Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.

Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we...

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets.

Winner of the Commonwealth Club Book Award, Silver Medal for Poetry (1990)

In the title poem "Fortress," the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world.

All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the...

This is the first book published in English by of the work of Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes....

Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world. "Mr. Tate is an elegant and anarchic clown. A lord of poetic misrule with a serious, subversive purpose."-John Ash, New York Times Book Review "Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. Tate's poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that is may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed...

Stephen Todd Booker, an inmate on Florida's death row, writes piercingly of incarceration. But he also sings, in a voice at once jagged and polished, of racism in Brooklyn and the South and of growing up black in 20th-century America, as he examines his life experience with metaphors that test the limits of language.

A striking interplay of content and style makes this book-length narrative poem a wrenching, compelling tale. Mose is incarcerated in a Texas prison for a crime whose circumstances slowly unfold as he numbers the days of his sentence and fantasizes about a woman inexorably tied to his fate. As the harshness of prison life begins to close in and distort Mose's consciousness, he is increasingly obsessed with the truth of what happened. In the end, that inquiry reveals to him "another world underneath / this one" where everything "is backwards / to what we want." The journey to that world is a...

Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossaand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new...

Edge Effect is Sandra McPherson's most original work to date. Constructed in two parts, the collection embraces secretly related worlds: the poetics of natural history and artistic discoveries of self-taught folk artists. Throughout, waves from one poem mark the shores of others. In natural history, an edge effect occurs where two communities, such as land and sea, overlap, that zone becoming more diversified than each of them. McPherson explores this effect in nature and art, questioning our notions of inside and outside, center and margin. Profound and moving, she recasts the very premises...