April Is Poetry Month
"Garrett’s poems can be intensely personal, extremely witty, evocative of real places, or beautiful love ballads. Yet, for all of its diversity, Garrett’s poetry has an extraordinary unity of vision that is magnified in this remarkable collection of his life’s work."
The above quotation is from the publisher's description. The author is Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Hailed as "not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one" (The New York Times Book Review), Sandra Cisneros has firmly established herself as an author of electrifying talent. Here are verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that reveal why her stories have been praised for their precision and musicality of language.
The culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award:
Time will append us like suit coats left out overnight
On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,
Silk handkerchief limp with dew,
sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.
And love will kill us--
Love, and the winds from under the earth
that grind us to grain-out.
--from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"
When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the Boston Review, "Charles Wright's trilogy of trilogies--call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead'--is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century."
The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.
(From the publisher's description)
"When Robert Hass first took his post as U.S. Poet Laureate, he asked himself, "What can a poet laureate usefully do?" One of his answers was to bring back the popular nineteenth-century tradition of including poetry in our daily newspapers. "Poet's Choice," a nationally syndicated column appearing in twenty-five papers, has introduced a poem a week to readers across the country.
"There is news in poems," argues Robert Hass. This collection gathers the full two years' worth of Hass's choices, including recently published poems as well as older classics. The selections reflect the events of the day, whether it be an elder poet recieving a major prize, a younger poet publishing a first book, the death of a great writer, or the changing seasons and holidays. They also reflect Hass's personal taste. Here is "one of the most gorgeous poems in the English language" ('To Autumn' by John Keats): a harrowing Holocaust poem ('Deathfugue' by Paul Celan); and 'my favorite American poem of spring' ('Spring and All' by William Carlos Williams). With a brief introduction to each poet and poem, a note on the selection, and insights on how the poem works, Robert Hass acts as your personal guide to the poetry shelves at your local bookstores and to some of the best poetry of all time."
Selected Poems includes over 200 works culled from Robert Lowell's books of verse--Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean, History,For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Edited and with a foreword by the poet Frank Bidart, who also edited Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, this volume is a perfectly chosen representation of "the greatest American poet of the mid-century" (Richard Poirier, Book Week)
"The poems in The Flying Change embrace a wide range of subjects and tones. Henry Taylor's concern with the rural anecdote, demonstrated in his two earlier works of poetry, The Horse Show at Midnight and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, is here broadened to include not only funny stories called "snapshots" but also extended meditations on change and death. Throughout this collection, Taylor combines everyday speech with careful control of traditional forms to produce poems of unusual power."
A Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
One of the most steadied and lauded American poets and for good reason. Sometimes writing for a youthful audience ("the fog comes on little cat feet...") and sometimes writing for persons of more experience ("...I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.") Revisit Frost's poetry now that you're out of English class and see what you think.
