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.

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.

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.

A unique mix of prose and poetry, of the joy of life and the agony of loss, Tadeusz Rozewicz creates a rich and complex portrait of his mother Stefania and of her indelible influence on her extraordinary family."