Poems from the Mud Room


Book Description

“Tantalizingly irreverent; Camner’s work smacks of the deliciously absurd with a point. He is a brilliantly bizarre poet and master of the surreal.” - Lenny DellaRocca The Poetry Museum “Camner defies the traditional aesthetic concepts of poetry. He targets a world of ideas in a rather active way as opposed to the more passive, meditative aspects found in most poetry. There is a linguistic simplicity to his poems, an almost transparent quality, over a rather complex web of experience and thought. His poetry is life... ‘All you have to do is look’ – The obvious and not so obvious.” - Marta Braunstein, editor Cambio Literary Journal “Camner writes in terse, stark, real verse that would make Hemingway raise his scotch glass in honor.” - New Times Newspaper “Camner’s poetic style is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s detective writing; descriptive and terse with interesting plot lines. His characters are certainly the product of a vivid imagination.” - The Comstock Review “Camner’s ‘humour noir’ is apparent in his poetics, his spirited voice and unabashed freedom – so alive, even in his earliest poems.” - Peter Hargitai “A literary detour, and well worth the trip.” - Village Voice




Rutted Field of the Heart


Book Description

This is a emotionally charged tribute to the author's late husband, detailing his life and death as well as his reappearance in various guises. Rooted in the elegance and reality of nature and family, Priscilla Ellsworth's poems become a gift, a primer on 'how to live / and how to die.' In an early poem she chides, 'Husband, wake up!' She is a wife who wants her husband's presence. Life: travel with family, work in the garden with him, the joy of his peonies - 'What if we had lived like this all our days?' Death arrives midway in the book: 'So this is it.' That single line, poignant, direct, straight to the heart. The poem 'Dawn Fire' which follows with its description of hunters and needless death takes one's breath away. In 'New Widow, ' when Ellsworth writes, 'For now my heart is a garden that cannot be turned, ' she keeps us in the rhythm of the natural world: for all its death, it will bring spring. Here are poems to trust."




Salvinia Molesta


Book Description

Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call "the worst weed in the world," a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that it is illegal to sell or possess in the United States. Chang explores this image of vitality and evil in three thematically grouped sections focusing on corporate greed, infidelity and desire, and historical atrocities, including the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China and the massacre of Chinese people in Nanking by Japanese troops in World War II. This edgy, fierce subject matter becomes engaging and fresh as Chang applies her powers of imagination to the extraordinary lives of Madame Mao, investment banker Frank P. Quattrone, and others living at extraordinary historical moments. In "Seven Stages of Genocide," for example, the poem's speaker is herded into a death camp along with a neighbor that he strongly dislikes: "The barbed wire around us forces me / to catch his breath that smells like goose." Chang focuses her attention to occurrences in the world that many poets find too violent or disturbing to write about, thereby making her own distinctive aesthetic from that which is, like Salvinia molesta, both creepy and beautiful.




Paul Muldoon


Book Description

The authors of these essays see Muldoon from many different angles - biographical, formal, literary-historical, generic - but are also engaged in directing attention to complex moments of creativity in which an extraordinary amount of originality is concentrated, and on the clarity of which a lot depends.




The Rules of Poetry


Book Description

This volume also features essays on perennial life topics such as the daunting task of self-forgiveness, appreciation of the natural world, the meaning of hospitality, giving, the loneliness pandemic and the strangeness of estrangement.




Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry


Book Description

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.




Children Writing Poems


Book Description

This volume demonstrates how the social and instructional worlds that children inhabit influence their poetry writing and performances. Drawing on rich vignettes of students from different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, it describes and analyzes the work of eight to ten-year-old U.S. students involved in a month-long poetry unit. Children Writing Poems outlines the value of a ‘poetic-functional’ approach to help children convey a poem’s meaning and mood, and expresses the need for educators to scaffold children’s oral readings and performances over time.




Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry


Book Description

Defying critical suggestions that the pastoral elegy is obsolete, Iain Twiddy reveals the popularity of the form in the work of major contemporary poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Reading. As Twiddy outlines the development of the form, he identifies its characteristics and functions. But more importantly his study accounts for the enduring appeal of the pastoral elegy, why poets look to its conventions during times of personal distress and social disharmony, and how it allows them to recover from grief, loss and destruction. Informed by current debates and contemporary theories of mourning, Twiddy discusses themes of war and peace, social pastoral and environmental change, draws on the enduring influence of both Classical and Romantic poetics and explores poets' changing relationships with pastoral elegy throughout their careers. The result is a study that demonstrates why the pastoral elegy is still a flourishing and dynamic form in contemporary British and Irish poetry.




Journey Into Space


Book Description




Contemporary British and Irish Poetry


Book Description

Sarah Broom provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. The book covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry tackles the most compelling and contentious issues facing poetry today.