Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.
Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
"I find myself taken by Patricia Kirkpatrick's unsentimental tenderness--a mark, I believe, of all good lyric poetry."--Jane Hirshfield
The poems in Century's Road travel the "plain public road" of American daily life while glimpsing the humanity of other continents. At the center of the book is the figure of the child as witness, whether newborn or newly immigrated, abandoned or unplanned, learning to read, or telling stories. In a voice combining a clear sense of image and sound, these poems stand in a lyric tradition yet address issues--and mysteries--beyond the personal. The poet pursues the life of the imagination and subjects of birth and death; the natural world; family, community and womanhood; and sometimes touching the legacy of World War II, Vietnam and September 11th.
from Century's Road
In the middle of the century, I stood watching
flickering reels of people flee the burning city.
A child stood sobbing at the edge of the road, holding her arms out but
nobody stopped to take her. Nobody stopped. Thundering passage
thundering past. The black and white footage of war. The hard cart of migration over stone.
Patricia Kirkpatrick grew up in Des Moines and graduated from the University of Iowa and San Francisco State University. She has received awards from the NEA, the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft-McKnight and the Jerome Foundation. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The Antioch Review, Threepenny Review and Luna. Her essays and interviews with American poets have been published in Ruminator/Hungry Mind Review, Speakeasy and Riverbank Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University, and has also taught and conducted workshops at Macalester College, the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Loft. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her family.
A new collection of some of the verses about animals with an illustration for every verse from Etienne Delessart.
Poems written by the prolific Chilean poet between the 1920's and 1940's illuminate his views on alienation and political oppression.
This volume includes the title poem as well as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," "Ash Wednesday," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and other poems from Eliot's early and middle work. "Eliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English" (Edmund Wilson).
The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
"The great California novel been written, in verse (and why not?): The Golden Gate gives great joy."--Gore Vidal
One of the most highly regarded novels of 1986, Vikram Seth's story in verse made him a literary household name in both the United States and India. John Brown, a successful yuppie living in 1980s San Francisco meets a romantic interest in Liz, after placing a personal ad in the newspaper. From this interaction, John meets a variety of characters, each with their own values and ideas of "self-actualization." However, Liz begins to fall in love with John's best friend, and John realizes his journey of self-discovery has only just begun. "A splendid achievement, equally convincing in its exhilaration and its sadness."--The New York Times "Seth pulls off his feat with spirit, grace and great energy."--The New Yorker "A marvelous work . . . bold and splendid . . . Locate this book and allow yourself to become caught up, like a kite, in the lifting effects of Seth's sonnets."--Washington Post Book World
Gathers a representative sampling of the German writer's poems and includes prose translations from the German
Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.
This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.
