Collected Poems, 1930-83


Book Description

Winner of the 1984 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Originally published in 1983, Miles's Collected Poems received seven awards, including the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize, and was one of three finalists for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A striking consistency -- of tone, of diction, of purpose -- characterizes Miles's life work. It has been a life well spent. --Publisher's Weekly. Miles is a poet of the first rank whose work might well be compared to that of Williams or Moore ... Collected Poems is a treasury of poetic wit and human understanding that belongs in all poetry collections. --Library Journal. Miles's work is one of the finest and most solid bodies of poetry to be found in this country. --A.R. Ammons.







Reading Poetry


Book Description

Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Discussing more than 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century, the book introduces readers to the skills and the critical and theoretical awareness that enable them to read poetry with enjoyment and insight. This third edition has been significantly updated in response to current developments in poetry and poetic criticism, and includes many new examples and exercises, new chapters on ‘world poetry’ and ‘eco-poetry’, and a greater emphasis throughout on American poetry, including the impact traditional Chinese poetry has had on modern American poetry. The seventeen carefully staged chapters constitute a complete apprenticeship in reading poetry, leading readers from specific features of form and figurative language to larger concerns with genre, intertextuality, Caribbean poetry, world poetry, and the role poetry can play in response to the ecological crisis. The workshop exercises at the end of each chapter, together with an extensive glossary of poetic and critical terms, and the number and range of poems analysed and discussed – 122 of which are quoted in full – make Reading Poetry suitable for individual study or as a comprehensive, self-contained textbook for university and college classes.




Honorable Amendments


Book Description




So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks


Book Description

An astonishing new talent, Rigoberto González writes with a clarity of the senses that pulls the reader into a marvelous and unfamiliar world. The sidewalk preacher, the umbrella salesman, the nurse on the graveyard shift, the professional mourner-- all allow González a clandestine glimpse of their lives. Crackling with the dry electricity of the desert and flashing with the brilliant colors of Mexico, González's poems are rooted in the fertile soil beneath poverty's dust, the border's violence, and longing's desolation.




Michelangelo's Seizure


Book Description

The following is a book of poems based on the lives of several classic and contemporary painters, including Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Monet, Renoir, Magritte and many others. While the poems participate in the tradition of ekphrastic poetry, they also engage with each painters' biography, as a lens through which to see each work. In the poems, many of the painters are reacting to a dramatic loss, transforming the pain of personal tragedy into art.




Floating on Solitude


Book Description

"Forging through this voluminous collection is akin to visiting at length with a charismatic, if highly disturbed, relative. Generally, the poems start out presenting facades of well-mannered normalcy, e.g., brief narratives or odes to nature and the sea, but then something shifts and goes terribly right. A sentence turns odd and powerful; a quiet, streak of insanity emerges; a young girl leaves her scent upon a young boy's body. Sometimes a poem pops up that is dangerous from start to finish, such as "The Suicide Eaters" or "Drunks," about a reading at a V.A. hospital for recovering addicts and alcoholics. Smith is highly conscious of word choice. He tinkers with grammar and rhythm just enough to be utterly engaging, leaving the reader exhausted after the visit, but wiser for the effort."- Publishers weekly.




Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight


Book Description

The winner of four major awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize, Mark Doty has established himself as one of the most courageous and eloquent poets of our time. The University of Illinois Press is proud to present this one-volume edition of Doty's first two collections of poetry, Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. Long out of print, Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight brought Doty to critical attention as the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. Stories of paradise, pageant, and fugitive peace course through these pages are lit by Doty's visions of the architecture and artifice of a lush world. Exploring the forms of remembering and inventing, Doty affirms that, from the first loss, we preserve by naming.




Off-canon Pleasures


Book Description

The inclusion of works in a canonical list creates a large body of exclusions. But among these neglected works there are not a few that nevertheless are worth reading. Literary worth is not necessarily aesthetic impeccability. A literary work recommends itself by a high degree of artistic achievement with elbowroom for historical importance. The present study focuses on Leo Rosten's immigration novel The Education of Hyman Kaplan (1937) and Archibald MacLeish's radio play Air Raid (1938). The first is more than the apparent compendium of language-based jokes. Read in the context of immigration policy from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt to F.D. Roosevelt and of Jewish-American humor, it displays Kaplan's moral and intellectual growth, which extant commentary denies, and exhibits the "interior internationality" of an immigration country. Air Raid is one of the few achieved American radio plays to take a stand on foreign affairs in a context that does not only consist of broadcasting and Picasso's collage-painting Guernica "the screaming picture" which MacLeish transposed into the acoustic medium but also of the historical saturation bombing of the Basque town.




American Ghost Roses


Book Description

In his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems--ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics--explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate.




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