When Laura Riding sailed for England in December, 1925, she left many of her personal belongings in the safekeeping of a friend in Greenwich Village. Among these items was a box containing the typescripts of more than two hundred poems, a few of which had been published in magazines such as The Fugitive, Poetry Nomad, Lyric West, and Contemporary Verse. Then aged twenty-four, Laura Riding had already been hailed as a leading voice of her generation. She had come to New York to pursue a life devoted to poetry, but saw her American contemporaries as lacking a seriousness, both poetic and personal, which she considered to be the poet's essential attribute. So when an invitation came from Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson in England, she accepted. In Europe she found "solitariness in which to probe the reality of poetry as a spiritual, not merely literary, inheritance". Although by 1938 she could say that "to live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence", her probing finally led her to renounce poetry; she had found poetic utterance inherently incapable of yielding the full truth-potential of words. Meanwhile the correspondence with the friend in New York had continued. In 1979 her friend wrote that she had discovered, in storage, the cache of poems left behind. Arrangements were made for its return, and during the months before her death in 1991, Laura (Riding) Jackson was preparing these early poems for publication. Rediscovering these poems of her youth, Laura (Riding) Jackson saw in them "a precise anticipation of an envisaged whole of poetry". Readers will find here the same confident authorial presence that permeates the "self-determining canon"of her poetic work, which she identified as her Collected Poems of 1938 (reprinted in 1980 by Persea as The Poems of Laura Riding), many of the themes developed in her later work, and a characteristic freshness of vision and scrupulosity of word-use. These poems are experiments in what poetry can do. They are early stepping stones on the path that led Laura (Riding) Jackson ultimately to a realization of what poetry cannot do. Those familiar with the poetry of Laura Riding will read First Awakenings with the delight of enlarged recognition, and those approaching it as an introduction to her work will find direction for the mind's journey.

Product Description Poems. Art. These poetic devotions and intentions, accompanied by whimsical drawings whose apparent simplicity is belied by shadings of a vastly complex subtext, pay homage to various painters: Pollack, Seurat, Vermeer, Picasso, Gorky, Morandi, Degas, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Rothko, de Kooning, Guston, O'Keefe, Gaugin, among others. Ranging from intensely serious to intensely playful, the texts create an artistic lineate that allows Basil King to engage in his own explorations using these well-known imagemakers as a ground from which to create new work. About the Author Basil King, a prolific, widely collected painter and a writer, first went to Black Mountain at 16. His paintings are in many public and private collections, including Yale University and the New York Public Library. His books of poetry include 77 Beasts: Basil King's Bestiary and Mirage: A Poem in Twenty-Two Sections.

How is one to speak with the dead? Why should you turn? Is this an apple? Anyone for tea before night falls? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?With these questions, plucked from the poems of writers whom she admires, Alison Pick fashions "answers:" extraordinary meditations on life and death, love and work, happiness and sorrow. The book includes a remarkable sequence about the poet's discovery as a teenager of her father's Jewish ancestry. Alison Pick is the winner of the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for the best unpublished writer under 35. The jury wrote: "The poems prove once again that poetry generates poetry ... that literary excellence fuels excellence in the generations that follow." By turns spiritual and earthy, accessible and complex, thoughtful and wrenching, Question & Answer announces the arrival a brilliant new poetic voice.

"Thoroughly readable....A fascinating introduction to the world of the Jew in 19th-century Europe, viewed through the eyes of a brilliant and perceptive artist."--AB Bookman's Weekly. "A first-rate eye-opener, a fascinating compendium of the profound struggle toward a more integrated humanity."--Choice. The work of the great 19th-century German poet Heine is rich with verbal portraits of men and women, real and imaginary, contemporary and historical, ranging from Karl Marx and the Rothschilds to Spinoza and characters from the Bible. Drawing on material only recently made available, as well as letters and recorded conversations, Prawer has produced a work which is at once a study of the technique of literary portraiture, and a panorama of the Jewish world throughout the ages.

In the kaleidoscope that is Lionel Abrahams, we find poet and wit, lover and critic, a voice speaking to us - especially to poets - with an inspirational clarity.

The poet explores the meaning of family, memory, and return. She draws her inspiration from Jewish mystical tradition and personal travels in Africa and Asia. An underlying voice elegant, cosmopolitan, and intense.

In this sensuously defiant collection of new poems, the winner of the 2004 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal expands and deepens a poetic ruse. In his critically acclaimed collections Saracen Island and Companion, David Solway took on the voice of a fictitious Greek poet named Andreas Karavis. The poems of these earlier two books were so artful and refreshingly immediate that many readers were convinced that they were authentic translations from the Greek. For The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, a new book of ostensible translations, Solway adopts the persona of Karavis's spurned lover, Turkish Cypriot poet Nesmine Rifat and explores the aftermath of one of Karavis's love affairs. Lushly sexual and sparkling with wit and intelligence, these passionate lyrics take the form of undelivered letters, written by Rifat in the wake of Karavis's desertion and his eventual marriage to her rival Anna Zoumi. Solway portrays, with subtlety and sensitivity, a powerful woman and gifted poet undergoing a turbulent emotional journey. Moving from wrath and arrogant disdain, through bitterness and grief, to an acceptance of the love she cannot subdue, his female poet grows in both strength and art. As an intimate record of one woman's anguish, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat is a remarkable achievement — even more so when one recalls that the author is actually a man.

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