Poolside Poetry


Book Description

A collection of funny and reflective poems from the poolside; a Scotsman abroad.




I Shimmer Sometimes, Too


Book Description

Porsha O's debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care - the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.




Poems About Weather


Book Description

From the crashing boom of a thunderstorm to a gentle breeze on a sunny afternoon, the weather has a way of fascinating us every day. Nothing captures the magic of weather better than poetry. Young meteorologists and poets alike will love this collection of poems that capture the natural phenomena of weather. Even reluctant readers will be intrigued by the gorgeous illustrations that accompany the poems and enrich the text. Fun and accessible, this carefully selected collection is the perfect introduction to poetry, making this book an excellent tool for any language arts curriculum.




The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry


Book Description

The hero s descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets - British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins - stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.




Poetry Slam


Book Description

Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry documents the first ten years of this cultural phenomenon with details on slam history and rules, hosting your own slam, winning strategies, tips for memorization, crafting group pieces, and other informative essays, as well as 100 of the best slam-winning poems ever.




Abundance from the Desert


Book Description

Abundance from the Desert provides a comprehensive introduction to classical Arabic poetry, one of the richest of poetic traditions. Covering the period roughly of 500-1250 c.e., it features original translations and illuminating discussions of a number of major classical Arabic poems from a variety of genres. The poems are presented chronologically, each situated within a specific historical and literary context. Together, the selected poems suggest the range and depth of classical Arabic poetic expression; read in sequence, they suggest the gradual evolution of a tradition. Moving beyond a mere chronicle, Farrin outlines a new approach to appreciating classical Arabic poetry based on an awareness of concentric symmetry, in which the poem’s unity is viewed not as a linear progression but as an elaborate symmetrical plot. In doing so, the author presents these works in a broader, comparative light, revealing connections with other literatures. The reader is invited to examine these classical Arabic works not as isolated phenomena—notwithstanding their uniqueness and their association with a discrete tradition—but rather as part of a great multicultural heritage. This pioneering book marks an important step forward in the study of Arabic poetry. At the same time, it opens the door to this rich tradition for the general reader.




The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry


Book Description

The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry brings Randall Mann’s characteristic wit, fearlessness, and attention to language, to twenty years of critical works, including reviews of early books by Laura Kasischke and Vijay Seshadri; essays on Shame, Money, and Forgetting; appreciations of Thom Gunn and John Ashbery; and two interviews. This incisive collection—a combination of criticism, close reading, autobiography, exuberance, and occasional irritation—offers a look into the mind of one of America’s finest formalists, revealing how the compression and vulnerability of the lyric draws us closer to, while asking us to resist, the limitations, freedoms, and intimacies of poetry.




Fifteen Lectures On Traditional Chinese Culture


Book Description

This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese edition since 2006.Before the 1980s, traditional culture was often the target of criticisms and put in a negative light in China. After the 1980s, due to the belief that traditional culture can contribute to modernization, people decided to 'take its essence and discard its dregs'. As of today, most books on this theme have been written in accordance with this principle.However, in this book, the author argues that many problems have emerged from the modernization of the Western society, and thus the need for reflection and re-examining. Traditional Chinese culture is a source for comparison and reflection. As such, when we discuss traditional culture nowadays, not only should we excavate its long-hidden meanings, but we should also develop contrastive resources to facilitate our collaborative development in future.The discussions in this book adopt a vertical structure that begins with how Chinese define a human, followed by topics on the human body, Qi, food, male and female, home and state, the relationship between heaven and human beings, ritual systems, historical consciousness, thinking patterns, the art of expressing sentiments, commitments to the politics of virtues and achievements, and cultural practices. In every chapter, there is also a horizontal method of comparison on Chinese, Western and Indian cultures, to foreground the particularities and advantages of the Chinese culture.Apart from elaborating on the major characteristics of traditional Chinese culture, there is also a discussion on how the modern disdain for and misunderstandings of the traditional culture originated from the West. The author also elaborates on Montesquieu's views of China and the various misconceptions and misunderstandings of the traditional Chinese legal systems. Finally, it ends with the author's thoughts on the revitalization of the Chinese civilization.




Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry


Book Description

Poetry in English since the Second World War has produced a number of highly original narrative works, as diverse as Derek Walcott's Omeros, Ted Hughes' Gaudete and Anne Stevenson's Correspondences. At the same time, poetry in general has been permeated by narrative features, particularly those linguistic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin considered peculiar to the novel, and which he termed "dialogic". This book examines the narrative and dialogic elements in the work of a range of poets from Britain, America, Ireland, Australia and the Caribbean, including poetry from the immediate postwar years to the contemporary, and novel-like narratives to personal lyrics. Its unifying theme is the way in which these poets, with such contrasting styles and from such varied backgrounds, respond to and creatively adapt the language-worlds, and hence the social worlds in which they live. The volume includes a detailed bibliography to assist students in further study, and will be a valuable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary poetry.




Ovid and His Love Poetry


Book Description

Ovid devoted about half of his poetic career to the production of several collections of amatory verse, all composed in elegiac couplets. Indeed, his irrepressible interest in love, sex and elegiac poetry is one of the defining features of his entire output. Here Rebecca Armstrong offers a thematic examination of some important aspects of the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Starting from an investigation of the narrator's self-creation and presentation of other characters within his amatory verse, she assesses the importance of mythical and contemporary reference, as well as the influence of the erotic on Ovid's later works. By looking at the Ars and Remedia alongside the Amores, the continuities and contradictions in the poet's elegiac outlook are revealed, and a complex picture is formed of the Ovidian world of love. Ovid's erotic works present the reader with a glimpse inside the minds of both poets and lovers, mediated through eyes which are frequently inclined to comedy and even cynicism, but always sharp, perceptive and above all fascinated by human behaviour.