In this exquisitely coherent new collection of poems, Ellen Hinsey explores the boundary between poetry and metaphysics, and the intimate bonds between morality and mortality. Drawing on philosophical and spiritual readings, The White Fire of Time displays a breadth of cultural knowledge and a deep understanding of the wisdom of the body. The poems in this book-length sequence are gorgeous, brooding, musical, elegant and serious. The work is composed in three sections: The World, meditations on the ordinary, the daily life of the body and its place in nature and time; The Temple,...

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes, ''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a...

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts--history, power, the personal and the social--that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching...

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and...

Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he--as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier--did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of...

This book by award-winning author Amy Newman explores as its formal structure the 72 definitions for the word "fall." These lovely, accessible poems span a narrative drama-from the creation of the world and the subsequent exile of its first inhabitants, through the downward movement of the human body in its surrender to illness and the world's gravitational pull, to the beauty in the descent of spent foliage in autumn. Each definition of "fall" engenders its own poem, and the definitions serve as poem titles. Section one explores the theological sense of The Fall, and section two focuses on...

Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry (2004)

Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."

Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great...

Winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001)

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf...

Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume...

Elizabeth Willis's new collection is a stunning collision of the pastoral tradition with the politics of the post-industrial age. These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of...