Poezja

-In Edgewater, her powerfully moving and redemptive third collection, Ruth L. Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world, human and natural. In poems both lyrical and grit-laced, she grapples with her twofold, central question: How can we love fully, open-eyed and openhearted amid all the flaws and beauty, each other and the world? How could we not?- -- Jane Hirshfield

-Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body, the daily...

Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to...

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth, ' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour, ' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.

New and Collected Poems: 1931--2001 celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name."

Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political...

The Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi is most beloved for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love in all its forms--erotic, platonic, divine--and Coleman Barks presents the best of them in this delightful and inspiring collection. Rendered with freshness, intensity, and beauty as Barks alone can do, these startling and rich poems range from the "wholeness" one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover's loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship to the immersion in divine love. Rumi,...

Part fable, part diatribe, part elegy, part love song, this extraordinary fifth collection by Campbell McGrath makes poetry of the most unlikely of materials -- his home state of Florida. While at times poignantly personal, McGrath also returns for the first time to the characteristically comic and visionary public voice displayed in the renowned "Bob Hope Poem." Moving effortlessly from prehistory to the space age, he catalogues Florida's natural wonders and historical figureheads, from Ponce de Leon to Walt Disney, William Bartram to Chuck E. Cheese -- "the bewhiskered Mephistopheles of...

This comprehensive anthology attempts to give the common reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The book features a large introductory essay by Harold Bloom called "The Art of Reading Poetry," which presents his critical reflections of more than half a century devoted to the reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves most. In the case of all major poets in the language, this volume offers either the entire range of what is most valuable in their work, or vital selections that illuminate each figure′s contribution. There...

For the first time, the collected prose of national treasure Nikki Giovanni

Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet
Nominated for the National Book Award, this is a journey -- both private and public -- through the trials and triumphs of 1960s America.

Sacred Cows ... And Other Edibles
Winner of the Ohioana Library Award, these fresh and wryly humorous essays explore some of America's lofty institutions and the poet's pivotal life experiences.

Racism 101
This collection of...

Prize-winning poet and New York Times-bestselling author Peter Balakian offers the best of his previous poetry, as well as thirteen new poems.

For three decades, Peter Balakian's poetry has been praised widely in the United States and abroad. He has created a unique voice in American poetry -- one that is both personal and cosmopolitan. In sensuous, elliptical language, Balakian offers a textured poetry that is beautiful and haunting as it envelops an American grain, the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide, and the wired, discordant realities of contemporary life.

Blue Suburbia is a searing memoir so fresh, original, and honest that it will break your heart and renew your faith in the human spirit.

With each spare stroke of her pen, Laurie Lico Albanese paints a vivid portrait of the blue-collar landscape of her childhood -- rusted swing sets, auto body shops, greasy hands, home improvements -- taking readers along for the wild, treacherous ride that leads to her escape. Her mother may stand silently at the sink year after year, or lie in the basement weeping, but Albanese is determined to flee the deadening certainty of her parents'...

from "neither Shakespeare nor Mickey Spillane"

young young young, only wanting the Word,
going mad in the streets and in the bars,
brutal fights, broken glass, crazy women
screaming in
your cheap room,
you a familiar guest at the drunk tank, North
Avenue 21, Lincoln Heights

sifting through the madness for the Word, the
line
the way,
hoping for a check from somewhere,
dreaming of a letter from a great editor:
"Chinaski, you don't know how long we've beenwaiting for you "

no chance at all.

The astonishing collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than fifty years, introducing foreign poets to American readers for the first time.

Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Bly introduced Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, Jimenez, Trastromer, and Rumi. His most recent translations include Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, and the...

The second of five new books of unpublished poems from the late, great, Charles Bukowski, America's most imitated and influential poet -- 143 never-before-seen works of gritty, amusing, and inspiring verse.

in this place

there are the dead, the deadly and the dying.

there is the cross, the builders of the cross and the burners of the

cross.

the pattern of my life forms like a cheap shadow

on the wall before me.

my love

what is left of it

now must crawl

to wherever it can crawl.

the strongest know that death is

final

and the happiest are those gifted with the

shortest journey.

another comeback

climbing back up out of the ooze, out of
the thick black tar,
rising up again, a modern
Lazarus.
you're amazed at your good
fortune.
somehow you've had more
than your share of second
chances.
hell, accept it.
what you have, you have.
you walk and look in the bathroom
mirror
at an idiot's smile.
you know your luck.
some go down and never climb back up.
something is being kind to you.
you turn from the mirror and walk into the
world.
you find a chair, sit down, light a...

the gas line is leaking, the bird is gone from the
cage, the skyline is dotted with vultures;
Benny finally got off the stuff and Betty now has a job
as a waitress; and
the chimney sweep was quite delicate as he
giggled up through the
soot.
I walked miles through the city and recognized
nothing as a giant claw ate at my
stomach while the inside of my head felt
airy as if I was about to go
mad.
it's not so much that nothing means
anything but more that it keeps meaning
nothing,
there's no release, just gurus...

A haunting and inventive book length sequence of poems from the distinguished author of Study for the World's Body.

The Face is both fiercely lyrical and intimately conversational. Coming to terms with the failure of a great love, the speaker descends into his own dark night of the soul. Here are poems that explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly, the speaker reassembles his life and again finds faith in himself and the world. These poems reveal a swirling...