Literary studies: poetry and poets Books
Franciscan Academic Press The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Dana Gioia
Book SynopsisDana Gioia stands out as one of the most important poets, critics, and defenders of the arts in our day. His advocacy of the renewal of rhyme and meter in poetry, his work as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and his recent efforts to strengthen the role of Catholic artists in American life have made a great impact on our public culture over four decades. Poet and scholar Matthew Brennan provides a thorough introduction to the life and work of this living classic of American poetry.The Colosseum Critical Introduction SeriesEach title in the Colosseum Critical Introduction Series provides a thorough study of the life and work of an important American writer who has sought to renew the craft and deepen the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of contemporary poetry. Intended to be at once brief and compelling, these introductory texts will help readers find their way into some of the best voices in the literature of our day.
£11.95
Franciscan Academic Press Before the Pen Runs Dry: A Literary Biography of
Book SynopsisThrough the lens of Samuel Hazo's engaging poems, Janine Molinaro tells the story of this fascinating man's life and career. Facilitated by extensive interviews with the poet and deeply moving excerpts from his personal journals, Molinaro provides insights into Hazo's family history, childhood, military service, and teaching career; his forty-three-year stewardship of the International Poetry Forum, which brought more than eight hundred international poets and performers to the city of Pittsburgh; his beloved wife Mary Anne and son Sam; and his views on politics, education, love, friendship, mortality, war, gender, poetry, and a host of other topics. The book captures pivotal periods and significant events in Hazo's life that shaped the person and writer he became as well as the remarkable individuals who added meaning and vibrancy to his life's collage. Candid, wise, and conversational, Hazo's poems are central to this pioneering biographical form—guiding the narrative as opposed to merely adorning or supporting it. Hazo once noted, "There are too many analytical books about authors and not many that see life as a story—which is what life is." Before the Pen Runs Dry is such a story: an intimate portrait of the man who penned a lifetime of compelling and memorable poetry.
£23.70
Nimbus Publishing (CN) Evangeline
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£9.95
Nimbus Publishing Limited Évangéline: The Many Identities of a Literary
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£25.16
Wilfrid Laurier University Press DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono
Book SynopsisDisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiqueing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley’s introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.Trade ReviewDisPlace is the contradictory being of Nduka Otiono: He’s “here” in Canada, but he’s also a dissident resident of Nigeria. He exists in the self-appointed Shangri-La that is the once-boastfully slaveholding Americas; but he insists on remaining the anointed exorcist of an Africa still decadent with bullets, with “militicians,” who play baboons rather than messiahs.—George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, 2016-17 The most personal of Otiono’s poems are mostly elegiac, with death pawing at the door, and the language swaying with a new, lithe spring to it and the strength one associates with fine, high-tensile wire. The poet’s imagistic reflections on life are at once sonorous, contemplative, bold, and defiant." - Chris Dunton, Professor of Literature in English and former Dean of The Faculty of Humanities at The National University of Lesotho, Roma
£18.00
Guernica Editions,Canada A Mingus Lullaby
Book SynopsisCharles Mingus, the renowned musician, composer and civil rights activist, claimed to be three people, was married to one of his wives by Ginsberg, and collaborated with such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Joni Mitchell. Twelve of the poems in A Mingus Lullaby explore moments in his life, compositions, performances, or are part of a fictional conversation between Mingus and the author. Themes from his life permeate throughout the collection.Trade Review"Swan moves through time, uses the language of broken English to emulate characters, takes us from Earth to Mars with such insight and empathy his voice becomes the voices of characters we know are curious about, abhor and leaves us with a greater understanding of the plight, strength and intimacy of strangers seen through the eyes of a gifted poet. Expect nothing ordinary in his work." -- Cathy Petch
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada Everything Reminds You of Something Else
Book SynopsisThin is the line between dreaming and wakefulness, wellness and disorder, here and there, this and that. Elana Wolff's poems illuminate the porousness of states and relations, the connective compulsion of poetic perception, in language that blends the oracular and the everyday, the elliptical and the lucent, the playful and the heart-raking. The de- and re-constructive workings of the poems in Everything Reminds You of Something Else argue for empathy and attentiveness. At the core of this work is the belief that art is the sanest rage.
£16.16
Four Courts Press Ltd Hearing Heaney: The Sixth Seamus Heaney Lectures
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£69.08
Carcanet Press Ltd Visible Voices
Book SynopsisIn Visible Voices Nicolas Barker traces the history of the 'translation' of poetry from a spoken medium to a written, or printed, medium.
£19.39
Carcanet Press Ltd John Clare by Himself
Book SynopsisThis text gathers together all of John Clare's autobiographical writing. The book extends, corrects and replaces the "Autobiographical Writings of John Clare", edited by Eric Robinson (Oxford, 1983). Clare's "Journal" is set beside "Sketches" and "Autobiographical Fragments", as well as his "Journey Out of Essex". Extracts from his asylum letters are included, his will, and two maps of Clare's countryside and his "Journey".
£17.06
Carcanet Press Ltd Metamorphoses: Essays
Book SynopsisEmerging from the practice, art, and magic of translation, this essay collection concerns itself with the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation--literary metamorphosis--extends this process. The syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, is offered as an example of the way visual experience can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet. Demonstrated is how, with a wealth of examples and close readings, poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realized though literary expression and technique. In these essays a major poet reflects on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.
£18.26
Carcanet Press Ltd Wordsworth's Poets
Book SynopsisA unique opportunity to examine the apprenticeship of a great writer, this selection of poems composed between 1785 and 1790 reveals a precocious and remarkably accomplished early talent and shows that even in his earliest work, Wordsworth was already preoccupied with the themes that would later be explored fully in "The Prelude,"
£15.58
Carcanet Press Ltd Book of Stones
Book Synopsis"Book Of Stones" is very much made out of the things around the author - living in the new South Africa, being part of a continent and its life and history and processes.
£15.55
Carcanet Press Ltd A Halfway House
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£15.55
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: John Gay
Book SynopsisJohn Gay (1685-1732) was part of the "association of wits" that included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. But though Gay's exposure of weakness and folly is no less acute than theirs, his wit is characterised by a benign and ironic sense of the fallibility of humankind. Gay is a great master of parody and pastiche, and the quality of Gay's poetry, as Marcus Walsh points out in his introduction, lies in its "sense of verbal play". The ironic appreciation of "life as it is" that makes his "Beggar's Opera" enduringly popular is present in his poetry. "Trivia", which Gay's biographer called "the greatest poem on London in English literature", teems with the chaotic energy of the 18th-century city, while "The Shepherd's Week" is a pastoral of comic realism. This selection enables Gay's poetry to take its place alongside his drama as one of the most distinctive reflections of his age.
£11.58
Carcanet Press Ltd Epigrams and the Forest
Book SynopsisBen Jonson is overshadowed as a dramatist by Shakespeare, his great contemporary. As a poet, however, he stands high. His polished urbanity, direct expression and classicism have been especially valued in modern times. T.S. Eliot says Jonson "incorporated his erudition into his sensibility", creatively assimilating Horace, Martial and Juvenal into his poetry and hence into English literature. Richard Dutton's introduction illuminates the structure and context of Jonson's "Epigrams" and "The Forest". Dutton shows them to be carefully structured poem sequences that display Jonson's command of poetic forms and involve the reader in evaluating a range of shifting perspectives. Jonson's recurrent theme, the nature of truth and virtue, is as pertinent to day as it was in his own time.
£15.92
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems and Plays
Book SynopsisAt the beginning of his career Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) wrote vigorous poetry, and plays which in their form and vehement characterisation resemble the later work of Samuel Beckett. This volume includes major works: One-Way Song, and Enemy of the Stars in its two very different versions, as well as other writings that can now be seen as central to the formation of Lewis's work. The plays and poems crackle with ferocious energy, concentrated and brilliant, as Lewis creates a literary equivalent to the visual revolutions of Cubism and Vorticism. He explores how an artist should think and write in an oppressive world, the relationship between imagination and action. This edition, with Alan Munton's annotations, is a definitive text based on Lewis's own final corrections. An introduction by C.H. Sisson places these radical works in the context of Lewis's other writings.
£15.19
Carcanet Press Ltd Star City: Including the Coalville Divan and
Book SynopsisJohn Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes moral, miniature movies out of the great scripts of old Persian sages, each of the one hundred sonnets returning a proverb to the particular lives, moments and places that made it. These little, colour narratives put Life back up there with its Meaning. Volume two has its mind on different things. If Beckett comes before Oort, and Fellini is next to the Unknown Soldier; if Alfred Schnittke can almost touch the muezzin who was a tape recorder, and William Bees VC is three steps away from a Mongolian marmot-killer, then it must be Excellent Men. Here are the lit-up males of a writer's heart, claimed by admiration, kinship, amazement, love, poetry and a good laugh. Each to his own.
£15.77
Carcanet Press Ltd Bricks and Ballads
Book SynopsisBallads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was 50, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful bell tower and its nesting jackdaws turned to a cry in the air. The bricks go off to salvage and are lost in other streets but the poems remain. Ballads are bare and brief; tried by time. They salvage but they sing, stubbornly. Their stories are sure: a woman in the kitchen, Handel at his illicit feast, the Russian dog heading for space. Shakespeare stops for breath on the stairs. Mithras is the milkman. There are cats and wild cranesbill. The poems nudge us on.
£15.63
Carcanet Press Ltd Pastorals
Book SynopsisApproach places, times and states of mind in a mosaic of knowledge, invention, memory and entertainment with this collection of poems. The personal and the public interact in many poems and others address personal histories and their creative consequences, alongside mythological motifs.
£16.15
Top Shelf Productions The Mirror of Love
Book SynopsisAcclaimed storyteller Alan Moore (From Hell, Jerusalem) yields this epic poem recounting the history of same-sex love, revealing a hidden side of Western culture through the lives of its greatest artists. Sappho, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, and many others are woven into this rich, visceral piece. Originally published in 1988, The Mirror of Love sprang from Moore''s activist heart as a reaction to Britain''s controversial anti-gay law, Clause 28. In the past, Mirror has been translated into both a comic book and a stage production, but Top Shelf presents it as it was meant to be, a hardcover book illustrated with over forty full-color photographs from acclaimed artist José Villarrubia.Included in the 128-page special edition is an essay about the poem and its previous incarnations, an index of characters and places, a selection of classic poems quoted in the text, and a bibliography.
£20.25
Carcanet Press Ltd Map of the Territory
Book SynopsisNigel Forde is fascinated by things in the process of change: music, the momentary epiphany, the precarious balance of twilight rather than night or day. The poems, written over a period of years, meditate on memory and landscape: in the unremarkable and evanescent lives can find their greatest clarity. Two central sequences, 'A Map of the Territory' and 'Touchstones', express ways of remaking memories in language. 'Touchstones', a Hungarian sonnet sequence, explores the creative possibilities of strict poetic forms. 'A Map of the Territory' attempts both truth to events and to what distance has made of them. The collection maps a landscape and the mind that it has shaped.
£15.63
Irish Academic Press Ltd Louis MacNeice: In a Between World
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£65.00
ATF Press Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes
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£56.19
The Library of America Edgar Allan Poe: Poems and Poetics: (American
Book SynopsisRichard Wilbur, a former Poet Laureate of the United States and one of the most admired poets and critics of his generation, revisits the poetry of Poe, exploring the philosophical seriousness of verse often identified with its macabre and gothic surfaces. Here is the whole canon of Poe’s mature poetry, along with a judicious selection of prose writings that illuminate Poe’s poetic goals.“Our poetry, in Poe’s view, must specialize in aesthetic transcendence, eschewing the truth, morality, and passion which might entangle it with this present world. The whole movement of Poe’s poetry is away from the material here and now. . . . The poet’s strategy is to accomplish a mock-destruction of earthly things, estranging the reader from material reality and so, presumably, propelling his imagination toward the ideal.” — Richard Wilbur, from the introductionAbout the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.Trade Review“Poe is so frequently reprinted that another selection can’t possibly seem fresh. Reading him with the guidance of Wilbur, however, helps one think about him again. . . . [Wilbur] appends selections from Poe’s writings about poetics to help understanding of his cosmology and discusses some of Poe’s most intense stories to exemplify his symbolism. The poems, presented chronologically, show again what a young prodigy Poe was, formulating his poetic thought while still in his teens, and what a sonorous Romantic musician he became.” —Booklist
£17.00
The Library of America Poets of the Civil War: (American Poets Project
Book SynopsisWriters on both sides of the American Civil War “brought to the crisis” (in editor J. D. McClatchys’ words) “poetry’s unique ability to stir the emotions, to freeze the moment, to sweep the scene with a panoramic lens and suddenly swoop in for a close-up of suffering or courage.” This vibrant collection brings together the most memorable and enduring work inspired by the conflict: the masterpieces of Whitman and Melville, Sidney Lanier on the death of Stonewall Jackson, the anti-slavery poems of Longfellow and Whittier, the front-line narratives of Henry Howard Brownell and John W. De Forest, the anthems of Julia Ward Howe and James Ryder Randall. Grief, indignation, pride, courage, patriotic fervor, ultimately reconciliation and healing: the poetry of the Civil War evokes unforgettably the emotions that roiled America in its darkest hour.About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.Trade Review“McClatchy’s selection has not only breadth of representation but fine choices within forms, causes, and poets.” —Sewanee Review
£17.00
The University of Akron Press Poems at the Edge of Differences: Mothering in
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£35.14
Ave Maria University Press A Lifetime With Hopkins
Book SynopsisIn these brief, readable, and insightful essays, Fr. Milward delves into the poetry of Hopkins and his central ideas on God the Trinity, the self, nature and people.
£28.45
Ave Maria University Press Languange Redeemed: Chaucer's Mature Poetry
Book SynopsisThe contemporary reader of Chaucer's poems is often surprised to discover how bawdy they are. A superficial veneer of Christian culture seems to give way easily in Chaucer to the celebration of a light-hearted hedonism. In this readable study, written for students and experts alike, the eminent literary scholar David Williams guides the reader carefully through Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. He shows that below the surface Chaucer's narrative reveals an author attuned to the Christian story of creation, fall, and redemption. His characters expose the sophistries, spiritual and intellectual, that Chaucer seeks to mend.
£28.45
Baylor University Press R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology
Book SynopsisThis volume celebrates the work of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) and illuminates the theological implications of this famous twentieth-century poet-priest's pilgrimage. By providing detailed readings of individual poems, Davis explores the depth and imagination of Thomas's profound theological vision.Trade Review"This book uses strategically selected readings to trace the development of particular themes and preoccupations in Thomas' work." - Barry Sloan, University of Southampton "Davis says of R S Thomas, "His pilgrimage will long be traced by faithful followers and by readers still to come." Davis' book succeeds in showing why this should be so." - D Z Phillips, Professor Emeritus, Swansea UniversityTable of Contents1 Poetry in Theological Crisis 2 Finding and Following R. S. Thomas 3 Agnostic Faith 4 Poet-Priest and the Apocalyptic Mode 5 Mirrors and Mirror Imagery 6 Gaps in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas 7 Fathers and Sons 8 The Quarrel with Technology 9 R. S. Thomas and Soren Kierkegaard 10 R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens Conclusion
£45.66
Hanging Loose Press Blue Hanuman
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£17.10
Schaffner Press Short Circuits: Aphorisms, Fragments, and
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£17.09
Amherst College Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson's Master Hours
Book SynopsisA major event in Dickinson scholarship, Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson's Master Hours proposes new constellations of Dickinson's work as well as exciting new methodologies for textual scholarship as an act of intimate editorial investigation.
£28.95
Wooden Books Poetic Meter and Form
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£7.55
Caitlin Press In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Form Poetry
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£23.96
Massey University Press Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2023
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£23.19
Les Belles Lettres Ovide, l'Art d'Aimer
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£32.00
Les Belles Lettres Virgile, Bucoliques
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£38.29
Les Belles Lettres Minimum Respect
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£22.88
Les Belles Lettres Roland Furieux - Orlando Furioso T. II: Chants XI
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£55.00
Les Belles Lettres Roland Furieux - Orlando Furioso T. III: Chants
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£55.00
Klincksieck Faut-Il Comprendre La Poesie ?
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£23.00
Classiques Garnier Yves Bonnefoy Ou l'Experience de l'Etranger
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£36.00
Classiques Garnier Louis de Gonzague Frick Dans Tous Ses Etats:
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£83.60
Classiques Garnier Masques, Corps, Langues: Les Figures Dans La
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£83.60
Classiques Garnier Poesie Moderne Et Oralite Dans Les Ameriques
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£70.30
Classiques Garnier La Poesie Et Le Latin En France Au Xixe Siecle
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£95.95
Classiques Garnier Oeuvre Poetique Complete
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£125.40