Search Results: Poetry from The Vespiary Book Restoration & Bindery

Examining the connections between history and the imagination, ethics and action, she explores the possible meanings of being white, female, lesbian, Jewish, and a United States citizen, both at this particular time and through the lens of the past.

Winner of the 1988 Merriam-Frontier Award.

Rilke considered the Elegies his greatest achievement. Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, in the winter of 1922. They are part of the same creative vein from which erupted, spontaneously and in far briefer time, the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Another collection of the most distinctive comic voice (in comic verse) of our time. Sometimes pithy, sometimes rambling, always observing sharply, often with kindness: Ogden Nash is unique and his following immense throughout the English and American-speaking world.

This is Alice Walker's fourth volume of verse and her first since she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple.Using short, nonmetrical lines, these simple lyrics meditate on love and lovers, Afro-Amer-ican experience and heritage, Walker's own family past, women, Indians, hunger, the Third World, and poetry itself.'I understand how poems are made,' she tells us, and perhaps she does, but the poems assembled here seem more posed and self-conscious than those of her powerful first volume Once (1968) in which she successfully combined detached observation, emotional urgency, and understatement. Here many of the poems read more like exercises than necessary utterances.

Cover portrait by Josephine Wu. Number 4 in the CutBank Chapbook Series.

The Last Best Place includes over 230 stories, poems, reminiscences, and reports written by 140 men and women. The book is divided into eight sections with introductory essays by William Bevis, Mary Blew, William Kittredge, William Lang, Richard Roeder, Annick Smith, and James Welch.

Within these pages Mary Oliver collects twenty-six of her poems about the birds that have been such an important part of her life-hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows, and, of course, the snowy owl; among a dozen others-including ten poems original to this volume. She adds two beautifully crafted essays, "Owls," selected for the Best American Essays series, and "Bird," one that will surely take its place among the classics of the genre.

Poetry written by Edwin Lester Dana

A distinctive collection of more than 90 effective poetry-writing exercises combined with corresponding essays to inspire writers of all levels.

These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct--the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

This miracle of a book, perhaps the most beautiful group of poetic translations this century has ever produced

This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provencal songs to his English version of Sophocles'Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem. "

The Spirit Level was the first book of poems Heaney published after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book Review, Richard Tillinghast noted that Heaney "has been and is here for good . . . [His poems] will last. Anyone who reads poetry has reason to rejoice at living in the age when Seamus Heaney is writing."

Vinograd became part of the "street culture" of Berkeley beginning in the 1960s and was often called a "street poet". She was also an active participant in the influential poetry slam scene at Cafe Babar in the Mission District from the mid-Eighters through the 1990s, where she yelled "Staaaaaarting!" at the beginning of each night of poetry.

The United States of Poetry combines images from the breakthrough TV series on which it is based with over 80 poems to reveal this nation as never before. It is the first anthology to capture the passion, intelligence, and variety of the New Poetry that is sweeping the country. Three years in the making, including a 10-week, 13,000-mile road trip to film the poets on their own turf, this book is for everyone with a love for the power of the word. The United States of Poetry will inspire and delight as it unveils a new nation, conceived in language, and dedicated to the proposition that you don't have to turn off your mind to have a good time. From renowned Nobel Laureates (Brodsky, Milosz, Walcott) to rock 'n' rollers (Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen), from the Beats (Ginsberg, Baraka, Ferlinghetti) to cowboy poets, rappers, and former President Jimmy Carter, this book is a feast of language and image, energy and meaning. Here, the disparate and unheard languages of our country - pidgin, Spanish, hip-hop,… Read More

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics.Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets--male and female, famous and forgotten--who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By "declining" the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores… Read More

In this latest collection of poems, Charles Simic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, brings us startling new visions of the haunted landscape that has been his oeuvre, where the surreal and the mundane, the sacred and profane, are indistinguishable, a world where "everything is teetering on the edge of everything/With a polite smile". A man waits at a bus stop for the love of his life, a woman (Lady Luck?) he's never met. The world's greatest ventriloquist who sits on a street corner uses passersby as dummies and speaks through us all. Hamlet's ghost walks the hallways of a Vegas motel. Sunlight streams through a windowpane of fire. Mary Magdalene cruises Santa Monica Boulevard. Flies from a slaughterhouse leave bloody tracks across the pages of a book. Jesus panhandles in a weed-infested Eden.

Winner of the 1982 Merriam-Frontier Award

A sweet little book of nature poetry with woodblock prints by author.