Arc International Poets "Richard Howard's collection, Trappings, shows him at the height of his form. His work serves as a gold standard for those who care about the shape, sound and wit of a poem." Benjamin Ivry, Boston Review

Spanning nearly sixty years, these poems--both new English compositions and Nina Cassian's translations of her work in Romanian--blend her gallows humor with an engagement with the human experience.

From as little as the snail to as big as the giraffe, from the thundering mastodon of long ago to the ordinary backyard squirrel of today, the animals in this book inspire our imagination. Here is a fascinating cornucopia that exudes a whimsical affection and respect for the creatures with whom we share our kingdom.

96p hardback with very fresh dustjacket, a tight and clean copy, excellent condition, first edition thus

This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea.

Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of Warning, her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over the more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of literary forms, new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories, she has always written what she thinks if as songs . For this new book she has brought back some of those best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph s ability to convey the experiences of a thinking heart is in no way diminished."

A new format reprint of one hundred poems. potency and tenderness The gratifying thing about reading his work now is that it grows with you. The older I get the more the poems reveal. I'm knocked out by the richness, the resonance, the generosity, the hard intelligence, the clarity, the passion, and above all else, the great, great aching tenderness, which remains very much a part of who he is and he means to me. Leonard Cohen a poetic mind of genuine dignity and power an unobstrusive mastery of technique. Northrop Frye When I first clapped my eyes on the poems of Irving Layton I let out a yell of joy With his vigour and abilities, who shall not say that Canada will not have produced one of the West's most famous poets? William Carlos Williams

"Hilde Domin was one of the most highly regarded German poets of the 20th century. Her work was deeply influenced by her time in exile and loss of homeland. A poet of the Jewish faith, she fled political developments in Germany in 1932 and spent more than twenty years of her life in various countries including the Dominican Republic, which became her self-chosen namesake. After returning home to Germany from exile she became known as the "poet of return" and received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Nelly Sachs Prize, and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit. The Wandering Radiance is a selection of poems that spans decades. Presented bilingually, many of these poems appear here for the first time in English, brilliantly translated by Mark S. Burrows"--

A fine new collection of poems by Ginsberg that feature an important new work, the title poem "White Shroud".

Product Description Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade. Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries. "Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, "Mind Breaths," presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg. . . .The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called "mind breaths." No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this." —Hayden Carruth, New York Times Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom "Howl" is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet." About the Author Allen Ginsberg is also the author of Howl and Other Poems, which was originally published by City Lights Books in the fall of 1956.

Explores how poetry is necessary to prayer, illustrated from the Psalms, Isaiah and Caedmon's Hymn.

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She's always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another's son--a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed Psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language, ' Back warns. Good then that she's giving it to us."--Kazim Ali "'What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking, ' and the book itself is the answer: Poetry --this poetry--is necessary, irreplaceable, urgent. This is the best work of an important Israeli-American poet, translator, peace activist and scholar who reminds us, through the courageous beauty of her poems, that not to be political in these times is to collaborate with the forces of darkness. And what is political for Back couldn't be more intensely personal, as the mother of an air-force paramedic who suffers from PTSD. Narrating the endless cycle of violence of her region, Back's poems protest, grieve, and rescue language from its political and commercial appropriations. Throughout she adopts the irreverent tradition of textual allusion in Jewish poetry, allowing herself to radically rewrite the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Psalms, and feminize the Jewish liturgy. This is one of the best new books of poetry I have read in recent years!"--Chana Kronfeld "Poetry may make nothing happen, as Auden infamously wrote, but Rachel Tzvia Back's poetry makes something delicately yet fiercely come forth: the grief of mothers, the fear of soldiers, the tenderness of a younger brother's hand, the stones and sand against which cyclamens struggle to flower in Israel/Palestine. This is a poetry that honors the vast silence out of which and into which we go, and the silences before and after extreme violence. Drawing on ancient epic and myth, alert to the rhythms of land- and sea-scapes, Back's poems arise from a background of unending war, refugee crises, the 'sea of small feathered/things' and 'of mortar fire fired.' These are incantations offered in part to heal a son, to recognize injury, to sound out grief and guilt, but also to register difficult flashes of beauty and the presiding elemental forces of "eastern winds," sun, moon, season, and sea. Back's lyrics are as purposive, stealthy, and precise as the step of the tutelary cat in some of her poems. Her beautifully spare lines offer 'a narrow bridge and all the world'." --Maureen McLane