Outside History


Book Description




Collected Poems, 1980-1990


Book Description







Collected Poems


Book Description

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. No to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. -- Czeslaw Milosz




Bye-and-Bye


Book Description

Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work—including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality—showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the true affinity between writer and subject, human and nature; the tenuous relationship between description and actuality; and the search for a truth that transcends change and death. Bye-and-Bye is a wonderful introduction to the late work of one of America's finest and best-loved poets.




The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010


Book Description

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.




Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990


Book Description

An essential volume by one of our most esteemed poets. "[Boland is] an original, dazzlingly gifted writer.... Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention." —David Walker, Field




Country Music


Book Description

A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career. Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.




New Collected Poems


Book Description

"Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme, and language."--BOOK JACKET.




Negative Blue


Book Description

Negative Blue is 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.




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