"Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing."
As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud.
He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.
This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.
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Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters
“Magnificent . . . poems to inspire [with] brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them.”―Alan Cheuse, NPR Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made― in terms borrowed from the “singing school” of William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Robert Pinsky’s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.
This anthology respects poetry’s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.
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Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters
A bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past. Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made― in terms borrowed from the “singing school” of William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Robert Pinsky’s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.
This anthology respects poetry’s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.
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Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud
A vibrant anthology and accompanying CD that revive a great American tradition: the joy of reciting poetry aloud. This lively, abundant book is distinguished by its focus on hearing poetry read aloud. Robert Pinsky, beloved for his ability to bring poetry to life as spoken language, has collected poems that sound marvelous in a reader’s actual or imagined voice. Pinsky has organized the book into sections with brief introductions that emphasize the attentive, intuitive, and reflective process of listening to poetry. This structure provides an implicit, generous definition-by-example of poetry itself: beginning with “Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes” and “Long Lines” and proceeding through fundamental themes such as “Love Poems,” “Odes, Complaints, and Celebrations,” and “Jokes, Ripostes, Parodies, and Insults.”Essential Pleasures gives a fresh setting to traditional favorites, including poems by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, placed among contemporary poems by John Ashbery, Louise Glu¨ck, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many others. This is an inviting and distinguished collection and an essential book for every home.
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The Book of Poetry for Hard Times: An Anthology
Robert Pinsky, “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), gathers poems that cope with the most extreme human emotions. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate source for the urgent, varied experience of human emotion. Poems get under our skin; they offer solace with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Book of Poetry for Hard Times, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky curates poems that explore the expanses of human emotion across centuries, from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood. Each poem reveals something new about our most profound and universal experiences; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry.
“For anyone who knows these human feelings―and almost everyone does―this book will become an essential companion.”―Eavan Boland
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Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet
"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." ―Bruce Springsteen
In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.
Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life’s challenges, such as his mother’s traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.
Candid, engaging, and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.
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The Situation of Poetry
In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other.
The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped.
Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.
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Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series, 27)
The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.
There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.
As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
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The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling
A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall―its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem―acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound.
With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry.
Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.
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First Things to Hand: Poems (Quarternote Chapbook Series)
“Pinsky has . . . the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”—Louise Glück
In these new poems the humble objects of everyday life—door, photograph, newspaper, pen, book—become artifacts pointing to the very center of human difference.
Robert Pinsky’s books include The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel: Collected Poems 1966-1996, and Jersey Rain. Among his awards are the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. From 1997 to 2000 he was the US Poet Laureate. He currently teaches at Boston University.
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Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (The Rice University Campbell Lectures)
Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and nightmares of such small towns—their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II.
The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small minded—in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses.
Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that "the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people." Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.
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The Life of David (Jewish Encounters Series)
Part of the Jewish Encounter series
Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David’s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David’s life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms—traditionally considered to be David’s own words—Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David’s story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative.
Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky’s erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David—both the man and the idea of the man—is brought brilliantly to life.
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Proverbs of Limbo Poems
A new book of poems by the three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer "rarely equalled" (Louise Glück).
Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.
In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. For Pinsky, they include the familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as limbal realities that are more personal—clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture—all the countless variations of in-between.
The title Proverbs of Limbo tips its hat, at an angle, to the great poet William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Blake’s jagged, contrary proverbs resist, from within, the binary rights and wrongs of conventional Christianity: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
Here, Pinsky embodies a different resistance to different conventions of understanding. “The Buddha,” begins the title poem, “is a liquor store / On a busy corner.”
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Robert Pinsky: The First Two Books of Poems
The remarkable first two books of poetry by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate—now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the author
Award-winning poet Robert Pinsky’s first two collections—Sadness And Happiness and An Explanation of America—announced the arrival of a major new voice in American poetry. Now, these acclaimed books are presented together in a single volume featuring a new preface by the author, introducing a new generation of readers to the groundbreaking early work of a beloved poet. Sadness And Happiness explores everyday subjects such as the streets and oceanfront of Pinsky’s hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey, while the long title poem of An Explanation of America examines personal and national myths as it transports readers across the states.
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