Influenced by the Chinese and Japanese masters, Hamill's "Dumb Luck "affirms his ability to give us back the world and all its vicissitudes. Here you will find Zen fables, elegies and haiku, bluesy riffs, and poems that celebrate births, marriages, the liberating exile of the poet, as well as verses that present the dumb luck that has peppered the poet's life.

Sam Hamill is the author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, as well as three collections of essays. He is the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and contributing editor at "The American Poetry Review."

"Carruth is] one of the lasting literary signatures of our time."--"Library Journal" (starred review)

"Carruth...contains multitudes."--"Booklist" (starred review)

"Carruth is a people's poet... a virtuoso of form."--"The Nation"

This "portable Carruth" gathers new poems with the essential works from a major American poet. Included are lyrics, short narratives, comic, meditative, and erotic poems that engage politics, music, rural poverty, and the cultural responsibility of artists. As Sam Hamill writes in the introduction:

"Carruth's great body of work is a world... Like the jazz he so loves, his poetry ranges from the formal to the spontaneous, from local vernacular to righteous oratory, from beautiful complexity to elegant understatement."

From "A Few Dilapidated Arias"

""Our crumbling civilization"-a phrase I have used often
during recent years, in letters to friends, even in
words for public print. And what does it mean? "Can"
a civilization crumble? At once appears the image
of an old slice of bread, stale and hard, green with mold,
shaped roughly like the northeastern United States, years
old or more, so hard and foul that even my pal Maxie,
the shepherd/husky cross who eats everything, won't
touch it. And it is crumbling, turning literally into
crumbs, as the millions of infinitesimal internal connecting
fibers sever and loosen. The dust trickles and seeps away."

Hayden Carruth, a longtime resident of Vermont, currently lives in upstate New York, where he taught at Syracuse University. His many honors include the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski (1941-2021) was one of Europe's major poets, and one of his country's best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region. This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back.

Quintessential classical Japanese haiku - selected and translated by one of America's premier poet-translators - now available in a pocket edition. In this collection of haiku, translator Sam Hamill has compiled the best from the tradition, spanning the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on the three great masters: Bash, Buson, and Issa. Based on images from nature, the poems address the themes of joy, temporality, beauty, wonder, loneliness, and loss.

Sam Hamill is that rare figure whose life is continually in dialogue with the rich and diverse tradition of poetry, whether that dialogue takes the form of translating the work of a poet long dead, writing a poem in celebration of the work of a contemporary poet, or musing on what it means to be a poet himself. A true poet's poet--and also the founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, one of the most influential publishers of poetry today--Hamill has been part of America's poetry scene for decades and has won numerous prizes and awards for his work. This collection presents the best of Hamill's work from his thirteen books of original poetry and from his numerous critically acclaimed works of translation, as well as a number of new, previously unpublished poems.

This extraordinary collection of poems--covering thirty centuries of poetry from around the world--celebrates the erotic spirit in all its forms, from the passion of sexual desire to the intense longing for spiritual union. Beginning with anonymous Egyptian love songs from the fifteenth century BCE and continuing up to today's finest poets, the book draws on a broad range of cultural and spiritual traditions, including ancient Greek and Roman erotic poems, ecstatic Sufi songs, Chinese elegies for lost lovers, and bawdy English satires. Many of the poems are presented here in new translations by the editor, Sam Hamill, one of America's premier poet translators.

A Zen poem is nothing other than an expression of the enlightened mind, a handful of simple words that disappear beneath the moment of insight to which it bears witness. Poetry has been an essential aid to Zen Buddhist practice from the dawn of Zen--and Zen has also had a profound influence on the secular poetry of the countries in which it has flourished. Here, two of America's most renowned poets and translators provide an overview of Zen poetry from China and Japan in all its rich variety, from the earliest days to the twentieth century. Included are works by Lao Tzu, Han Shan, Li Po, Dogen Kigen, Saigyo, Basho, Chiao Jan, Yuan Mei, Ryokan, and many others. Hamill and Seaton provide illuminating introductions to the Chinese and Japanese sections that set the poets and their work in historical and philosophical context. Short biographies of the poets are also included.

Habitation collects the best poetry from a career spanning more than forty years by the distinguished northwest poet-editor-translator, Sam Hamill. Drawn from fifteen volumes of celebrated poetry, whether in brief haiku-like poems or long-ranging narratives, Habitation presents a lyrical voice is unique in American poetry today. Jim Harrison has declared, "Hamill has reached the category of a National Treasure," and Hayden Carruth has written, "[His] poetry is no less than essential."

The "Chuang Tzu " has been translated into English numerous times, but never with the freshness, accessibility, and accuracy of this remarkable rendering. Here the immediacy of Chuang Tzu's language is restored in a idiom that is both completely fresh and true to the original text. This unique collaboration between one of America's premier poet-translators and a leading Chinese scholar presents the so-called "Inner Chapters" of the text, along with important selections from other chapters thought to have been written by Chuang Tzu's disciples.

One of the most famous Japanese writers of the 20th century, Yosano Akiko is the author of more than 75 books. Although probably best known for her exquisite erotic poetry, Akiko's work also championed the causes of feminism, pacifism, and social reform. "River of Stars" is her first book presenting the full breadth of her poetic vision. Illustrations.

Over the past twenty years, Sam Hamill has published over than thirty volumes of original poetry, essays, and translations of poetry from classical Chinese, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Latin and Estonian. As founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, he has made service to poetry a way of life for nearly a quarter century. But it is in his poetry, in his passionate, lucid insistence that poetry is an essential component of enlightenment, that he distin-guishes himself. "He teaches us" Larry Smith has written in Small Press, "that the 'Zen' poem is any poem that is truly alive to the moment." Selecting from among all his published volumes of poetry except the book-length Triada, and adding over fifty pages of previously uncollected new work, Hamill brings the poetics of "engaged Buddhism" face-to-face with a sweeping erudition and technical virtuosity drawn from eastern and western traditions. Informed by personal experience as various as building his own home in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest, teaching for thirteen years in prison writing workshops in Alaska, Washington, and California, teaching in artists-in-education programmes across America, or his decades-long commitment to working on behalf of domestic-violence programs, non-violence and conscientious objection, his poetry is deeply felt and plain-spoken, at once scholarly and accessible.