The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry


Book Description

This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin Chile--Pablo Neruda China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting El Salvador--Claribel Alegria France--Yves Bonnefoy Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos India--A.K. Ramanujan Israel--Yehuda Amichai Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa Mexico--Octavio Paz Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal Nigeria--Wole Soyinka Norway--Tomas Transtromer Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott




World Poetry


Book Description

An anthology of the best poetry ever written contains more than sixteen hundred poems, spanning more than four millennia, from ancient Sumer and Egypt to the late twentieth century




How Poets See the World


Book Description

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.




Poetry for the Earth


Book Description

While the state of the environment is a very current issue, passion and concern for the world around us is nearly as old as the world itself. Poetry for the Earth brings together a cross-section of some of the most beautiful and haunting poetry ever written in tribute to--or in mourning for--our magnificent landscapes.




World Poetry Anthology


Book Description




A World Full of Poems


Book Description

A gorgeously illustrated introduction to poetry for children, featuring poems about everything from science, sports, and space, to friendship, family, and feelings. This thoughtfully crafted anthology is perfect for children new to verse and for young poetry fans seeking out new favorites. Explore poetry from a diverse selection of contemporary and historical poets, covering a broad range of topics—from personal subjects like emotions and family, to the wonders of the natural environment. Carefully selected works encourage children to see the poetry in everything and to embrace the beauty of their everyday lives. Prompts and activities inspire children to create their own poetry, and devices like rhyme, repetition, and alliteration are introduced and explained in a fun and accessible manner.




Last Dream


Book Description

Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. An essential new translation of one of Italian literature's most celebrated poets. Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals. "This collection is a revelation. In Geoffrey Brock's impeccable versions, Pascoli becomes a poet who demands to be read out loud. Time and again I found myself stopping to savor a phrase, a line break, a rhyme, a stanza. And then reading the poem over from the start. 'The Sleep of Odysseus' is heart-stopping. It's difficult to overstate my admiration for that tact, grace, and formal imagination that shape these remarkable translations."--Clare Cavanagh "A champion of childlike intuition, muted tones, and 'small things,' Pascoli has until now been confined to his corner of the map. In this personal anthology, poet and translator Geoff Brock conveys to us the best of Pascoli. His Pascoli is the author of subtle, bewitching poems that look both inward and outward, celebrating the natural world and the inner life of humble objects: kites, walking sticks, the little nests of spring. Brock has kept the rhymes and meters, and his deeply intelligent remakings breathe new life into the old idiom."--Will Schutt




Ain't I a Woman!


Book Description

Spanning the centuries from Sappho's Greece to tenth-century Japan, from nineteenth-century Chile to Zindziswa Mandela's twentieth-century South Africa, the voices of these women poets express themes of love, injustice, motherhood, and loss, and the oppressions of race and sex. The sequence of the poems moves from youth to old age, and they bear witness to the triumphs as well as the pain and frustration of women in many times and in many places. Among the many poets whose work is included are Anna Akhmatova, Maya Angelou, Judith Kazantzis, Gabriela Mistral, Marge Piercy, Irina Ratushinskaya and Alice Walker. Illona Linthwaite began gathering this collection several years ago, initially for a theatrical performance. Here, in this unique exchange between women of many races, affirming their differences and what they have in common, are more than 150 poems which assert the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth's challenge, "Ain't I a Woman!" In addition to the poems, there are biographies of the 91 contributors.




A Library of Poetry and Song


Book Description

Excerpt from A Library of Poetry and Song: Being Choice Selections From the Best Poets, With an Introduction The Publishers take pleasure in believing that many readers will find in this volume inducements to seek complete editions of favorite American poets, in order to become better acquainted with those authors whose writings have made this compilation so complete in the poetical literature of our own land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




My Mountain Country


Book Description

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye's poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China's essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown. "Fiona Sze-Lorrain brings her sense of immediacy, and her lucid control of tone, to these inspired translations of Ye Lijun which capture, with unerring musicality, the rhythms of the original Chinese."--Martha Kapos "Ye Lijun's quiet, powerful poems accrete from places, memories, affect, and ideas unique to the poet. The distinctiveness of Ye's diction, metaphors, and associations make her imagination and intelligence anchor in ours. We come away from Ye's mountain, her house, her books, her loves, and return to those of our own with our senses made more acute. Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a gifted poet herself, creates an English-language voice for Ye Lijun that has all the grace and surprise of the original."--Thomas Moran "[T]he joys revealed in MY MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, which bring together a selection of poems from her three books, elegantly translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, suggest that for an acute observer of the natural world every hour, secret or not, may become an occasion for opening, 'in clarity,' to the beloved, to nature, to the invisible--leaves and roses and flowering trees that at a moment's notice may awaken in her soul, alerting her once again to the mysterious bounty of life on earth."--Christopher Merrill