For the first time, the collected poems of America's preeminent postwar poet Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet--if you don't count Eliot--who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition." Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the brilliant willfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his History , winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day . The book will also include several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts. As poet and critic Randall Jarrell said, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece." Lowell's Collected Poems will offer the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

"Proofs & Theories is a long-awaited first gathering of essays by one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Ms. Gluck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled. The force of her thought is apparent everywhere in her writing and whether she is contemplating - skeptically - the critical currency of ideas like "courage" and "sincerity," T.S. Eliot's reduced reputation as a poet of impersonality, the loyalties of the objectivist George Oppen, or the ferocity in the headlong art of Sylvia Plath, there is something exhilarating about her seriousness, spare, austere, mind-clearing, and adamantly alive. She shares her skepticism with a whole temper of post-modern critical thought. But post-modernism, on the whole, has stood aside from what artists have thought was at stake in their art in order to dissect it. Ms. Gluck is also quite expert - wry sometimes, darkly funny even - at dissection but in these essays one never doubts what is at stake: an art as truthful, adamant, and unflinching as the intelligence that she brings to her own. Proofs & Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet"--OCLC

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times) . Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph.

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. "Howard Nemerov is a witty, urbane, thoughtful poet, grounded in the classics, a master of the craft. It is refreshing to read his work. . . . "— Minneapolis Tribune "The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review

"A timely new collection that sounds themes about the fragility of life and our duty to respect the planet in a time of climate change, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who work "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" (Carrie Fountain) The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its "integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry" (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species. The book succeeds in braiding together a recognition of our limits and of our responsibilities in ways that are deeply moving and revealing"--

Spring and All, a collection of poems and essays, was first published by William Carlos Williams in 1932. Williams was a true renaissance man - he was a doctor, an artist, and a poet. This collection contains many of his classics including Red Wheelbarrow. He wrote this while tending to a sick child. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Williams was well celebrated during his lifetime. He won the first National Book Award for Poetry. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Be inspired by his thought-provoking works! Note that Lisa Shea will also soon have an annotated and illustrated version, for those who would enjoy having notes on each poem.

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends , his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

This collection of poems focuses on the author's view of America and was the winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

First published in 1975, and available now as a New Directions Paperbook, George Oppen's Collected Poems brings together the work of one of our foremost contemporary poets, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet writes about her life, the creative process, and the work of other poets.

In these new poems, her eleventh collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet focuses on the themes of family, friendship, the pleasures and rigors of rural life and the animal world that have always engaged her powerfully and fruitfully. Change and the things that never change attract Kumin's attention equally. Whether chronicling the bounty of summer, the cycle of seasons, or memories of youthful parties, her voice is clear, wise, and compelling.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012) was a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in Jamaica, the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother, he emigrated to America at the age of 17. Voices in the Distance was the first selection of his poetry to be published in Britain for over 25 years, drawing on 18 collections, from The Arrivistes (1949) to his final book, Struggling Times, which he published in 2009 at the age of 86. Both timely and personal, Louis Simpson's poetry dramatises his continuing quarrel with suburban America, as well as his concerns about the direction of an American society struggling to retain its integrity in the midst of widespread challenges and worldwide strife. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

"Karl Shapiro was one of the twentieth-century's major poets. He published more than twenty books of poetry, two autobiographies, including poetry, seven collections of essays, and a novel. Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), he was the winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the Contemporary Poetry prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a faculty member at several universities. Active in his craft well into his late seventies, in 2000 Shapiro died at the age of 86. This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--