Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg. Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

From Ritual A slow parade of old west enthusiasts, camp song and hymn, came in along the winding way where rural declined to suburban, slow riders and wagoners passing a cow staked to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly up not in vacant lots the ancient icons of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics, in sacrifices and customs of bride-price or dowry. (It's good people no longer make blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores, for example, and in the crunching gravel parking lots of small churches oh but we do.) In his tenth book of poems, Reginald Gibbons immerses the reader in many different places and moments of intensity, including a lake in the Canadian north, a neighborhood in Chicago, the poet Osip Mandelshtam's midnight of social cataclysm and imagination, a horse caravan in Texas, and an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. Last Lake begins with a cougar and ends with bees; it speaks in two ways with reminiscence, meditation, and memorial, and with springing leaps of image and thought.

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways-guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry's ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets-Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.

"This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The great Modernists of most countries are presented here--Paul Valery, Federico Garcia Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Eugenio Montale, Wallace Stevens--as are a range of younger, less eminent figures from the English-speaking world: Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry. . . . The reader will find here a lively debate over the individualistic and the communal ends served by poetry, and over other issues that divide poets: inspiration and craft; the use or the condemnation of science; traditional and 'organic' form."--Alan Williamson, "New York Times Book Review
"

This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible. Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.

Jorge Guillen is one of Spain's most important and productive poets of the twentieth century; yet though recently honored with prestigious literary prizes in Spain, Italy, and the United States, he remains little known in this country. This selection of his poetry and his commentary on the poems comprise an extraordinary introduction of the poet to an English-speaking audience. Ranging over the nearly sixty years of Guillen's poetic career, this anthology consists of the poet's own selection of forty-one poems that represent for him the coherence and unity of his life's work. His commentary on each poem explains its place and significance in this context. With the original Spanish and the English translations on facing pages, the anthology proceeds thematically. The poet asks us to consider the architecture of his work as a whole, and not necessarily his development as a poet. At Guillen's invitation, the translators visited him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they taped the poet reading and talking about his poetry for more than five hours. Guillen on Guillen is the edited transcript of that meeting. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky.
Echoing through western culture for more than two millennia, Sophocles' Antigone has been a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destiny. This exciting translation of the play is extremely faithful to the Greek, eminently playable, and poetically powerful.
For readers, actors, students, teachers, and theatrical directors, this affordable paperback edition of one of the greatest plays in the history of the western world provides the best combination of contemporary, powerful language, along with superb background and notes on meaning, interpretation, and ancient beliefs, attitudes, and contexts.
"Sophocles' text is inexhaustibly actual. It is also, at many points, challenging and remote from us. The Gibbons-Segal translation, with its rich annotations, conveys both the difficulties and the formidable immediacy. The choral odes, so vital to Sophocles' purpose, have never been rendered with finer energy and insight. Across more than two thousand years, a great dark music sounds for us."
--George Steiner, Churchill College, Cambridge
"Produces a language that is easy to read and easy to speak.... Enthusiastically recommended."--Library Journal Starred Review]

Sophocles' tragedies--from "Antigone" to "Oedipus Tyrannus"--are filled with highly wrought, vivid, and emotionally powerful poetry. Yet most translations sacrifice the poetry to convey only the sense of the lines as dramatic speech. This is the first book in English to present Sophocles exclusively as a poet, and the only volume to reveal the full force and beauty of his verse. With a fresh and consistent attention to structure, language, and rhythm across Sophocles' writings, Reginald Gibbons has translated a selection of odes from Sophocles' surviving plays as well as fragments from his lost works. What emerges is a genuinely new sense of a Sophocles who was as much poet as dramatist. Bringing the Greek poet and his world surprisingly close to us, these translations also restore a sense of the long continuity of poetry. Complete with an introduction, this edition reveals Sophocles' poetic brilliance as never before.

In Creatures of a Day, Reginald Gibbons presents intense encounters with everyday people amidst the historical and social contexts of everyday life. His poems are meditations on memory, obligation, love, death, celebration, and sorrow. Some of them show how the making of poetry itself seems inextricably enmeshed with personal encounter and with history. This new collection includes five odes woven from interactions with others, thirteen shorter poems, and Fern-Texts, a kind of biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American 1960s. Using quotations from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fern-Texts interweaves the dilemmas of love, ethics, and political engagement in Coleridge's life when he was in his twenties and in the poet's own life when, at the same age, he lived in California. Ranging from poems of witness to paradoxical speculations, from the personal intimacy of love and death to the broad scope of historical turmoil, Creatures of a Day is an unusual, powerful collection.

Award-winning poet Reginald Gibbons' latest poetry chapbook.

Euripides' Bakkhai is the staple of the canon of Greek tragedy and is required or strongly recommended reading for most undergraduate Classics majors. It also surfaces quite often in non-classics courses focusing on tragedy because its structure and thematics offer exemplary models of the classic tragic elements. The plot of Bakkhai centers around the actions of Pentheus, King of Thebes, who refused to recognise the god Dionysus or permit Thebans to worship him. In revenge, Dionysus drove Pentheus mad, made him cross-dress as a maenad, sent him to worship the god he had spurned, and made his mother, Agave, mistake him for a wild beast and rip him to shreds. Gibbons, a prize-winning poet, and Segal, a renowned classicist, are both leaders in their professions and are well-suited to take on this central text of Greek tragedy. This edition includes an introduction, a new translation, notes on the text, and a glossary.

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways-guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry's ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets-Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.

William Goyen (1915-1983) was an American original, acclaimed nationally and internationally, and one of the most important writers ever to be associated with the regional culture and literary history of Texas. Called "one of the great American writers of short fiction" by the New York Times Book Review, Goyen also authored the novels The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, Come, the Restorer, and Arcadio, as well as plays, poetry, and nonfiction. His literary works manifest an intimate intensity of feeling and an inimitable tone of voice, reflecting Goyen's lifelong desire to create art that was at once a spiritual quest for universal truths and an evocation of the rhythms of speech and storytelling of his native East Texas.

This volume contains all of the uncollected autobiographical writings of William Goyen, including essays previously published in American periodicals and literary journals; interviews published in Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and the French magazine Masques; and previously unpublished materials drawn from Goyen's papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The writings span Goyen's entire adult life, from youthful journals to autobiographical sketches to his long sketch for an autobiographical book, Six Women, which profiles women whom Goyen felt had influenced him deeply: Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Margo Jones, Millicent Rogers, and Katherine Anne Porter. The volume also contains late essays on growing up in Houston, writing from life, and illness and recovery.

While most of William Goyen's work was autobiographical, writing a traditional autobiography proved to be inimical to his artistic sensibility and style. Thus, the pieces collected in Goyen constitute the most complete autobiography that we will ever have from this highly regarded writer.

This special issue of TriQuarterly presents a decade of stories by such writers as Raymond Carver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Barthelme, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Bly, and many others.

Thiahera Nurse's Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil' Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of Nurse's poetry functions equally as underworld and imagined heaven. Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone sees Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Korrynn Gaines, and others not as ornamental nor does the book attempt to canonize the dead women as saints. The poems see them as they are: play-cousins, home-girls, the mirror. Line to line, there is an obsession with keeping all of the women in the poems safe and perhaps resurrectable. The black girl who is alive here lives to switch her waistline to a reggae beat. She is in the middle of the dance floor with a suicide note in her purse as a means of warding off bad juju. Always, she is chasing joy head-on, at warp speed. Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is a celebration that the black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother's funeral repast-she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience - a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown L tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more - these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With "Slow Trains Overhead", he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg. Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggy bank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, "Slow Trains Overhead" evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

Jorge Guillen is one of Spain's most important and productive poets of the twentieth century; yet though recently honored with prestigious literary prizes in Spain, Italy, and the United States, he remains little known in this country. This selection of his poetry and his commentary on the poems comprise an extraordinary introduction of the poet to an English-speaking audience. Ranging over the nearly sixty years of Guillen's poetic career, this anthology consists of the poet's own selection of forty-one poems that represent for him the coherence and unity of his life's work. His commentary on each poem explains its place and significance in this context. With the original Spanish and the English translations on facing pages, the anthology proceeds thematically. The poet asks us to consider the architecture of his work as a whole, and not necessarily his development as a poet. At Guillen's invitation, the translators visited him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they taped the poet reading and talking about his poetry for more than five hours. Guillen on Guillen is the edited transcript of that meeting. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.