Search results for ""carcanet press""

Conjurors presents this poet's best work, much of it for the first time.

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These short poems, considered as Iraqi haiku, reflect an urgent wisdom beyond their original borders.

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This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are 'inserted headlong into life' and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work - at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac - Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, 'troubling the stubborn world for meaning'.

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Sarah Broom's poetry profoundly engages the landscape of her native New Zealand. Experienced as both nurturing and menacing, tender and indifferent, it is the context within which other terrains are explored: heightened states of awareness, the physical extremes of illness, the drifts and tides of close relationships, the complexities of motherhood. Intensely conscious of death, her poetry is fiercely attached to life and love.

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Reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, this work records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, and the continuity and remaking of the source.

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This collection of poems rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland describes a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird and then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh. Recording a violent, clannish world of fierce hatreds and passionate loyalties, the ballads tell vivid tales of raids, feuds and betrayals, romances and acts of revenge.

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In this radical anthology, the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space from which to speak and to sing. The anthology comprises an essential selection of some 40 pages from the work of the poet

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The Adulterer's Tongue casts a brilliant light on the world of Welsh-language poetry. Poetry has been written in Welsh for over fifteen hundred years: an ancient literature, it is also a vibrant part of the culture of modern Europe, often overlooked by English speakers. Robert Minhinnick's translations bring six outstanding contemporary Welsh language poets into the spotlight, providing the Welsh texts en face. Minhinnick, himself a leading poet, is conscious of the responsibilities of translating out of a minority language. His versions take risks, but honour the originals' forms and intentions, making audible a wide array of individual styles and voices. The poets here each in different ways remake the language and culture they inherit. This collection testifies to the abiding creative energy of the Welsh language and culture. The poets are: Bobi Jones, Menna Elfyn, Emyr Lewis, Iwan Llwyd, Gwyneth Lewis and Elin ap Hywel.

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In 1997 Matthew Welton received an Eric Gregory award for his poetry, the next day he threw his only copies of the prize winning poems into the Thames, he took the train back to Manchester and started writing again. This book includes everything he has written since.

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The concept of this text is that each piece of writing is a scientific paper of itself, a series of findings. The practices of writing science and poetry are a single discussion of perception carried out with the same eye and ear, and in the same laboratory of language.

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In contemplating her own death, Louise Gluck confronts the possible and the inevitable in this, her ninth and boldest book.

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'Transparently accomplished,' as John Kerrigan has written, 'his work displays the kind of internal "itinerary" which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry'. This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a journey through worlds exotic, domestic, surreal and psychic, explored with visual sharpness and linguistic acuity. This is above all a poetry of colour and celebration, of strangeness blossoming inside familiarity, nurtured with a meticulous patterning of language and form. Eavan Boland has called Lindop's 'a lyric voice that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace, draws you in, reminds you of an ordered and structured world the voice of a happy spirit with, maybe, a measure of regret and an interesting intimation of waste.'

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Keith Douglas enlisted when World War II began, to fight and to try to make sense of history from within its turbulence. Like the major poets of World War I, his art was tried and tempered, and then curtailed. His letters tell the story of a man fully engaged by his art, his times and his loves.

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The poems in Gillian Clarke's Five Fields break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences. There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.

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This text gathers together all Robert Pinsky's poetry, including 21 new poems. The verse essay "An Explanation of America" (Carcarnet, 1980) remains at the heart of this work. The book also includes "Ginza Samba", a history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell", a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), "History of My Heart" (1984) and "The Want Bone" (1990). Also included are some of Pinsky's translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's "Inferno" (1994).

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Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishingly popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borgese and Vladimir Nabokov. This selection of Carroll's verse serves as an introduction to his work. It includes the best-known Alice poems as well as "Sylvie and Bruno", "The Hunting of the Snark" and pieces from Phantasmagoria. The text is illustrated with a number of the evocative original Tenniel drawings.

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This 16th collection by the author contains 59 comic and lyrical poems, including the 13-part title-poem. John Ashbery was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

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Features five key figures of Australian poetry - Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb. Les Murray's introductory essays to the poets evoke the writers' circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work and suggests why their accomplishment have been generally eclipsed.

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The first literary experiences of John Clare (1793-1864) included the tales handed down by word of mouth in his native village, and as a mature poet he reworked them in his narrative verse. This edition, published for Clare's bicentenary, comprises the tales he wished to include in his third collection, "The Shepherd's Calendar" (1827), and previously unpublished poems which show the range of his narrative achievement. The detailed introduction traces the composition of the poems. Clare's own description of local customs, his previously unpublished draft essay on English pastoral poetry, and a full glossary are included. Clare's original spelling and punctuation are preserved.

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"Days Beside Water" is an ideal introduction to the poetry of Gregory O'Brien, one of the best younger writers (and artists) of New Zealand. The poems are set where sea, land and sky, past, present and future, meet in different lights and moods. There are lyrics, comic interludes, an imagined account of the marriage of Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missioner. The theme of spiritual marriage - a union of clements in imaginary or historical contexts - recurs in two sequences: an invented life of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and "The Milk Horse", about a foundling and the Mother Superior of an orphanage. The poems capture the permanent value in moments and emotions, chiefly love. O'Brien's involvement with the graphic arts and add richness to his imagery.

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The great English, Anglican and modernist poet and writer C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol a hundred years ago. This Reader draws on his poetry, fiction, translations, and his literary, political and religious essays. It justifies what his peers and critics said of him. Of the poems Donald Hall wrote in the New York Times Book Review that they 'move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France, they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through [ - ]; they move in love of the old lost life by which the new life is condemned.' Writing of his essays in the same pages Louis Simpson notes 'his fearless views'. 'Mr Sisson isn't afraid to say what he thinks. He isn't looking over his shoulder at an establishment as he writes.' Jasper Griffin in the Times Literary Supplement dubbed him 'one of the great translators of our time'. As a writer he was always starting anew, rejecting, he said, 'whatever appeared with the face of familiarity' and referring the present to those defining periods of English and European history and culture that tried humanity and languages most harshly: the seventeenth century, for example, and the twentieth.

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This extraordinary debut collection by a young Irish poet living in New Zealand marries poetry to the languages of science.

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In this extended elegey for her mother, each poem written in couplets and contained within the space of sixteen lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love.

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A major new sequence by a bestselling Carcanet author pays tribute to a Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet.

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The author turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. This book also includes the 'asked for' and commissioned poems, and the Guardian spreads Clarke has written during her time as National Poet of Wales.

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Poems on death and mortality accompany memoirs of the poet's childhood between Yorkshire and Italy

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Stories of nature, folklore and Romani heritage by an award-winning poet, critic and teacher.

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This debut explores the histories of identity and place.

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The latest collection by an award-winning poet, editor and publisher.

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Sarah Kirsch (1935 - 2013) is recognised as one of Germany's most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry's free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes' translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch's writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch's poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes.

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In Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.

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Comic, cosmic: for Kuppner the terms are inseparable. In the three plaited sections of "The Same Life Twice", Frank Kuppner asks the essential, answerless questions about human existence: What are we doing here? Is it really here? And why here? 'Fortunately,' he writes, 'it is nearly always possible to take notes, even if these habitually contradict each other.' Here are Kuppner's fieldnotes from life in an unfathomable universe. A sardonic Virgil showing us a directionless "Infinity", Kuppner guides us through a reality in which we are just 'one more of the ignorant infinite dots / rather than the vast central vortex we must feel ourselves to be'.

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Chris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his engagement with the precise crafts of language and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem 'Dust' from his 2009 collection Polder, a meditation on extinction: 'dust again the voices of the pages and the voices of the lovers'. Other voices follow, conversations in which civility, memories of friendship, art and literature respond to the desolation of dust, asserting what imagination can create from it. In translations from Old English, sonnets, villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates the fragile place in which we live, 'between space and space - / and both are dark'.

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This collection thinks about two main things: the efforts we make as individuals to find some form of connection between ourselves, and the efforts we make as a group to connect to the environment we live in.

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The poems in Near-Life Experience consider, above all, ideas of attentiveness: to art and experience, to nature and imagination; to the present moment as it happens, what it offers, leaves behind, and means.

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The November-December 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes the rediscovery of the poetry of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, close friend of Frank O'Hara, key figure in the New York School, with an introduction by Rosa Campbell; Sinead Morrissey celebrates Ciaran Carson; Miles Burrows's Postcard from Taiwan; A Song Atlas feature in the Reports pages: John Gallas translations of short lyrics from the corners of the earth and the whole span of poetic history; Anthony Vahni Capildeo on Fire & Darkness; new poems by Jane Yeh; and James Campbell on being spied upon. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.

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The May-June 2023 issue During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes new artwork Antony Gormley and Mary Griffiths; poetry from Gillian Clarke, Tara Bergin, Sheri Benning; wonderful anecdotes from Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Dan Burt, Rebecca Watts, Philip Terry, Jeffrey Wainwright, and Carol Rumens; tributes from Lorna Goodison and Bill Manhire; and an AI generated conversation between William Empson and Robert Graves. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox. https://pnreview.substack.com/

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The July-August 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes Jane Duran on her poet father and Spain; Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk in conversation with Sasha Dugdale, and a wide selection of her poems drawn from the conflict; Recovering the Welsh poet Iwan Llwyd; Tom Pickard’s Chapters of Memory; Introducing German poet Mara-Daria Cojocaru; and Jon Glover, editor of Stand, in conversation. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.

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Shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award (Poetry Book) 2023. Shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award (City of Saskatoon) 2023. Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award 2022. Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada. Sheri Benning's poems chart the ways in which a way of life collapses, the world of the family farm, even as the speaker suffers, too. The first poem in the collection, 'Winter Sleep', is a fever dream: the borders between past and present, between the unconscious and the real, break down. The poem reckons with the devastating social and environmental impacts of the agribusiness industry. The long elegy, 'Let Them Rest', takes its cue from the Dies Irae and the Latin liturgy of the Requiem mass to mourn Saskatchewan's many ruined farmsteads and razed communities. Throughout, the poems trace the still luminous contours of love - for family, for the land - in rendering the horrors of loss. The incantatory voice rises from dream into dark vision. The book also includes lyric poems that give voice to the affective consequences of loss brought on by climate change and factory farming and renew a sense of locality in the teeth of corporate farming practices. Benning has worked with her sister Heather Benning, who constructs large-scale, site specific installations which explore and extend these themes.

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John Birtwhistle has said that 'one writes each poem just to learn how to write it', and insists that he 'doesn't care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One's Own Voice'. The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice comes through. For all their variety of forms and ideas, his poems are consistent in their visual precision, their scrupulous phrasing and their formal clarity. These qualities are brought to everything he touches, whether it is a passing moment of childhood, a natural detail, a wryly stoic observation, or perennial emotions in the face of events from before birth (first foetal movements) to after burial (removal to an ossuary). Many scores of individuals are named or make their appearance in some way. If one poem is satiric, the next is unashamedly lyrical. Several reflect on the adequacy of art, and a feature is the stream of very short pieces by way of illustration or riposte, like the border of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wit and feeling are so interwoven in Birtwhistle's technique, that when it comes to the register of loss and death he is able to find what an otherwise hostile critic admitted 'can be a kind of bridled eloquence'. Word frequency analysis shows a high incidence of time, thought, light, morning, child, apple tree, painting and fossil.

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Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper,' following the example of the great elegists including Milton, to whose Paradise Lost she listened during the period of composition, also hearing the strains of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, of Alice Oswald and Marie Howe. The poem becomes a kind of kingdom, 'one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between'. As well as elegy, Chakraborty composes invocations, verse essays, and the strange extended miracle of the title poem, in which ancient and modern history, memory and the lived moment, are held in a directed balance. It celebrates the natural forces of the world and the rapt experience of balance, form and - love. She declares a marked admiration for poems that 'will write into being a world that already in some way exists'. This is what her poems achieve.

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In 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan’s Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson’s childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in My Reef My Manifest Array. That totemic image of exile feeds an interest in borders and partings that runs throughout the collection. The Cornish landscape of the poet’s childhood, loaded with new significance following the death of his sister, is Wilkinson’s primary locus, but he ventures – flees, perhaps – farther afield, to Portland (Maine), Chicago, Sydney and Busan. Combining extended sequences with brief lyrics, Wilkinson’s lines tie minuscule linguistic knots that give pleasure when unwoven. The reading becomes archaeological as layers and layers of meaning, of feeling, of reason are exposed.

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Errant, Gabriel Levin’s sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book’s day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. `What Drew Me On’ is inspired by Tamara Rikman’s free-floating works on paper and by Plato’s image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly pres¬ences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet’s take on image-making down the ages. `First came sooty beings shinnying up walls.’ There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa’adi’s Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

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Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused - as lovers tend to be - by the inconstant nature of 'the other'. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture's Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality. Eros and Thanatos tap at his funny bone. Does God exist? he asks. Will the nightingale, the one right nightingale, sing?The landscapes of these poems are drawn from the Far East, New Guinea and the Home Counties, where Burrows has served as a doctor, psychiatrist and a teacher. Thematically the poems build on Burrows's eccentric childhood in a vanished but vividly reimagined, even re-invented England, rich in voices, disappointments and epiphanies and always maintaining a dialogue - now mischievous, now outrageous - with the present. The reader gratefully turns the pages, hoping the conversation will continue well beyond the back cover.

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The poems in Breezeway move lightly between the everyday world, with its pleasures and absurdities, and the worlds of literature and art, with theirs. John Ashbery's poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing, the work of an old and always a new master with an uncanny understanding of our age, its fears and fragmentation, its fulfilments. Here is Mr Salteena and the station of the Metro, demystified Middle English mysticism and a peculiarly-paced samba, a drugstore, a supermarket, Batman and his dog Pastor Fido, all concluding in 'A Sweet Disorder', in which Herrick is decisively transformed: 'Pardon my sarong. I'll have a Shirley Temple.'

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A magnificent anthology of the finest works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, perhaps the premier American lyricist of the twentieth century. --This text refers to an alternate paperback edition.

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