Poetry has always been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity, ever since Robert Giroux first brought T. S. Eliot to the company. FSG's personality and literary profile have been defined by both the poets and the prose writers who have made it an imprint with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by every one of the more than one hundred poets FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell were central to the first generation of those poets, followed by the international figures and Nobel laureates Nelly Sachs, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott. Over time the list expanded to include James Schuyler, John Ashbery, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Grace Paley, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Yehuda Amichai, Paul Valery, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ted Hughes, and Adam Zagajewski. Today Carl Phillips, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Ishion Hutchinson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Frederick Seidel, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, and Valzhyna Mort are among the poets who continue FSG's tradition as a premier discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary poetic voices. Poetry and prose are two indissoluble sides of the same coin. This anthology offers a unique perspective on the best of contemporary literature over the past three generations. FSG president and long-time poetry editor Jonathan Galassi contributes a lively history of the role of poetry in the publishing house.

A strong, idiomatic translation of Italy's greatest modern poet.
Eugenio Montale is universally recognized as having brought the great Italian lyric tradition that began with Dante into the twentieth century with unrivaled power and brilliance. Montale is a love poet whose deeply beautiful, individual work confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith with courage and subtlety; he has been widely translated into English and his work has influenced two generations of American and British poets. Jonathan Galassi's versions of Montale's major works--"Ossi di seppia," "Le occasioni," and "La bufera e altro"--are the clearest and most convincing yet, and his extensive notes discuss in depth the sources and difficulties of this dense, allusive poetry. This book offers English-language readers uniquely informed and readable access to the work of one of the greatest of all modern poets.

Montale's incandescently beautiful poetry is deeply rooted in the venerable lyric tradition that began with Dante, but he brilliantly reinvents that tradition for our time, probing the depths of love, death, faith and philosophy in the bracing light of modern history. Montale's poems teem with allusion and metaphor but at the same time are densely studded with concrete images that keep his complex musings firmly tethered to the world. Montale's reputation is international and enduring, and he has influenced generations of poets around the world. This volume contains selections from all his greatest works, rendered into English by the accomplished poet and translator Jonathan Galassi. It serves as both an essential introduction to an important poet and a true pleasure for lovers of contemporary poetry.

'So my mind sinks in this immensity: and foundering is sweet in such a sea' Revisited and reorganized over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a 'reliquary' for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations. It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as 'To Silvia'; and later masterworks such as 'The Setting of the Moon', written not long before Leopardi's death. Infused with classical allusion and nostalgia, yet disarmingly modern in their spare, meditative style and their sense of alienation and scepticism, the Canti influenced the following two centuries of Western lyric poetry, and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell. Jonathan Galassi's direct new translation sensitively responds to the musicality of the Canti, while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi's life and work.