Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.
-- Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Mary Oliver's most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
First performed about 1805, King Lear is one of the most relentlessly bleak of Shakespeare's tragedies. Probably written between Othello and Macbeth, when the playwright was at the peak of his tragic power, Lear's themes of filial ingratitude, injustice, and the meaninglessness of life in a seemingly indifferent universe are explored with unsurpassed power and depth.
The plot concerns a monarch betrayed by his daughters, robbed of his kingdom, descending into madness. Greed, treachery, and cruelty are rife and the denouement of the play is both brutal and heartbreaking. In fact, so troubling is its vision of man's life that, until the mid-19th century, the play was performed most often with a non-Shakespearean happy ending, with Lear back on his throne and Cordelia, the daughter nearest his heart, happily married to the noble Edgar. But there is a dark magnificence to Shakespeare's original vision of the Lear story, and the play is performed today essentially as he wrote it, uncompromised by later "improvements." King Lear is reprinted here from an authoritative British edition, complete with explanatory footnotes.
This formidable anthology includes writing from 36 Native American poets: Frank Prewett, Louis (Little Coon) Oliver, George Clutesi, Mary Tallmountain, Nora Dauenhauer, Maurice Kenny, Carter Revard, Jim Barnes, James Welch, Ray A. Young Bear, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Steve Crow, Joy Harjo, Gladys Cardiff, Gerald Vizenor, Peter Blue Cloud, Duane Niatum, Jimmie Durham, Simon J. Ortiz, Emma Lee Warrior, Lance Henson, Barney Bush, Gail Tremblay, William Oandasan, Roberta Hill Whiteman, Wendy Rose, Earle Thompson, Daniel David Moses, Anita Endrezze, Nia Francisco, Robert H. Davis, A. Sadongei, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Biographical information is provided on each of the poets.
The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."
The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann's translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe's language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.
Excerpt's from Pound's long poem designate his own choice of the basic elements in his life's work
Personal experiences underlie a biography of observations in which the author examines himself from a sociological perspective and reflects on the sights, sounds, and civilization of Europe and the United States
Poems written by the prolific Chilean poet between the 1920's and 1940's illuminate his views on alienation and political oppression.
