Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

Edwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns, the tyranny of love, and unspoken, unnoticed suffering. The fictional characters he created in 'Reuben Bright', 'Miniver Cheery', and 'Richard Cory' and the historical figures he brought to life - Lincoln in 'The Master' and the great painter in 'Rembrandt to Rembrandt' - harbour demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to a new generation of readers.

Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years". He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.

Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Frantz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Csaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria...

Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 goes beyond anything else in print (in French or in English) in that it locates the issues of Cesaire's struggle with an emerging postmodern vision. It will place Cesaire in a strategic position in the current debate in the U.S. over emergent literature and will show him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity.

In her work there is a return to the role of the poet as it served the human race for centuries: to fuel our thinking, show us our world in new ways, and to get us to feel more intensely. The rightness of this summary of Linda Pastan s poetic career in the San Francisco Review of Books will be immediately clear to readers of her new volume, PM/AM."

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) fue un poeta de vocacion infatigable. Mantuvo estrecha relacion con los artistas expatriados de la llamada Generacion Perdida y con escritores franceses de su tiempo. Escribio tambien novela, teatro y ensayo. Williams pertenece a una generacion de ilustres poetas que intentan encontrar vias alternativas a la tradicion poetica inglesa, todavia vigente a principios del siglo XX, y que convirtieron la poesia norteamericana de ese siglo en una epoca dorada. Paterson es un poema-libro dividido en cinco partes, con una estructura organica.

'A whole life, when it is written as a poem, ' says Allen Grossman, 'is like the whole of life.' The structure of his 'New and Selected' poems produces an encounter of the mind with the pasts it knows, while each successive future as it becomes present addresses hard questions to the unknowns crowding behind.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Ted Kooser, who served as United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006), is a poet who works toward clarity and accessibility, so that each distinctive poem appears to be as fresh and bright and spontaneous as a good watercolor painting. He is a haiku-like imagist who imbues his poems with "tender wisdom," and draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life.

Praise for "Delights and Shadows"

"Ted Kooser...has a genius for making the ordinary sacred."--"The New York Times"

"A sense of wonder and compassion runs through this Pulitzer Prize winning volume... Kooser's poetry is understated yet manages to skillfully illuminate the small moments of life."--"Christian Science Monitor"

" Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines."--"The Philadelphia Inquirer"

"There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, "Delights & Shadows." Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms."--Edward Hirsch, "The Washington Post"

""Delights and Shadows" is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained."--Carol Muske-Dukes, "Los Angeles Times"

"Kooser's ninth collection of poems reflects the simple and remarkable things of everyday life. That he often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated....Highly recommended."--"Library Journal"

"Few poets depict the Midwest so accurately or with such tender regard... Kooser excels at the brief, imagistic poem."--"The Kansas City Star"

""Delights and Shadows" raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor's waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser's ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming... This is not an extended, complex or experimental kind of writing, but poetry that rings true, allowing the human sound of being to exist on the page."--"Bloomsbury Review"

"Here is the gift and fragility of life."--"The Wichita Eagle"

"Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere... wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed... Perhaps Kooser's success lies in his determination to see the... things of this world with such clarity and passion that their underlying mysteries, delights, and shadows also become clear, if only for a moment."--"The Georgia Review"

"You can almost see Kooser behind the poems, watching the world like a sketch artist... Kooser displays the same kind of fluid strokes Degas used in his ballet pictures...He is an exquisite miniaturist of daily life."--"The Hartford Courant"

"The poet finds magic in activities and objects typically considered mundane... Metaphors are the treasure of these short, imagistic poems, emphasizing the wonder and delight latent in what is often merely taken for granted."--"Harvard Review"

"Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." --Dana Gioia

"Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic and has a gift for detail and a deceptive simplicity."--"Seattle Post-Intelligencer"

As Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column "American Life in Poetry," which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, including the collaboration with Jim Harrison, "Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry" (isbn 9781556591877).

In this new collection of sixty-two poems Charles Simic paints exquisite and shattering word pictures that lend meaning to a chaotic world populated by insects, bridal veils, pallbearers, TV sets, parrots, and a finely detailed dragonfly. Suffused with hope yet unafraid to mock his own credulity, Simic's searing metaphors unite the solemn with the absurd. His raindrops listen to each other fall and collect memories; his wildflowers are drunk with kissing the red-hot breezes; and his God is a Mr. Know-it-all, a wheeler-dealer, a wire-puller. In this latest lyrical gathering, Simic continues to startle his fans with the powerful and surprising images that are his trademark-slangy images of the ethereal, fantastic visions of the everyday, foreign scenes of the all-American-and moments full of humor and full of heartache.

In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems that make you feel the hairs on a pony's neck.

Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on calls of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final movement blows innocence off the map for good and all.

"The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll." David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review"

Pound, Guide to Kulchur. an iconoclastic revision of culture.

Poems: 1987-1992

This collection, 39 poems written between 1987 and 1992, is the final volume by "a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives," in the words of Adrienne Rich.

"This welcome collection, spanning the last half-decade of Lorde's life, shows the poet connecting the personal and the political with a fluent, conversational voice that holds the reader like great oratory."—Booklist

"In these last poems we recognize the same vibrant, brave and generous soul we knew before. A wonder in itself."—Alice Walker

"This volume resonated with some of the finest poems Audre Lorde ever wrote: sinewy, lyrical, celebratory even in the face of death, and always political in the best sense. Now the poet is gone—but the work lives, and sings."—Robin Morgan

In elegant and lyrical prose, Patti Smith honors the vibrant spirit and person that was Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989). In linked pieces she tells the story of a man on a journey to see the Southern Cross, who is reflecting on his life and fighting the illness that is consuming him. Metaphoric and dreamy, this tale of transformation arises from Smith's knowledge of Mapplethorpe as a young man and as a mature artist; his close relationship with his patron and friend, Sam Wagstaff; and his years surviving AIDS and his ascent into death. Rich in details, it is filled with references to Mapplethorpe's photographs and shows the man beneath the persona. The Coral Sea is Smith's beautiful recasting of her grief to recapture Mapplethorpe's life in the past and his future in his art. Set against photographs by Mapplethorpe, the work reads as a hymn, a prayer, a fable wishing him Godspeed on his latest journey.

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote "Todesfuge" ("Death-fugue"), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exited in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech". His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages. John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work. John Bayley wrote in the New York Review of Books. "Felstiner translates. . . brilliantly".

"Her poems become increasingly unforgettable, indispensable."—The New York Times Book Review

After her near-fatal accident, chronicled in her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond, Maxine Kumin feared that poetry might have "deserted" her. This luminous, reflective collection proves her wrong, and it is a special cause for celebration.

Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, and in a series of poems Kumin finds inspiration in addressing other poets, especially the eminent dead: "Skinnydipping with Wordsworth," "Imagining Marianne Moore in a Butterfly Garden," "Rilke Revisited." Especially intimate and poignant are poems about Anne Sexton, "Three Poems After a Suicide." Finally, nature, both directly and metaphorically, continues to engage Kumin. "Inescapably," she says, "many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to."

Short poems describe our interaction with nature, our observation of reality, and the role of the artist.

Poems examine truth, fiction, the imagination, family life, love, and mortality.

Here, in Elizabeth Macklin's second collection, an only child's responses to the fait accompli of childhood -- decisions already made, accidents of history and family, patterns preset -- come to the adult mind in the presence of change and grief. The mind regroups as it can: "later light on the hills of houses / before us / just as they are, as versus none".