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Poetry | - 78 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
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
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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Ashbery, John Chinese Whispers: Poems
Farrar Straus Giroux 2003 0374528802 / 9780374528805 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
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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Balaban, John (Editor) Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poety (A Kagean Book)
Copper Canyon Press 2003 1556591861 / 9781556591860 Paperback Fine n/a Paperback 8 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches
Fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. During the Vietnam war, John Balaban traveled the Vietnamese countryside alone, taping, transcribing, and translating oral folk poems known as "ca dao." No one had ever done this before, and it was Balaban's belief that his project would help end the war. The young American poet walked up to farmers, fishermen, seamstresses, and monks and said, "Sing me your favorite poem," and they did. "Folk poetry is so much a part of everybody's life, my request didn't seem like such a strange proposition," Balaban writes. The resulting collection -- the first in any Western -language -- became a phenomenon within the American Vietnamese community, but the book slipped out of print after the original publisher folded in the '70s. This revised, bilingual edition includes new poems and an eloquent introduction explicating poetry's importance in Vietnamese culture.The Painting The stream runs clear to its stones; the fish swim in sharp outline. Girl, turn your face for me to draw. Tomorrow, if we should drift apart, I shall find you by this picture."In early dynasties, Chinese emperors used to send out officials to record the poetry of the common people because folk songs were believed to be the truest indicators of popular feeling. . . . Consider this book such a sampling. Take it as a guide and enter this world of Taoist sages, parted lovers, melon gardens, concubines, exiled kings, wheeling egrets, rice paddies, bamboo bridges, shimmering moons, and fishtraps." -- from the introduction About the Author John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose prizes include the Lamont Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and two National Book Award nominations. His work has been featured on NPR's "Fresh Air," New York Times, and Utne Reader. He teaches at North Carolina State University.
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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
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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Britten, Benjamin Paul Bunyan: Libretto
Faber and Faber Ltd 1988 0571151426 / 9780571151424 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrapper.
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Christopher, Nicholas Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004
Harcourt 2004 0151010951 / 9780151010950 Hardcover Fine Fine Hardcover
Fine in publisher's boards in like dust jacket. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. From The New Yorker "14 rue Serpentine: A Paris Notebook," one of the new poems with which Christopher begins this three-decade retrospective, assumes what has become the poet's signature form: episodic narrative achieved by means of short scenes, as in an art film, with swift cuts and special effects. Christopher, who is also the author of four novels and a study of film noir, is an enjoyably indulgent director: "You're dreaming of the velodrome / the rings of Saturn spinning / with riders who blur away / like those fast-motion films / of flowers blossoming and dying." He asserts, "Sometimes it's not hours but years that pass in a single day," and that is precisely the sensation induced by this dreamlike and highly visual collection, where punctuation is often scarce and the plausible--a girl in a yellow bikini drinking Campari, say--can quickly turn surreal. Copyright � 2005 The New Yorker ... Since his poetry began appearing in the New Yorker when he was in his early twenties, Nicholas Christopher has been praised as one of America's most important poets by such literary talents as John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht, among others. Crossing the Equator collects Christopher's best work from the past three decades and includes a section of new poems that are among his finest. Exploring with equal brilliance the labyrinths of history and the human heart, the jagged magic of urban life and the illuminations of travel, the luminous and transformative voice of Crossing the Equator puts on display Christopher's dazzling power and myriad depths. ... Cold missiles and a rain of embers accompany the men who slide like shadows into the city faces mud-smeared stones for teeth no eyes... who slit the throats of everyone they encounter until breaking down my door they drag me into the darkness that floods the corridor and lock me in an icy chamber -from "The Last Hours of La�dik�, Sister of Hektor
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Constantine, David Something for the Ghosts
Bloodaxe Books 2002 1852245905 / 9781852245900 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. Near fine in publisher's decorated wrapper.
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Cope, Wendy Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Faber and Faber 2001 0571137474 / 9780571137473 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
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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Creeley, Robert En Famille: A Poem
Granary Books 1999 1887123261 / 9781887123266 Hardcover New Hardcover
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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Donnelly, Jean Anthem
Green Integer 2002 1557134057 / 9781557134059 Paperback Fine n/a Paperback 7.5 x 5 x 0.3 inches
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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Dorfman, Ariel; Grossman, Edith In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages
Duke University Press 2002 0822329875 / 9780822329879 Paperback New n/a Paperback
Very good. Dusty with some bumping and rubbing to publisher's decorated wrapper. Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. Review “For Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, Sept. 11 meant tragedy even before 2001. On Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military seized power in a bloody coup in which President Salvador Allende died. It ushered in more than a decade and a half of dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. . . . Now, in two post-Sept. 11, 2001 books, Dorfman uses that connection to explore universal themes of healing, loss, and justice. . . . [T]he voices of exiles, activists, separated lovers and families of victims convey a sense of love, faith and hope in a world wracked by political violence.” --The Herald Sun “[A] handbook of horror, interlaced as the book progresses with a poetic intelligence and a humanist grief that sings. . . . The facing-page presentation will give readers who are fluent in Spanish the delightful opportunity to enjoy Dorfman’s own linguistic rhythms; and Edith Grossman’s perceptive translations allow the beginner in Spanish, and even those with no Spanish, the chance to move back and forth across the page for an instructive experience of both languages, and a lesson in how the limitations of prosody can be over-ridden by a shared sensibility. . . . This is a timely book, stark and honest, a reminder that the wolves of terrorism are not confined to an area half a world away, but are rampant and still on the prowl in our own hemisphere. Every reader, of whatever political mind, can find evidence here for the perilous varieties of both public and private heroism.” --Sandy McKinney, Octavo “Ariel Dorfman has spent his adult life’ obsessed with problems of pain and justice and redemption.’ Each is a Rosetta Stone, and the bilingual Chilean writer has sought to decipher them in Spanish and English, poems and plays, chiseling deep into scarred humanity, good and evil.” --Dick Gordon, WBUR website "[T]he bilingual edition reflects a reconciliation, begun in his memoir, of the complex allegiances of his life. The work is all the more significant because of the historical specificity of these allegiances. . . . In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land is an important work by one of our time’s significant moral voices. It is worth letting him get under your skin." --David Need, Independent Weekly [Durham, NC] "Ariel Dorfman reveals his gifts as a powerful political poet in In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land. Dorfman’s poems, while possessing the concision and resonance essential to good poetry, are strikingly dramatic, too, animated as they are by a chorus of voices: political prisoners, shattered family members, agitators for change. In this way he both capitalizes on his gifts as a dramatist and satisfies his urgent need, when confronting his country’s dead and missing, to ‘let them speak for themselves.’" --Rachel Wetzsteon, American Theatre "Dorfman . . . has succeeded in inspiring courage in victims and resolve in reformers. . . . Dorfman’s writings, and especially his poetry, show that, though we may buckle and admit defeat, our defeat can only be temporary. We cannot hope for real justice; the odds are too strong against the possibility. What we will strive for is the vindication that the knowledge of the truth will bring. To that end, our literature in every form must be testimony. In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land is irrefutable testimony, not only against tyranny and repression but also for integrity and endurance." --Fred Chappell, Duke Magazine "[T]he spare, understated texts are distinguished examples of both exile writing and what is sometimes categorized as 'literature of human rights.' . . . The translations . . . are natural-sounding and accurate." --Naomi Lindstrom, World Literature Today “In a world increasingly battered with terror and terrorist anti-terror, the American reader will discover here that a telescopic view of what is happening in far lands is more than echoed by this up close and personal report on the dehumanizing events taking place in our own hemisphere.” --Sandy McKinney, Fore
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Dunn, Douglas The Donkey's Ears (Faber Poetry)
Faber and Faber 2000 0571204260 / 9780571204267 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
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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Dunn, Stephen Local Visitations: Poems
W W Norton & Co Ltd 2003 0393052001 / 9780393052008 Hardcover Fine Hardcover
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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Eliot, T.S. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (Faber Pocket Poetry Series)
Faber and Faber 1999 0571202551 / 9780571202553 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
Near fine in publisher's decorated wrappers Available in our UK premises for prompt dispatch worldwide. The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. The phenomenal worldwide success in the 1980s of the musical Cats ref
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Eliot, T.S. The Confidential Clerk
Faber and Faber 1975 0571081622 / 9780571081622 Paperback Near fine n/a Paperback
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