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In David Barber’s third collection of poetry, the past makes its presence felt from first to last. Drawing on a wealth of eclectic sources and crafted in an array of nonce forms, these poems range across vast stretches of cultural and natural history in pursuit of the forsaken, long-gone, and unsung. 

Here is the stuff of lost time unearthed from all over: ballyhoo and murder ballad, the lacrimarium and the xylotheque, the Game of Robbers and the Indian Rope Trick, the obsolete o’o, the old-school word hoard, sunshowers and beaters and breaker boys. Here, to mark the twilight of print and type, are gleanings and borrowings from a mixed bag of throwback bound volumes: The Magic Moving Picture Book, Mandeville’s Travels, The Golden Bough, Franklin Arithmetic, The Millennial Laws of the Shakers, A Conjuror’s Confessions. 

Here too are guiding spirits whose like will not pass this way again: Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club; Henry Walter Bates in darkest Amazon; George Catlin among the Choctaw; Little Nemo in Slumberland; Yogi Berra in all his oracular glory. Reveling in vernacular lingo of every vintage even while brooding on dark ages without end, Secret History chronicles a world of long shadows and distant echoes that bears more than a passing resemblance to our own.

The letter from Jose Rodriguez Feo that prompted Stevens's poem was the third in a ten-year correspondence (1944-54) between the poet and the young Cuban, who quickly became Stevens's "most exciting correspondent." The two shared a Harvard education, both were anxious to see Stevens translated for a Cuban audience, and each had an enduring admiration for Santayana, whose awareness of the cultural tensions between the Northern and Southern hemispheres formed a basis for the protracted argument between Stevens as the practical, Protestant father and the passionate Rodriguez Feo. The Cuban's descriptions of his life at the Villa Olga, of his black-and-white cow Lucera and his mule Pompilio, delighted Stevens, as did his wide-ranging questions and pronouncements of literary matters. Unaware of the well-known Stevens reticence, Rodriguz Feo elicited a more informal, playful response than Stevens's other correspondents. Formal salutations soon gave way to "Dear Antillean," "Dear Wallachio."

Coyle and Filreis present the entire extant correspondence between the two men. The fifty-one Rodriguez Feo letters and ten of the numerous Stevens letters are printed here for the first time, and the exchange between the two is unusually complete. The work includes a critical introduction and complete annotation of the letters.

Short listed for the 2007 New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize

The period from 1966 to 1999 represents a distinct era in Indonesian history. Throughout the “New Order” regime of President Suharto, the policies of economic development and political stability were dominant. However, the public opinion of personal expression was consistently under suspicion, and indeed dissent was severely punished.

Secrets Need Words traces the development of Indonesian poetry throughout this entire period. Texts are presented both in the original Indonesian and in careful, stylistically sensitive English translations.

In this anthology of contemporary work by Indonesian poets, the renowned translator and editor Harry Aveling presents a series of ongoing analyses detailing the political and social shifts that have influenced the work of particular poets.

Professor Aveling's analyses, along with the poems themselves, demonstrate how the poets responded to the power of the state in a variety of ways ranging from direct confrontation to withdrawal into personal and private realms characterized by fantasy and the use of heavily rhythmic language.

Secrets Need Words will be of interest to scholars of Indonesia and comparative literature, and will be for many years to come a basic text for scholarship and teaching. But it also offers all readers of poetry an opportunity to explore a new, complex, and exciting body of literature from one of the world's largest nations.

"My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world."

This is Navajo country, a land of mysterious and delicate beauty. "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

With Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, William Franke reexamines the role that literature plays in theological revelation. In the modern world, secularism typically means the exclusion of God from the world. Yet Franke, recognizing that secularity itself is built into religion and revelation, argues that theologically sensitive poetry has driven secularization throughout the modern period. The essays in this volume construct a trajectory through modern poetic literature as it struggled with the sense of a loss of the very possibility of theological revelation. Can literature replace religion? Can it do so triumphantly or only mournfully? Is this literary transmogrification of revelation the death of religion or its rebirth in a vital new form?
Secular Scriptures examines, through its own original speculative outlook, some of the most compelling exemplars of religious-poetic revelation in modern Western literature. The essays taken as an ensemble revolve around and are bookended by Dante, but they also explore the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Yeats. Looking both backward and forward from the vantage of Dante, Franke explores the roots of secularized religious vision in antiquity and the Middle Ages, even as he also looks forward toward its fruits in modern poetry and poetics. Ultimately, Franke’s analyses demonstrate the possibilities opened by understanding literature as secularized religious revelation.

The world is made of seductions. In Quincy Troupe's Seduction, the "I" becomes the "Eye," serving as metaphor and witness in a narrative compilation from a master of poetic music. Elegies and dramatic odes look at the seduction of all things loved or hated, especially the man made of color. How did the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin seduce the public's eye and catch the fire of racism? How did Aretha Franklin seduce us with voice and twang? How does the art of Romare Bearden or Jack Whitten still tell our truths, fantasies, and oppressions?

time is a bald eagle, a killer soaring high in the blue, / music to men
dodging bullets in speeding cars, / knew death, hoped it'd never come . . .

In this collection we are seduced by Troupe's opus. This is the poet's art laid bare. He is our "Eye." Visions of the transatlantic slave trade, portraits of American violence, pop culture, and historical voices are the lyrical relics in Troupe's masterful verse. One of American literature's most important rhythmical artists, Troupe has created a chronicle reaching through history for the collective "I/Eye" that is all of us.
 

An acclaimed novelist, essayist, memoirist, and translator, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has written that she began writing "before [she] knew about the strictures of literary genres: poem, story, essay." What she wrote as a child was "poetic speculation . . . partaking of all the genres and bounded by none." It is not surprising, then, that her facility with, and love of, language and speculation are on display in her new collection of poetry, See You in the Dark. 

Despite her indifference to genre, Schwartz takes a profound delight in poetic forms, appropriating the sonnet, the prose poem, and the envoi. She brings an easygoing musicality to her work, which ranges from parodic translations of Verlaine to instructions for making the perfect soup to a meditation on an Ecstasy trip. No artificial line between high and low culture divides Schwartz's world: she is equally intrigued by the metaphor of gardening, the work of artist Jenny Holzer, the bandits Frank and Jesse James (maybe distant relatives of Henry and William?), and the unintentional poetry of Craigslist's "missed connection" section. 

Filled with wisdom, humor, and deep insight, See You in the Dark is poetry for readers not bounded by genre.

This edition presents, for the first time in English, a selection from the repertoire of the first Polish woman dramatist, Princess Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (1705–1753), with a historical-biographical Introduction incorporating interpretations of her works. Radziwiłłowa’s plays treated complex issues concerning intimate relationships. In her poetry she explored new, very personal, means of expression for intimate declarations, in a form of language capable of conveying the emotional distress that could not find expression under existing conventions.

Undeniably one of the modern world's greatest literary figures, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) left behind a correspondence documenting in intimate detail a life as intense in its extremes as his poetry. This extensive selection of his letters—many translated for the first time into English—depicts a poet divided between despair and elation, thoughts of suicide and intimations of immortality; a man who could write to his mother, "We're obviously destined to love one another, to end our lives as honestly and gently as possible," and say in the next sentence, "I'm convinced that one of us will kill the other"; who courted and then suffered the controversy provoked by his masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal; who struggled throughout his life with syphilis contracted in his youth, near-intolerable financial restrictions imposed by his stepfather, and conflicting feelings of failure and revolt dating from his school days.

Writing to family, friends, and lovers, Baudelaire reveals the incidents and passions that went into his poetry. In letters to editors, idols, and peers—Hugo, Flaubert, Vigny, Wagner, Cladel, among others—he elucidates the methods and concerns of his own art and criticism and comments tellingly on the arts and politics of his day. In all, ranging from childhood to days shortly before his death, these letters comprise a complex and moving portrait of the quintessential poet and his time.

It is the reading world's good fortune that Stéphane Mallarmé's letters survived, allowing later generations an intimate look at the inner life of one of Europe's most important poets. Mallarmé (1842-98), often called the father of the Symbolists, has had an immense influence on the development of modern European poetry. It was his ambition to create a poetry pure of quotidian reality—autonomous, concentrated, linguistically inventive. His correspondence documents the evolution of this aim, the crafting of a poetics out of a life inescapably "real" in its pains and charms.

It is most fitting that Northwestern University Press, long a leading publisher of Russian literature in translation, launches the Northwestern World Classics series with a new translation of Russia's greatest poet. Included are many famous poems well known to, and often memorized by, every educated Russian, as well as lighter, more occasional pieces.

Renowned translator James Falen’s collection of 167 of Pushkin’s lyrics is arranged chronologically, beginning with verse written in the poet’s teenage years—Pushkin published his first poem at fifteen and was widely revered by his later teens—and closing with lines composed shortly before his death. As a whole, these selections reveal Pushkin's development as a poet, but they also capture the wide range of subjects and styles in Pushkin’s poetry.

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: The City of the Sun, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s Republic, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning Defense of Galileo, which may have done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy.

           

But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular.

Lee Gerlach’s Selected Poems is a rigorous culling from the life’s work of a remarkable and prolific poet. Written over a period of fifty years, the poetry of Lee Gerlach is a full spectrum of human expression, vision, and experience. It reflects a wisdom and maturity of character that has been constant during the entire span of Gerlach’s writing career. This selection, chosen by the poet, is the retrospective of a true twentieth-century American original.

James Applewhite has produced nine extraordinary books of poetry. This volume is the first anthology of his remarkable oeuvre. It brings together chronologically arranged selections from all of his previous books, from the first, published in 1975, through the most recent, published in 2002. Applewhite’s poetry is deeply rooted in the history and rhythms of rural North Carolina, where he was born and raised, and these poems mark stages in an artistic and personal journey he has undertaken over the past thirty years.

In impeccable and surprising language, Applewhite depicts the social conventions, changes, frictions, and continuities of small southern towns. He celebrates that which he values as decent and life-enhancing, and his veneration is perhaps most apparent in his response to the natural world, to the rivers and trees and flowers. Yet Applewhite’s love for his native land is not straightforward. His verse chronicles his conflicted feelings for the region that gave him the initial, evocative language of place and immersed him in a blazing sensory world while it also bequeathed the distortions, denials, and prejudices that make it so painful a labyrinth. Rendering troubled legacies as well as profound decency, Applewhite reveals the universally human in a distinctively local voice, within dramatic and mundane moments of hope and sorrow and faith.

One of world literature's towering figures, Goethe dominated two centuries of European writing and thought. The Enlightenment's most wayward genius, and Romanticism's most remarkable, he led two great artistic movements without fully subscribing to either. While his stature in the English-speaking world is often acknowledged, his poems are little regarded, for the simple reason that they have proven untranslatable. But thanks to John Whaley's outstanding translation, Goethe's poetry can at last be appreciated in English, with all its grace, music, and humanity intact.

Selected Poems represents the best of John Frederick Nims's widely aclaimed work over the past thirty years. Selections are from Five Young American Poets, Third Series (1944), The Iron Pastoral (1947), A Fountain in Kentucky (1950), Knowledge of the Evening (1960), and Of Flesh and Bone (1967) and emcompasses the full range of one of contemporary America's foremost poets.

A selection of poems by Lorna Goodison, who in 2017 was named Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems. With the publication of her selected poems, Swallow Press celebrates the distinguished career of one of its most cherished authors.

Critics as disparate as Kenneth Rexroth, Timothy Steele, Theodore Roethke, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Dana Gioia have sung the praises of her work over the decades. Her career as a poet was remarkable not only for its longevity but also for the fact that even well into her tenth decade she wrote poems that stand with her very best work.

Characterized by the vigor and sharpness of her images and the understated lyricism that permeates her rhythmic lines, The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis is a survey of modern poetry unto itself.

In a masterly translation by Norman Shapiro, this selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal demonstrates the magnificent range of Baudelaire's gift, from the exquisite quatrains to the formal challenges of his famous sonnets. The poems are presented in both French and English, complemented by the work of illustrator David Schorr. As much a pleasure to look at as it is to read, this volume invites newcomers and devotees alike to experience Baudelaire's genius anew.

"A fine, formal translation of the best poems of France's founder of the symbolist movement."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's rare to find a rewarding translation of a masterwork, particularly a collection of groundbreaking poetry. . . . Through Shapiro's skillful wordsmithing, the reader can fully appreciate Baudelaire's control of the soul and the word which is the ancient and indefatigable ambition of all great poets. . . . Shapiro's interpretations set the standard for future English translations."—Virginia Quarterly Review

A Pulitzer Prize winner best known as an imagist, John Gould Fletcher experimented with every facet of Modernist poetry and influenced poets in both England and the United States. this is the first collection to span his entire career, and brings again to the public eye work that has been unavailable for thirty-five years.

Fletcher is responsible for introducing Ezra Pound to French symbolism, and Amy Lowell to “polyphonic prose,” and his connection with the Southern Fugitive Agrarian movement adds to his significance as the first modern Southern poet. The editors have chosen representative works for his many stages of development and discuss in the introduction Fletcher’s influence on the better-known modernists.

Selected Poems of John Gould Fletcher is the first n a series of books by or about Fletcher to fill an important space in home and public libraries with American literature collections.

A remarkable bilingual edition of the best poetry written by the legendary author of Les Miserables 

Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions.

Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.

Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

This graceful translation and bilingual edition, now in paperback, is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death on July 6, 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Cáceres and including work from each of Agustini's four published books, Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited.

Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 24, 1886 to wealthy parents of German and Italian descent. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-one and followed with two more in the next six years: the fourth volume was a posthumous publication. Her life was cut short in 1914, when Enrique Job Reyes, her ex-husband, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself.

Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini's development and strengths as an artist—including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them—and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Cáceres's introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini's work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luís de Camões (1524–80) has been ranked as a sonneteer on par with Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare. Championed by such influential English poets as William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and admired in America by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, Camões was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense adventurous life. He was banished for dueling and brawling at court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in North Africa, was shipwrecked off the coast of India, jailed in Goa, and exiled in Mozambique. Throughout these personal trials, he advanced poetry beyond the Petrarchin model of love won and lost to write of personal despair, history, politics, war, religion, and the natural beauty of Portugal.

The first significant English translation of Camões's sonnets in more than one hundred years, Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition collects seventy of Camões's best—all musically rendered into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry by William Baer, with the original Portuguese on facing pages—and reintroduces the genius of a poet whom Cervantes called "the incomparable treasure of Lusus." A comprehensive selection of sonnets that demonstrates the full range of Camões's interests and invention, Selected Sonnets will prove indespensible for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.

Finalist, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Awards 



A Library Journal Best Poetry of 1998 Selection

Pamela White Hadas won enthusiastic recognition for her early books of poetry, Designing Women and Beside Herself. In Self-Evidence, she selects the best of her published work and combines it with poems never before collected. This collection contains legendary, mythic, historical, and imaginary characters--Lilith, Pocahontas, Simone Weil, the wives of Watergate, a circus performer, and others. With playful originality and virtuoso voicing, Hadas weaves breathtaking tapestries of women's loves and labors.

Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

“Shows this exceptional poet at his rhyming best.”

—Billy Collins

Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror presents the mirror that reflects not always what is, but what is desired, or not desired. In the opening poem, the speaker, Diane Arbus, looks at her very early pregnant self and asks, “Why would I bring you into this world?” This book answers that question, or tries to: the world is what it is as we try to live as our best selves in that world. But that knowledge of the world is hard and has consequences, and not in the abstract, as Gibson’s poetry dynamically shows.

Employing new formalism, Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror examines historical, familial, and personal pasts as those pasts continue into the present, reminding us, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In his third book of poems, Mark Halliday grapples with the endless struggle between self-concern and awareness of the rights of others. Through humor, ironic twists, and refreshing candor, these poems confront a variety of situations—death, divorce, artistic egotism and envy, personal relationships—where the very idea of self is under siege.

"If Selfwolf were a pop music CD, it would be hailed as Mark Halliday's breakthrough album. . . . This third collection of poems teems with unsparing confessions of misdirected lust, lost faith, regret and a winningly goofy cheerfulness in the face of all that bad stuff. . . . The informal, conversational quality of Halliday's work almost hides its artfulness, which seems to be precisely his intention."—Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review

"With unflinching, often comic honesty about how 'ego-fetid, hostile, grasping' we are, Halliday exposes the self's wolfish hungers and weaknesses."—Andrew Epstein, Boston Review

"Mark Halliday's new book offers more of his trademark riffs on self-consciousness. His subversive, surprising, hugely enjoyable poems will make you laugh out loud, squirm in uncomfortable recognition, and appreciate anew the comedy of our daily battles for self-preservation. . . reading Halliday is pure delight. . . . I love the daring and intelligence with which Halliday skates along the shifting boundary between self within and world outside. Selfwolf slows down our habitual negotiations between 'in here' and 'out there,' exposing the edgy comedy of how we survive."—Damaris Moore, Express Books

“I wish I could find the words to tell you the story of our village after you were killed.” So begins Senegal Taxi, the new work by one of contemporary poetry’s most vibrant voices, Juan Felipe Herrera. Known for his activism and writings that bring attention to oppression and injustice, Herrera turns to stories of genocide and hope in Sudan. Senegal Taxi offers the voices of three children escaping the horrors of war in Africa.

Unflinching in its honesty, brutality, and beauty, the collection fiercely addresses conflict and childhood, inviting readers to engage in complex and often challenging issues. Senegal Taxi weaves together verse, dialogue, and visual art created by Herrera specifically for the book. Stylistically genre-leaping, these many layers are part of the collection’s innovation. Phantom-like televisions, mud drawings, witness testimonies, insects, and weaponry are all storytellers that join the siblings for a theatrical crescendo. Each poem is told from a different point of view, which Herrera calls “mud drawings,” referring to the evocative symbols of hope the children create as they hide in a cave on their way to Senegal, where they plan to catch a boat to the United States.

This collection signals a poignant shift for Herrera as he continues to use his craft to focus attention on global concerns. In so doing, he offers an acknowledgment that the suffering of some is the suffering of all.

In an age of interpretation, style eludes criticism. Yet it does so much tacit work: telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What does style have to do with form, history, meaning, our moment’s favored categories? What do we miss when we look right through it? Senses of Style essays an answer. An experiment in criticism, crossing four hundred years and composed of nearly four hundred brief, aphoristic remarks, it is a book of theory steeped in examples, drawn from the works and lives of two men: Sir Thomas Wyatt, poet and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, and his admirer Frank O’Hara, the midcentury American poet, curator, and boulevardier. Starting with puzzle of why Wyatt’s work spoke so powerfully to O’Hara across the centuries, Jeff Dolven ultimately explains what we talk about when we talk about style, whether in the sixteenth century, the twentieth, or the twenty-first.