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Poetry | - 56 items found in your search |
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Ai Dread: Poems
W. W. Norton & Company 2003 0393041433 / 9780393041439 Hardcover Fine Near fine Hardcover 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
New. Fine in publisher's boards in near fine, slightly rubbed dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.A delusional woman insists that her long-dead sister perished in the destruction of the World Trade Center; John F. Kennedy Jr. speaks from beyond the grave; a psychic detective tracks a serial killer known as "The Florist"; an adoption broker exalts his dubious trade-these and other striking, violent or baroquely sexual life stories fuel this seventh volume of verse from Ai (Greed; Cruelty), made up (like her others) of dramatic monologues and character-based confessions, in which shocking, pathetic, frustrated or odious figures explain how they came to be the people they are. Ai (who won the National Book Award for 1999's Vice) explores her own heritage along with urban and Native American milieus; she's especially good with disillusioned middle-aged women and traumatized children, whom she ventriloquizes expertly: "Maybe Danny's only playing dead too/ and there's no gash in his head"; "Before I knew what was happening/ pain shot a fiery bullet into my arm." After six books of painful monologues, some readers may find her speakers' language limited, or their situations redundant; many, however, will gravitate to the undoubtedly powerful personae Ai creates, with their gender troubles and criminal pasts, their "inferno of family violence" and "rush/ of promises," and "reparations/ in pounds of flesh." Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist: Ai is the queen of poetic monologues. Her new collection of unsparing, often headline-inspired recitations continues the potent series that includes Vice (1999), Greed (1993), and Fate (1991) and presents her most masterfully unnerving works to date. Ai tightrope-walks the fine line between intense sorrow and psychosis as her protagonists shift from memories to self-mythologizing, from observation to delusion. The destruction of the World Trade towers inspires some extremely moving poems. In one, a woman policeman, called Officer Girlie on the street, searches the huge, rubble-filled crater for her beloved brother; in another, a woman prone to dementia goes to the site pretending to search for her sister, who may or may not have drowned years before. Ai understands intimately how traumas warp a life, and each of her revealing poems revolves around dire occurrences: an unwanted pregnancy, childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, racism, suicide, thwarted love and illicit lust, and, in a striking cycle, "The Psychic Detective," murder. Explicit, audacious, and empathic, Ai's cleansing soliloquies give voice to pain both personal and communal. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Allen, Fergus Mrs. Power Looks Over the Bay
Faber and Faber 1999 057120029X / 9780571200290 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's slightly rubbed decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.In many of the poems in Fergus Allen's third collection, he places himself outside, looking in, a traditional pose for the poet, strengthened by being born in England to an English mother and Irish father and growing up in Ireland. In "The Visitant", a gr
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1.74 GBP
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Ashbery, John Chinese Whispers: Poems
Farrar Straus Giroux 2003 0374528802 / 9780374528805 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's slightly rubbed decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Ashbery's most recent style equal parts cracked drawing room dialogue, 4-H Americana, withering sarcasm and sleeve-worn pathos has been perfected over five or so books and adapted by generationally diverse poets from James Tate to Max Winter. The late Kenneth Koch's description of Ashbery as "lazy and quick" remains thoroughly apropos; these 61 page-or-two poems can seem brilliantly tossed off, much like those in his 2000 collection, Your Name Here. The title is appropriate too: Chinese Whispers is the British name for the game of Telephone, where children (or adults) gather in a circle and whisper a "secret" word or phrase into the ear next to them. The last person says it out loud; the results are often "off" in funny, surprising and telling ways. The surprise, in poem after poem, is that high and low comedy and offhanded delivery can read like simultaneous expressions of pain and regeneration and that they do not dull after multiple permutations are spun out: "The beginning of the middle is like that./ Looking back it was all valleys, shrines floating on the powdered hill,// ambivalence that came in a flood sometimes, though warm, always, for the next tenant/ to abide there." As with all Ashbery's work, these poems leave plenty of room for readers to abide. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. ... Since winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery has been regarded as one of our major poets. This thoughtful new collection may not be any great advance-with Ashbery's elliptical style, how far can one go?-but it does maintain his momentum. The eye is immediately caught by some lines in an early poem-"Our lives ebbing always toward the center,/ the unframed portrait"-which feel like a key to Ashbery's aesthetic; he doesn't want us to look only at the center, at the shapes that predominate, but at the details along the edge. Thus, at first reading, his poems can seem like a string of out-of-sequence images, but they do bleed a definite atmosphere. Often, that atmosphere is disquieting or at least restless, but in these autumnal pieces a sense of calm predominates. True, the tale "jerks/ back and forth like the tail of a kite," and frogs and envelopes mutter, "That was some joust!" But the energy crackles only momentarily; here, things repeatedly fall, ebb, dissipate, or descend. Not that these are dreary pieces; there is a light touch and consistent pacing throughout, making this a satisfying read. Given Ashbery's stature, this is recommended for all contemporary poetry collections. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Barnstone, Willis (Introduction, Translator) The Song of Songs: Shir Hashirim
Green Integer 2002 1931243050 / 9781931243056 Paperback Fine n/a Paperback 6.3 x 4.4 x 0.2 inches
New. Fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.One of the great collections of love poems the world has known, The Song of Songs, which appears in the Old Testament, has, over the years, been the focus of much speculation. Who could have written these incredibly sexual lyrical poems. At various times Moses, Solomon, Isaiah, David, and Daniel have been suggested as the author of these works. Noted translator Willis Barnstone argues, in his short introduction, that Biblical scholars have generally dismissed all of these possibilities. Whoever the author is, woman is central in these stunningly powerful poems.
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2.33 GBP
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Cope, Wendy Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Faber and Faber 2001 0571137474 / 9780571137473 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Wendy Cope is very clever. She's good at taking much of what poetry holds dear and pricking its balloon. Her humour is an acquired taste and one short poem from "Strugnell's Haiku" sets the tone of this volume, first published in 1986, to great popular ac
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1.15 GBP
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Creeley, Robert En Famille: A Poem
Granary Books 1999 1887123261 / 9781887123266 Hardcover New Hardcover
New. VG in slightly faded and rubbed publisher's decorated boards. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Slight fading and rubbing to publisher's decorated board.
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1.08 GBP
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Donnelly, Jean Anthem
Green Integer 2002 1557134057 / 9781557134059 Paperback Fine n/a Paperback 7.5 x 5 x 0.3 inches
New. Fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Unflinchingly rigorous and nuanced, Jean Donnelly's Anthem contains a poetry "as real as this house," comprising some of the most riveting writing on motherhood ("mothers nibble a cold/ dinner at midnight// generations stamp the water/ with shots & breeds of rats") since Alice Notley's Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. In four long pieces, two of them in prose, Donnelly asks and answers: "Where's your hand. There's your hand. Jack in a sleeve makes it a hand. You can draft a poem." Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Through prose poems, lyric poetry, and other commentary, author Jean Donnelly, in her first major work of poetry, explores the very nature of poetry, which "hitchhikes between chapels," while she makes profound literary observations on the nature of the medium. Bernstein writes of her work: "Anthem is fresh as the first moment of the rest of your live, where invention is an attribute jof grace and the intimacy of the newly coined rules the roost. O can you hear the charms bursting in ear."Jean Donnelly lives in the Washington, D.C. area, is a graduate of George Mason University, and co-founder of So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.
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2.91 GBP
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Dunn, Douglas The Donkey's Ears (Faber Poetry)
Faber and Faber 2000 0571204260 / 9780571204267 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.The Donkey's Ears is everything modern poetry should be: clever, lyrical, accessible, enlightening. It tells, in mildly formalised rhyme and metre, the fascinating story of the Russian Baltic fleet, that set sail from Saint Petersburg in 1905 and voyaged
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1.15 GBP
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Dunn, Stephen Local Visitations: Poems
W W Norton & Co Ltd 2003 0393052001 / 9780393052008 Hardcover Fine Hardcover
New. Fine in publisher's quarter-bound board in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of domestic emotions and New Jersey landscapes returns to familiar spaces and themes in this comfortable and comforting (if rarely surprising) 12th book. As in previous volumes, Dunn sorts his poems into related series, all of which exemplify the plain diction and commonsense homilies for which he has been widely admired. The first sequence follows a modern-day Sisyphus, whose middle-aged troubles readers may easily match up with their own: "Sisyphus in the Suburbs," seeking Christmas presents, hopes to "walk through the unappeasable/ crowds as if some right thing/ were findable and might be bestowed." Dunn (Loosestrife, Between Angels, etc.) gathers his newest poems of marital love into a less detailed, perhaps more personal second section ("Best to have a partner whose desire matches yours"). The third and most ambitious sequence imagines a queue of "Great Nineteenth-Century Writers" in the poet's own contemporary South Jersey. These poems merge the chosen writers' favorite themes and phrases into Dunn's own quiet, demotic language: "Dickens in Pleasantville" begins "It is neither the best nor worst of times," while "Melville at Barnegat Light" "could hear sounds/ of life from distant and disappearing shores." Dunn's quiet free verse keeps matters of diction and music on deep background, hoping to focus on ready emotion instead. Here as in his previous work, he offers a plain and sometimes plaintive introspection, a panoply of lightly sketched driveways, shopping malls and seashores, a real attempt to represent his region (South Jersey) as well as a nation's careful coccooning. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. ... Long admired for the intimacy and candor of his plain, pointedly spoken lyrics on the quandaries and ironies of middle-class life, Dunn takes a more overtly literary approach in his first collection since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours in 2001. The opening section of poems recasts Dunn's average American as the mythic Sisyphus, imprisoned by repetitive work ("a repetition/ which would never mean more/ at the end than at the start") and yet bereft without it ("But more often he finds himself dreaming/ of his rock, wishing it back, the better/ to defend himself against so many hours"). Nearly half the collection transports 19th-century literary figures to contemporary New Jersey towns ("Mary Shelley in Brigantine," "Hawthorne in Tuckerton"), a series of poems more attractive in concept than in practice, where the subjects often fail to transcend the contrivance they inhabit. But the nine poems at the book's center remind us of Dunn's characteristic strengths: his knack for catching the nuances of sexual abandon ("your respective clothes/ Pollocking the floor"), the dilemmas of infidelity ("The Affair"), or our humanizing dependency on love ("Questions"). For larger collections. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Editor-Philip French; Editor-Ken Wlaschin The Faber Book of Movie Verse
Faber and Faber 1994-07-04 0571173292 / 9780571173297 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.From Publishers Weekly: Readers of this wonderful, if overly long, anthology dedicated to the power of cinema may be best served by skipping the editors' introduction--which spends too much time discussing the "various" and somewhat tenuous connections between verse and cinema--and moving right into the poems. French ( Malle on Malle ) and Wlaschin have compiled an excellent collection of poetry, ranging from e. e. cummings through 1950s work by Frank O'Hara to recent works by John Ashbery. The poems are a must for any cinema lover, and the editors provide copious notes on every poem, explicating film references. The collection is organized into topical sections: "The Silent Cinema," "Hollywood," "The Stars and the Supporting Cast," "Movies as Metaphor," etc. However, most of the poems seem to straddle genres, such as Charles Webb's "After Not Winning the Yale Poetry Prize" (featured in "Movies as Metaphor") in which the author imagines monsters from the horror genre, such as King Kong and Godzilla, descending upon a poetry judge. While impossible to read in one sitting, the volume is perfect for occasional reading; pick it up, and you'll find such delights as Amiri Baraka's "Jim Brown on the Screen," Margaret Atwood's "Werewolf Movies" and John Hollander's "MovieGoing"--whose final line serves as a summary of the joys of movies as well as of reading: "These fade. All fade, Let us honor them with our own fading sight." Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Product Description This collection of poetry about the cinema includes work by almost 100 English-language poets. It guides readers through the silent era to talkies, movie stars, home movies and beyond - the final poem being about recording TV films onto VHS.
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9.33 GBP
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Eliot, T.S. The Confidential Clerk
Faber and Faber 1975 0571081622 / 9780571081622 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
New. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1953. 'The dialogue of The Confidential Clerk has a precision and a lightly felt rhythm unmatched in the writing of any contemporary dramatist.' Times Literary Supplement 'A triumph of dramatic skill: the handling of the two levels of the play is masterly and Eliot's verse registers its greatest achievement on the stage - passages of great lyrical beauty are incorporated into the dialogue.' Spectator About the Author Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He came to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.
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Elizabeth Bishop; Editor-Alice Quinn Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Farrar Straus Giroux 2006-03-07 0374146454 / 9780374146450 Hardcover Near fine Near fine Hardcover
New. Remainder mark. Near fine in publisher's very slightly bumped cloth in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Starred Review. This book is as much Alice Quinn's as Elizabeth Bishop's. The New Yorker poetry editor spent countless hours with the 3,500 pages of Bishop (1911-1979) material housed in the Vassar College library, and particularly with two notebooks that contain drafts from the period 1936-1948, which, Quinn says in an introduction, furnished the "kernel" of the book. None of the material (aside from "One Art," of which 16 drafts are included as an example of Bishop's exacting process) was marked by Bishop for publication but, as Quinn notes, much of it has been quoted extensively by Bishop scholars. Quinn, who also directs the Poetry Society of America, hopes this volume "will provide an adventure for readers who love the established canon," and it is, indeed, a fan's book. But it also contains some terrific lines and images; a few fully realized poems that will eventually enter the Bishop canon; and a delicious look into Bishop's thinking and composition--seeing a bad Bishop poem is a revelation. There are 108 poems (seven less than the Collected), 11 prose pieces, the "One Art,"some sketches and other visual art, drafts and 120 pages of Quinn's excellent notes. Some of the poems are fragmentary; many contain Bishop's own question marks and possible substitutions; all will be cherished by those who love her work. (Feb.) Copyright
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15.07 GBP
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17 |
Elizabeth Bishop; Editor-Alice Quinn Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Farrar Straus Giroux 2006-03-07 0374146454 / 9780374146450 Hardcover Near fine Near fine Hardcover
New. A new book. Remainder mark. Near fine in publisher's slightly rubbed cloth in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Starred Review. This book is as much Alice Quinn's as Elizabeth Bishop's. The New Yorker poetry editor spent countless hours with the 3,500 pages of Bishop (1911-1979) material housed in the Vassar College library, and particularly with two notebooks that contain drafts from the period 1936-1948, which, Quinn says in an introduction, furnished the "kernel" of the book. None of the material (aside from "One Art," of which 16 drafts are included as an example of Bishop's exacting process) was marked by Bishop for publication but, as Quinn notes, much of it has been quoted extensively by Bishop scholars. Quinn, who also directs the Poetry Society of America, hopes this volume "will provide an adventure for readers who love the established canon," and it is, indeed, a fan's book. But it also contains some terrific lines and images; a few fully realized poems that will eventually enter the Bishop canon; and a delicious look into Bishop's thinking and composition--seeing a bad Bishop poem is a revelation. There are 108 poems (seven less than the Collected), 11 prose pieces, the "One Art,"some sketches and other visual art, drafts and 120 pages of Quinn's excellent notes. Some of the poems are fragmentary; many contain Bishop's own question marks and possible substitutions; all will be cherished by those who love her work. (Feb.) Copyright
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10.17 GBP
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Foo, Josey Tomie's Chair
Kaya/Muae 2002 1885030363 / 9781885030368 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback 7.2 x 6 x 0.2 inches
New. Near fine in publisher's slightly rubbed decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.Inspired by a mixed-media installation by artist Tomie Aria, Foo's second book continues her explorations of other artistic disciplines and their effect on the boundaries of writing. Her debut, Endou, featured poems and essays, portions of which were included in The Best American Essays 1995, and the Leah Stein Dance Company has choreographed a series of movement dance pieces, titled Imprint, based on Foo's work. A Malaysia native of Chinese extraction who arrived in the U.S. as an undocumented alien, Foo now works as a lawyer-advocate on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. She juxtaposes her own manipulations of chair-images with textual explorations of space, gesture, position and how individuals occupy their own history: "I am getting up.... I am enfolds what happens where unknown place begins. The results of pressed, compact place (constantly changing) tell circumstances of me.// (Rebound or remain in such situations)." Like film developing in reverse, the narrator is slowly defined by the words and places that surround her, while she also shapes that exterior reality with her own body, ultimately creating a subtle yet undeniably compelling history of displacement, loss and love: "The place, made of parts, is aging./ When the door shuts, I believe I am heart/ and soul you came for, after." Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Inspired by "Arrival," Tomie Arai's 1996 mixed-media installation at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City, "Tomie's Chair" is an allegory of outward and inward movement. The chair is a symbol of rest but also of decision--to rise and move beyond signposts, to change and break bonds, to be independent and create new bonds within one's own static, open spaces; to go further than the signposts at the end of a half-open road. "Tomie's Chair" is a unique book--imagistic, latently philosophical, whimsical, economical, deep. I love reading through the poems." --Edmund White Josey Foo's new collection is a provocative and arresting journey into and out of the place of confidence, where "each rugged stroke of the chalk" becomes "a defiant act of moving towards a promise of quiet." --Arthur Sze Like "Endou", "Tomie's Chair" is an indefinable work. More choreography than inscription, as though air were the page on which it were written. As though composed out of doors. The chair is the most specific object in the field; it centers the field, but the chair is light and the center moves. The speaker is a mere inference: "That there are a thousand stories to affirm the negative of me and perhaps only one story to reverse it." A new work by Josey Foo maintains a beautiful fidelity to the space between objects, beings, words and honors its own immanence with her deft, invisible brush. --C.D. Wright By Josey Foo. Introduction by Tomie Arai. 5.5 x 7.5 in. 15 b/w illustrations
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19 |
Gary Snyder Danger on Peaks
Shoemaker & Hoard 2004-09 1593760418 / 9781593760410 Hardcover Near fine Near fine Hardcover
New. Near fine in publisher's slightly rubbed quarter bound boards in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.
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GL Hart The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil - The Purananuru (Translations from the Asian Classics)
Columbia University Press 2002-09-18 0231115636 / 9780231115636 Paperback Fine n/a Paperback
New. Fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide.This translation of the Purananuru by a distinguished Tamil scholar and a noted poet is unlikely to be rivaled for a long time to come. It is a remarkable achievement, at once eloquent and immensely moving, and deserving of unstinting praise. -- Review Review "This translation of the Purananuru by a distinguished Tamil scholar and a noted poet is unlikely to be rivaled for a long time to come. It is a remarkable achievement, at once eloquent and immensely moving, and deserving of unstinting praise." -- R. Parthasarathy, translator of The Tale of an Anklet
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