Regarded by a contemporary as a «brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature,» William Blake (1757–1827) is today recognized as a major poet and artist. This collection of 104 poems, carefully chosen by noted Blake scholars David and Virginia Erdman, reveals the lyricism, mystical vision, and consummate craftsmanship that have earned the poet his preeminent place with both critics and the gen ...
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 La ...
"A terrible beauty is born," observed the greatest modern Irish poet after his country's 1916 Easter Rebellion against the British. This streak of proud nationalism, interwoven with elements of Celtic lore and mysticism, and infused with a hard-earned wisdom, makes Yeats's works resonate to this day. His career spanned five decades, earning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and he is widely regarded as the finest English- ...
Considered the greatest Roman poet, Vergil spent over a decade working on this monumental epic poem, which has been a source of literary inspiration and poetic grandeur for more than 2,000 years. Its twelve books tell the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found a new city in the west. This city, Lavinium, was the parent city of Rome.Drawn by divine destiny after the fall of Troy, Aeneas sailed westward tow ...
In Christopher Howell’s twelfth collection of poems, his gifts for elegy, humor, and lyricism are on full display. The Grief of a Happy Life explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that happiness and grief inform one another and give our lives fullness and vitality.Arranged in four sections, Howell’s poems feature not only these concerns, but a large and various cast of characters as well ...
Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour , and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time , Republic Cafe is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history’s tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of our human memory, but also the sanctity ...
Vagrants & Accidentals, the second full-length collection from poet Kevin Craft, is part vade mecum, part songbook, whose taut lines and adaptable stanzas traffic in the personal effects of emigration and estrangement, exile and return. In ornithology, a vagrant or accidental is a bird that appears out of its natural or normal range, blown off course by a storm, or inadvertently introduced into a new environment by human trade. Likewise, Cra ...
Emotion, raw and unadorned, is woven through the poems of Christianne Balk's The Holding Hours. Part I explores the subtle and surprising transformations that come from caring for her young, neurologically injured daughter. Insights unfold in metaphor and persona below the surface of an exquisitely observed life.Gazing through the lens of other lives challenged by disability and illness, including those of John Muir and the 16th-century Sai ...
Disquiet is a collection of poems that utilizes natural phenomena�a bright beach, a fallen tree limb, the weight of gravity�to evoke and reflect upon memory and human experience. The poems are structurally innovative, each shaped around a central axis as they trace the speaker�s growth from childhood to adulthood. Acute observations resonate throughout the book as its focus shifts from the natural world to the wo ...
