Christmas is both a holiday and a holy day, and from the start it has been associated with poetry, from the song of the seraphim above the manger to the cherished carols around the punch bowl. This garland of Christmas poems contains not only the ones you would insist on finding here ("A Visit from St. Nicholas," "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," and "The Twelve Days of Christmas" among them) but such equally enchanting though lesser-known Yuletide treasures as Emily Dickinson's "The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman," Anthony Hecht's "Christmas Is Coming," Rudyard Kipling's "Christmas in India," Langston Hughes's "Shepherd's Song at Christmas," Robert Graves's "The Christmas Robin," and happy surprises like Phyllis McGinley's "Office Party," Dorothy Parker's "The Maid-Servant at the Inn," and Philip Larkin's "New Year Poem."

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter - a marvellous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo's ''Love Misinterpreted'' to Noel Coward's ''Mad About the Boy,'' from May Swenson's ''Symmetrical Companion'' to Muriel Rukeyser's ''Looking at Each Other,'' these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

An exciting new collection of in-depth interviews with seven important American poets. Interviewees include Ashbery. Hall, Hecht. Justice, Simic. Snodgrass, and Wilbur. An informative, entertaining, candid and occasionally surprising panopticon of a book.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is one of the modern era's most important writers, but his fame as Richard Strauss's pioneering collaborator on such operas as "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Die Frau ohne Schatten" has obscured his other remarkable writings: his precocious lyric poetry, inventive short fiction, keen essays, and visionary plays. "The Whole Difference," which includes new translations as well as classic ones long out of print, is a fresh introduction to the enormous range of this extraordinary artist, and the most comprehensive collection of Hofmannsthal's writings in English.

Selected and edited by the poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy, this collection includes early lyric poems; short prose works, including "The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two," "A Tale of the Cavalry," and the famous "Letter of Lord Chandos"; two full-length plays, "The Difficult Man" and "The Tower"; as well as the first act of "The Cavalier of the Rose." From the glittering salons of imperial Vienna to the bloodied ruins of Europe after the Great War, the landscape of Hofmannsthal's world stretches across the extremes of experience. This collection reflects those extremes, including both the sparkling social comedy of "the difficult man" Hans Karl, so sensitive that he cannot choose between the two women he loves, and the haunting fictional letter to Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he can no longer write. Complete with an introduction by McClatchy, this collection reveals an artist whose unusual subtlety and depth will enthrall readers.

In "Twenty Questions, " one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical -- and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars "Poetica" unavailable elsewhere -- J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind.

McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility -- from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic.

Later sections range through poetry past and present -- from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin -- with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse.

The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, "Twenty Questions" is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

From Sappho to Shakespeareto Cole Porter--a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.

The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo's "Love Misinterpreted" to Noel Coward's "Mad About the Boy," from May Swenson's "Symmetrical Companion" to Muriel Rukeyser's "Looking at Each Other," these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expres- sionism, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well- connected existence. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much- anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. With a carefully curated selection of the artist's best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter's expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter's influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter's paintings.

Praised by poets and critics ranging from A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy to Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay's bold, exquisite poems take their place among the enduring verse of the twentieth century. Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries and readers ever since with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance, and often mischievous wit. J. D. McClatchy's introduction and selections offer new and surprising insights into Millay's achievement. Included are her most beloved and justly admired poems, such as the wry bohemian anthem "Recuerdo" and the sonnet sequence"Fatal Interview," the poetic record of a love affair that is presented in its entirety. McClatchy has also chosen works that extend our sense of Millay's range: translations, her play"Aria da Capo," and excerpts from her libretto"The King's Henchman." "I have for the most part been guided by my taste for Millay at her tautest and truest," writes McClatchy. "There are precise and resonant images everywhere."

This classic, award-winning novel was included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon as a work likely to be cherished by future scholars, and in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels. It treats one of mankind’s most persistent fantasies as a criminal offense.

Flying--it is a transcendental state, the highest exaltation of the soul, paradise itself, and it can be achieved simply by singing a song. But it is also illegal, at least in the state of Iowa, where everything’s rationed, where people live in fortress-villages, and where Daniel Weinreb, intrepid native and incorrigible teen, does a stint in prison for having secretly delivered copies of the Star-Tribune, the immoral daily from the infidel state of Minnesota. While in prison, he is advised by an inmate that if he wants to fly, he must make a mess of his life, and upon release, that is exactly what he does. For Daniel finds that he will do anything in order to fly.

They have inspired poets and challenged translators through the centuries. The odes of Horace are the cornerstone of lyric poetry in the Western world. Their subtlety of tone and brilliance of technique have often proved elusive, especially when--as has usually been the case--a single translator ventures to maneuver through Horace's infinite variety. Now for the first time, leading poets from America, England, and Ireland have collaborated to bring all 103 odes into English in a series of new translations that dazzle as poems while also illuminating the imagination of one of literary history's towering figures.

The thirty-five contemporary poets assembled in this outstanding volume include nine winners of the Pulitzer prize for poetry as well as four former Poet Laureates. Their translations, while faithful to the Latin, elegantly dramatize how the poets, each in his or her own way, have engaged Horace in a spirited encounter across time.

Each of the odes now has a distinct voice, and Horace's poetic achievement has at last been revealed in all its mercurial majesty. In his introduction, J. D. McClatchy, the volume's editor and one of the translators, reflects on the meaning of Horace through the ages and relates how a poet who began as a cynical satirist went on to write the odes. For the connoisseur, the original texts appear on facing pages allowing Horace's ingenuity to be fully appreciated. For the general reader, these new translations--all of them commissioned for this book--will be an exhilarating tour of the best poets writing today and of the work of Horace, long obscured and now freshly minted.

The contributors are Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, Robert Creeley, Dick Davis, Mark Doty, Alice Fulton, Debora Greger, Linda Gregerson, Rachel Hadas, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, Daryl Hine, John Hollander, Richard Howard, John Kinsella, Carolyn Kizer, James Lasdun, J. D. McClatchy, Heather McHugh, W. S. Mervin, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Marie Ponsot, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Ellen Bryantr Voigt, David Wagoner, Rosanna Warren, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, and Stephen Yenser.

Unavailable for a few years, this new edition of Philip Hoy's lengthy interview with the great American poet makes available once again an indispensable guide to Anthony Hecht's work, including extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary work, and ten pages of previously unpublished photographs.

In this classic text, the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In new essays for this revised edition, J. D. McClatchy and Richard Wilbur each offer a personal take on why Rhymes's Reason has played an integral role in the education of young poets and student scholars. "[Hollander] put everything he knew about the structures of poetry-those fabled magic tricks-into a sort of guidebook for those starting out on the trail up Mount Parnassus. . . . There are astonishments on every page."-from the Foreword by J. D. McClatchy "This book's wit and inventive spirit, its self-describing embodiments of form, now offer the beginning poet a happy chance to discover the technician in himself."-from the Afterword by Richard Wilbur "How lucky the young poet who discovers this wisest and most lighthearted of manuals."-James Merrill "What the E. B. White-William Strunk The Elements of Style is to the writing of prose, Rhyme's Reason could very easily become to the writing of verse. . . . Marvelously comprehensive, clarifying and useful, [and] a delight to read."-John Reardon, Los Angeles Times Review of Books "A virtuoso performance and a mandatory text for poetry readers and practitioners alike."-ALA Booklist

Centuries ago, when books were rare, those who owned them would lend them to friends, who in turn would copy out passages they especially liked before returning the precious book to its owner. These anthologies came to be known as Commonplace Books, and modern writers as different as W. H. Auden and Alec Guinness have kept them as well, recording phrases or passages that struck them as wise or witty or quirky. The result is as much the self-portrait of a sensibility as it is a collection of miscellaneous delights. Renowned poet J. D. McClatchy has been keeping such a book for three decades now. This selection from it offers a unique look into what strange facts, what turns of mind or phrase, what glorious feats of language and nature can attract the attention of a poet.The great and the obscure are gathered around the same table, exchanging remarkable opinions. Henry James is speaking of Venice:  The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give." At the other end of the table, Groucho Marx is playing drama critic:  I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse circumstances the curtain was up." Nietzsche and Flaubert, Dizzy Gillespie and Marianne Moore dozens of unexpected and timeless aphorisms and anecdotes that pierce and provoke. Many of McClatchy's own observations about the art and prowess of writing are included as well.This is a book meant to be sipped, not gulped; meant to be read at leisure and pondered on at length.

At last-a definitive selection of the elegant work by a poet at the forefront of American poetry for more than three decades.
With his first several books, J. D. McClatchy established himself as a poet of urbanity, intellect and prismatic emotion, in the tradition of James Merrill, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop-one who balances an exploration of the underworld of desire with a mastery of poetic form, and whose artistry reveals the riches and ruins of our "plundered hearts." Now, opening with exquisite new poems-including the stunning "My Hand Collection," a catalogue of art objects that steals up on the complexity of human touch, and a witty and profound poem entitled "My Prostatectomy"-this selection is a glorious full tour of McClatchy's career. It includes excerpts from the powerful book-length sequence "Ten Commandments" (1998) and his more recent works "Hazmat"(2002) and "Mercury Dressing" (2009), for which he has been hailed as a poet of "ferocious alertness," one who elicits (says "The New Leader") "the kind of wonder and joy we experience when the curtain comes down on a dazzling performance."

College years-when ideas collide, literature intrigues and inspires, lasting passions are first fired-can stamp a young writer for life. This extraordinary book contains the work of dozens of writers whose experiences at Yale over the past three centuries exerted a powerful force on their writing lives. Formed and nurtured by the unique intellectual community of the university, writers as diverse as Noah Webster and Gloria Naylor emerged from Yale to make their own fresh contributions to our nation's remarkable literary heritage. From the galaxy of authors Yale has produced, J. D. McClatchy selects a rich and varied sample. He includes sermons, essays, poems, short stories, and excerpts from novels. The book opens with a section devoted to the work of four great teachers of writing at Yale in recent decades: John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, John Hollander, and Robert Stone. The middle and most generous section of the volume focuses on writers who have been working since the end of the Second World War. Each of these selections casts a strong light on its author and his or her work. In the final section, McClatchy draws on the work of earlier literary figures from James Fenimore Cooper to Thornton Wilder, in many cases retrieving little-known material. A stroll through the pages of this bountiful anthology, dazzling in the diversity of its offerings, will appeal to any reader. Each of the authors was challenged and inspired by Yale. In this volume, each in turn challenges and inspires us. Among the authors and poets in this volume: Jonathan Edwards, Sinclair Lewis, Cole Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Brendan Gill, Robert K. Massie, William F. Buckley, Jr., Calvin Trillin, Paul Monette, Garry B. Trudeau, Claire Messud, Chang-rae Lee

James Merrill himself once called his body of work "chronicles of love and loss," and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life--comic and haunting, exotic and domestic--to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. This volume rings together the best of Merrill--from the domestic rupture of "The Broken Home" to the universal connections of "Lost in Translation"; from the American storyteller of "The Summer People" to the ecologically motivated satirist of "Self-Portrait in a TyvekTM Windbreaker." Merrill dazzles at every turn, and this balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to the work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.
Log
Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,
Dear light along the way to nothingness,
What could be made of you but light, and this?

In "Twenty Questions, " one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical -- and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars "Poetica" unavailable elsewhere -- J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind.

McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility -- from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic.

Later sections range through poetry past and present -- from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin -- with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse.

The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, "Twenty Questions" is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind's nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea-pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis-have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed. This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson's seductive sea-fairies next to Poe's beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge's darkly brooding "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five." And here is Masefield's "I must go down to the seas again" alongside Cavafy's "Ithaka" and Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West." In the wide variety of lyrics collected here-sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers-we feel the encompassing power of our planet's restless

What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force.

Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau; from Keats, Blake and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost's tribute to the evanescence of spring in 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' to Langston Hughes's moody 'Summer Night' in Harlem; from the 'stopped woods' in Marie Ponsot's 'End of October' to the chilling 'mind of winter' in Wallace Stevens's 'The Snow Man', the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage with the world outside ourselves.

Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.
Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume--the first selected poems to be made from Hecht's seven individual volumes--will be captivated by Hecht's dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are "moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies."
This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come.
Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,
God's finger in the cloud, and on the ground
Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all.
But in our fallen state where the blood hunts
For blood, and rises at the hunting sound,
What do we know of lasting since the fall?
Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth,
Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree,
The grasshopper, and the failing of desire,
And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy
Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir
A secret-voweled, unutterable truth?
--from "A Poem for Julia"

Groundbreaking anthologies of this kind come along once in a generation and, in time, define that generation. The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets identifies a group of poets who have recently begun to make an important mark on contemporary poetry, and their accomplishment and influence will only grow with time. The poets gathered here do not constitute a school or movement; rather they are a group of unique artists working at the top of their craft. As editor David Yezzi writes in his introduction, “Here is a group of writers who have, perhaps for the first time since the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century, returned to a happy détente between warring camps. This, I think, is a new—at least in our age—kind of poet, who, dissatisfied with the climate of extremes, has found a balance between innovation and received form, perceiving the terror beneath the classical and the unities girding romanticism. This new unified sensibility is no watered-down admixture, no pragmatic compromise worked out in departments of creative writing, but, rather, the vital spirit behind some of the most accomplished poetry being written by America’s new poets.� Poets include: Craig Arnold, David Barber, Rick Barot, Priscilla Becker, Geoffrey Brock, Daniel Brown, Peter Campion, Bill Coyle, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Ben Downing, Andrew Feld, John Foy, Jason Gray, George Green, Joseph Harrison, Ernest Hilbert, Adam Kirsch, Joanie Mackowski, Eric McHenry, Molly McQuade, Joshua Mehigan, Wilmer Mills, Joe Osterhaus, J. Allyn Rosser, A. E. Stallings, Pimone Triplett, Catherine Tufariello, Deborah Warren, Rachel Wetzsteon, Greg Williamson, Christian Wiman, Mark Wunderlich, David Yezzi, and C. Dale Young.