The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. This volume presents fresh versions of Sophocles's Theban plays, which include the most famous of the ancient Greek tragedies, King Oedipus. Sophocles reveals the history of Oedipus from the fulfillment of the oracle that foretold he would kill his father, outwit the Sphinx, marry his mother, and have a family, through his banishment and tortured death as a blind man and the attempted redemption of the family by his daughter, Antigone. Translations are by Jascha Kessler (King Oedipus), George Garrett (Oedipus at Colonus), and Kelly Cherry (Antigone).

In Fred Chappell’s introduction to The Kelly Cherry Reader, he writes, “Cherry is a flambeau example of the extremely conscious artist, a writer who mediates ceaselessly upon the problems and possibilities of the poem, the novel, the short story and the essay. She ponders what she has done and how she has done it; she thinks about the approaches and techniques she has employed, and she labors to extend and expand them. This kind of effort is not common to all writers, many of whom will write this year pretty much the same novel they wrote year before last, the same poem they wrote twenty years ago.” Cherry has long been a writer whose work has remained vital and, due to her diligence, fresh. Here, in the Reader, she collects a body of work, much of it no longer in print, and permits us to remap and re-explore where her writing has come from, where it has gone, and where it is bound yet to go; it reacquaints long-time fans and invites new readers to discover the importance of her work.

The power of the written word can transform the human experience... One of the special roles of poetry is to concentrate observations and their attendant emotions in ways that can be a powerful stimulus to our imagination and helps us to transcend the particular moment of occurrence... The Poets Laureate of Virginia featured in this anthology possess this special gift. Our lives are richer for their dedication to their crafts as well as the insights from their hearts.

- Charles W. Steger, President of Virginia Tech

Winner of the 2013 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award In her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world and lives. The poet begins with silence and animal sound before taking on literature, public discourse, and the particular art of poetry. The sequence ""Welsh Table Talk"" considers the unsaid, or unsayable, as a man, his daughter, and his daughter's friend sojourn on Bardsey Island in Wales with the father's female companion. The innocence and playful chatter of the children throw into sharp relief a desolate landscape and failed communication between the adults. In the book's final section, Cherry considers translation, great art's grand sublimity, and the relation of poetry -- the divine tongue -- to the everyday world. Witty, poignant, wise, and joyous, The Life and Death of Poetry offers a masterful new collection from an accomplished poet.

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams, the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake, it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs. In the poems of God's Loud Hand, Cherry conducts, often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry (""Lord save me,"" ""Lord forgive me,"" ""Lord help me""), a metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr, perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a willingness to ask Abraham's great question, ""Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge wisely?"" This intellectual boldness reveals itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points logically, no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks, an exaltation of larks, as they say, that rise each morning to heaven's gate, but instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy's own music. And in what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods. From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama, through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the orchestral outburst of the final group of poems, poetry celebrating its own freedom ot be poetry, in all these parts (""a chorus of lyrics,"" one might say) there is a symphonic unity that astonishes, an ode to joy.

In Observing the Invisible, Kelly Cherry crafts poems that explore the ever-evolving realm of modern physics, confronting the invisibilities and mysteries of the material world. She leverages challenging ideas into a space of contemplative wonder as the book moves from external observation into an increasingly inward space of personal reflection and expression. Throughout, Observing the Invisible remains deliberate in its concentration on what cannot be, almost as if the poems are being erased even as they are being written. Acknowledging that such contradictions cannot sustain themselves for long, Cherry seeks out these difficulties and ultimately finds resolutions.