In these poems, G. E. Murray blends the colors of the soul with those of the world it brushes up against, exploring the ways in which art, both as possession and possessor, informs perception.

Viewing his subjects sometimes from airplane altitude, sometimes from the intimacy of a shared restaurant table, Murray crafts “true stories about color,” narratives of dislocation and belonging that invite readers to question their own relationship to art.

Included in this volume is a long sequential poem titled “The Seconds,” which Murray composed across the second days of thirteen months. The rhythms of this diary-as-poem seize the tensions of shifting times and locales, capturing the essences of moments that are at once chosen and arbitrary.

“Codes toward an Incidental City,” the sequence that closes the book, is a confederacy of forty poems that delve into the concrete familiarities and mythologies of urban landscapes, illuminating the ecstasies of city life.

Ira Sadoff’s new volume of poems opens with a quotation from Rilke: “But because truly being here is so much; because everything here / apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us. . . .” The poetry collected here is a response to this call.
 
Rooted firmly in the “fleeting world,” Sadoff’s poems find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. The poems in Barter delve deeply into the past, the personal past of regret, travel, love, divorce, and bereavement, as well as the global past of Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of communism. Each poem is offered up by Sadoff as a barter, something to be traded for a little more time, a little more understanding.
 
The poems in Barter comment on the power of culture to interject itself into our desire for an idealized self, the way our inner and outer lives lack correspondence, harmony, and integration. They also talk about commerce, the trading of bodies, the way we as a nation “use” and exchange and appropriate -- and like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, try to bargain with and evade the urgency of our time on earth.
 
In the poem “Self-Portrait with a Critic,” Sadoff makes what could be a succinct statement of purpose: “And inside, let’s not make it pretty, / let’s save the off-rhyme and onomatopoeia / / for the concert hall, let’s go to the wormy place / where the problematic stirs inside his head.”
 

  Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
        as one of five volumes published in 1996 in the National Poetry Series
      "Marcus Cafagña is a poet who shies at nothing, who will
        not turn away from what he sees--ordinary people struggling against, and
        sometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate. The Broken World
        is a deeply humane and accomplished first book--probing, watchful, compassionate,
        and necessary."
        -- Edward Hirsch
      "I challenge anyone to be unmoved by The Broken World. Cafagña
        never gives up in these difficult, heart-rending poems." -- Jim Daniels,
        editor of Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race
      The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth
        and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance--a
        distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis
        center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagña has led us
        through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native
        Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide,
        a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagña the confusion and
        madness of the twentieth century.
 

Now published for the first time, Ever the Winds of Chance is Sandburg's evocative sequel to Always the Young Strangers (1953), "the best autobiography ever written by an American" (Robert E. Sherwood, New York Times). Though left unfinished at his death, the sequel provides a wry, nostalgic chronicle of Sandburg's college years and early adulthood, a restless decade for a young man still in quest of his calling.
Ever the Winds of Chance opens in 1898 when the twenty-year-old Sandburg, recently returned from the Spanish-American war, enrolls at Lombard College in his native Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg writes about his job at the fire station; his teachers, inspired or otherwise; his classmates and their camaraderie; his observations on great literary works and writers; and his own writings for the school newspaper, literary review, and yearbook and for the Galesburg Mail. But he also includes much about life between school years and after college, recounting his various brief careers as a fireman, salesman of stereoscopic views, advertising copywriter, vagabond, "jailbird," and budding poet and socialist. Together these reminiscences provide an intimate look at the formative years of a preeminent figure in American letters.
 

 
       "I count Sandra McPherson as one of the dozen or so truly outstanding
        American poets who write brilliantly in the Romantic tradition. . . .
        The God of Indeterminacy brings together a group of exciting poems
        showing the vital influence of her interest in the blues tradition and
        in African-American quiltmaking. They are brilliant testimonials to this
        fruitful wedding of the musical, the visual, and the literary."
        -- Clarance Major
     
 

 
       "The Great Bird of Love brims with a life so intense that it
        must be told quietly. The pages are quirky, full of surprise, variety,
        humor, and the sustaining reliable voice of a worthy guide to experience.
        These poems come from perception informed by sympathy, and the language
        is alive with verbal adventure."
        -- William Stafford
      A book in the National Poetry Series
 

"This is no fairy tale. / It's all fantastic and bizarre and true. / It's my life, a raspy song, that sounds better if you sing along."
 
The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox behind the bar, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess.
 
In this collection of poems, R. T. Smith paints a vividly imagined portrait of the community in this small-town bar, capturing the chorus of the patrons' voices echoing off the knotted wood-paneled walls. Smith's stand-in, Sam Buckhannon, scribbles stories heard and overheard as tongues loosened by liquor spin out monologues in which southern idiom and vernacular seem perfectly at home within the constraints of measured verse.
 

In House of Poured-Out Waters, Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency.
    
More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future--but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her.  Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.
 

As a recipient of Poetry's Levinson Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize and a nominee for the American Book Award and National Book Award, David Wagoner is one of this country's most celebrated poets.
 
In The House of Song, he offers a hundred new poems in six parts.  At turns elegiac, comic, and nostalgic, these poems venture to the seemingly infinitesimal points where people, legends, and culture collide with nature, memory, and action. 
 
With characteristic wit and brevity, Wagoner chronicles the material invasions of the natural world, reconsidering Thoreau amid ruminations on voyeurs and destroyers, slug watchers and moth collectors.
 
The House of Song asserts Wagoner's place among the finest of American poets, past and present.
 

Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series
 
In the Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are "transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another."
 
No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are transfigured. Tempering steely candor with a sophisticated delight in wordplay, these poems turn on a dime from the sensual to the eerie, the resigned to the hopeful, the comforting to the shocking. Each poem weaves together layers of dream, remembrance, and fantasy, distilling from romantic excess a gritty, spare language of truth-telling and surprise.
 

This is the first cloth edition of one of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series, Philip Levine said: "The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry. . . . Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music."
 
 

      Selected by Sandra McPherson
        for the 1996 National Poetry Series
      The late poet James V. Dickey
        was judge of the Yale Prize poetry competition when he wrote to A. V.
        Christie, one of the finalists, "I have become very fond of your
        poems, especially the elegiac ones. . . . Your work is heartfelt; one
        believes every word of it. . . . You have given me much in-depth pleasure;
        have moved me strongly."
      The work in Nine Skies
        is as Dickey described it--heartfelt, moving. Here is what others
        say about it:
      "Beautifully crafted
        and sustained, with six or seven poems as fine as anything being written
        today. This remarkable book is a rite of passage for the poet and speaks
        of even better things to come." -- Elizabeth Spires
      "Only the best poetry
        is written this well, with this much craft and conviction. Of course the
        poems are meditative and elegiac, brilliant and finely detailed, but they
        are also thought through and wholly felt, so that even in their small
        moments they celebrate."
        -- Stanley Plumly
      "A. V. Christie writes
        with a Romantic's eye and a Realist's heart, so there is no sentimentality,
        that sickness afflicting our age. The voice on these pages is hard-bitten,
        luxuriant, and true." -- Henri Cole
      "Nine Skies is
        a graceful realization in each detail of elegy or celebration." --
        Sandra McPherson
 

This is the first book to celebrate the life and writing of one of the most charismatic Southern leaders of the middle twentieth century, Don West (1906-1992). West was a poet, a pioneer advocate for civil rights, a preacher, a historian, a labor organizer, a folk-music revivalist, an essayist, and an organic farmer. He is perhaps best known as an educator, primarily as cofounder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and founder of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia. In his old age, West served as an elder statesman for his causes.
 
No Lonesome Road allows Don West to speak for himself. It provides the most comprehensive collection of his poetry ever published, spanning five decades of his literary career. It also includes the first comprehensive and annotated collection of West's nonfiction essays, articles, letters, speeches, and stories, covering his role at the forefront of Southern and Appalachian history, and as a pioneer researcher and writer on the South's little-known legacy of radical activism.
 
Drawing from both primary and secondary sources, including previously unknown documents, correspondence, interviews, FBI files, and newspaper clippings, the introduction by Jeff Biggers stands as the most thorough, insightful biographical sketch of Don West yet published in any form.
 
The afterword by George Brosi is a stirring personal tribute to the contributions of West and also serves as a thoughtful reflection on the interactions between the radicals of the 1930s and the 1960s.
 
The best possible introduction to his extraordinary life and work, this annotated selection of Don West's writings will be inspirational reading for anyone interested in Southern history, poetry, religion, or activism.
 

          Alice Fulton's writing has been characterized by The New Yorker
          as "electrifying," and the poet herself, according to Publishers
          Weekly, "may be Dickinson's postmodern heir."
 

Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air."
 
The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.
 

Arranged in four parts--each associated with a particular Louisiana city--the poems in Rhythm & Booze trace the hardships and uncertainties, as well as the moments of unexpected sublimity, of a life lived in a continuous struggle between fresh starts and destructive old patterns.
 
Mirroring the music of New Orleans, Kane's poems combine traditional form with improvisational flourishes. Rhythm & Booze charts her progress as she undertakes a number of journeys, from youth to experience, from blues bars to college classrooms, from city to country, from chaos to something approaching peace.
 

Selected by C. K. Williams as one of the five volumes published in 1991 in the National Poetry Series, The Surface was the first collection in Laura Mullen's acclaimed career.
 

Writing in The Hudson Review,
        David Mason has characterized Lorna Goodison's work as a "revelation
        to me, much of it beautiful for its simple negotiation of the line between
        life and art."
      One of the most distinguished
        contemporary poets of the Caribbean, Goodison draws on both African and
        European inheritances in her finely crafted poems, which often carry a
        sense of language's healing power in the face of the pain of the past.
        She deals thematically with the struggle of Caribbean women and writes
        in a fashion that has developed from conversational to more ritualistic.
      From reviews of Goodison's
        earlier works:
      "The evocative power
        of Lorna Goodison's poetry derives its urgency and appeal from the heart-and-mind
        concerns she has for language, history, racial identity, and gender."
        Andrew Salkey -- World Literature Today
      "A marvelous poet, one
        to savor and to chant aloud."
        -- Pat Monaghan, Booklist
 

The lyric energy, compassion, humor, and tenderness that characterize Lorna Goodison's work are once again in evidence in Turn Thanks, her seventh collection. Here the Jamaican poet turns to acknowledge her own ancestors and those of her craft: mother and father, aunts and uncles, Africa, William Wordsworth, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wild Woman. "Whether you will receive this letter or not I cannot tell," she writes. "Still, I intend to send it . . . "
 

  When David Wagoner's last collection, Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems, was published, Harold Bloom noted that Wagoner's "study of American nostalgias is as eloquent and moving as that of James Wright, and like Wright's poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse." The same could be said of Walt Whitman Bathing, in which Wagoner's poems range from the lyric to the satiric, the elegiac to the transcendental, the autobiographical to the visionary. Other comments on Wagoner's earlier works: "Wagoner has the visual acuity of his loved hawks and a lifelong absorption with living and growing things. A lovely wit and a lively intelligence inform these poems." -- Maxine Kumin

"When Wagoner looks at something, he brings it to vivid and immediate life through an extraordinary power with a simple name: love. He is as formally various as Thomas Hardy, as playful as Dickinson, as wry as Frost." -- Dave Smith
"A sharp-eyed, even gutsy nature poet, the deftest and tenderest of love poets, Wagoner is a verbal magician capable of surprising, sometimes crazy tours de force."-- X. J. Kennedy
    
 

      Includes
        "Of History and Hope,"
        the 1997 Presidential Inaugural Poem
      When Miller Williams
        read his Inaugural Poem, "Of History and Hope," to a world-wide
        audience in January, his proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame"
        lasted far less--somewhere between three and four minutes. That was long
        enough to make a big impact on many. Said poet Paul Zimmer, one of the
        millions in his viewing audience, "I came up out of my Lazy-Boy and
        cheered loudly!"
      Williams is an
        American original whose poems have been praised for both the elegance
        of their style and the simplicity of their language, for their wonderful
        humor and genuine passion. The works in his newest collection, The
        Ways We Touch, may be nostalgic or challenging, humorous or full of
        moral fortitude; always Williams speaks with the kind of insight that
        rises from wisdom and experience.
      Praise for Williams's
        earlier work:
      "Miller
        Williams is one of those writers whose books drag me snorkeling happily
        along. Happy as a pig among truffles, I hurry to the next treasure."
        -- William Stafford
      "Most contemporary
        poets might well go to him for lessons in the art of speaking plainly
        in disciplined lines alive with emotional energy." -- X. J. Kennedy
      "Better
        than almost anything else being published." -- Donald Justice
 

       From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, this
        anthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life in
        industrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,
        and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,
        and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary
        anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary
        poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative
        of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.
      Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,
        Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,
        June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol
        Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,
        and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169
        poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.