Search results for ""Author Carmela Ciuraru""

A Washington Post Most Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year“Delicious and infuriating . . . unputdownable.”—Sadie Stein, The New York Times“A tour de force. . . . The stories are gripping, horrific and sometimes funny, but most important of all they are important.”—The Washington Post“A compulsively readable book.”—The Wall Street Journal“Enthralling . . . incendiary reading.”—Daphne Merkin, Air MailIn Lives of the Wives, author Carmela Ciuraru offers a witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five famous writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, fame, and power in these complex and fascinating relationships.The legendary British theater critic Kenneth Tynan encour

Read more less

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this anthology features the richly varied voices of sons and daughters, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves. From eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o's witty 'On the Birth of His Son' to Dylan Thomas's poignant 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night'; from Sylvia Plath's searing poem 'Daddy' to Yeats's tender 'A prayer for My Daughter'; from Homer to Seamus Heaney, from Shakespeare to Milosz, the poets and poems collected here range across cultures and centuries, and deal with every facet of the father-child relationship from birth to death and beyond. Gratitude, tenderness and awe infuse some of the poems. Others express anger or sorrow. Many are moving tributes to the first man in a child's life. And each one conveys the profound nature of fatherhood.

Read more less

A collection of poems which capture the experience of solitude- by day or night, in the city or in the country, in waking or in dreams. There are contented reveries, expressions of loneliness and despair, reflections on mind and soul, and meditations recorded in the stillness of the night. Poets can be said to be the custodians of the interior life, and from Sappho's "Tonight I've watched" to Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and from Yeats's communion with 'the deep heart's core' in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" to Bei Dao's veneration of "Ordinary Days", some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet's art. And for readers who either seek or escape from solitude,all of the poets in this anthology - from Sappho and Callimachus to Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur - offer words to console and inspire. They remind us that in cultivating solitude we explore the limits of our imaginations and realize our mostprofound feelings and needs.

Read more less

From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example: "Don't you fall now- / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Brontë's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

Read more less

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.

Read more less

Many kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent war horses to cowboys' trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses. We encounter the famous Trojan horse in Virgil's Aeneid, only to see it from a quite different perspective in Matthea Harvey's whimsical 'Inside the Good Idea'. Longfellow shows us Paul Revere defying an empire from the back of a horse, while Shakespeare's Richard III vainly offers his kingdom for one. Robert Burns's 'Auld Farmer' dotes affectionately on his ageing mare, while Paul Muldoon's 'Glaucus' is devoured by his fierce young fillies. Robert Frost's little horse stopping by the woods is gently puzzled by human behaviour, while Ted Hughes is dazzled by a stunning vision of horses at dawn, 'grey silent fragments/Of a grey silent world'.Mythical and metaphorical horses cavort alongside vividly real ones in these poems, whether they be humble servants, noble companions, beloved friends or emblems of the wild beauty of the world beyond our grasp.

Read more less

If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.

Read more less