Ciardi's fourteenth volume of verses demonstrates the distinctive voice, vision, and manner of a noted American poet whose career has spanned four decades.

Isaac Asimov, one of the world's best-selling authors, a scientist, academic, romantic, and original thinker, here jousts and jests with his old opponent in the war of the words, John Ciardi. Ciardi, of course, is a poet, world authority on and premier translator of Dante, teacher, critic, and formidable manufacturer and wielder of the word-weapon.

Ciardi records his days and nights as a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during four of the last terrible months of World War II.

Ciardi records his days and nights as a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during four of the last terrible months of World War II.

Sensitive and intelligent, the poems in this book are a fitting testament to an accomplished man of letters and a fine poet. -- Atlanta Constitution

These 45 poems by the late John Ciardi were unpublished and unknown until his papers were sorted following his death in 1986. As with all his poems, these are alive with Ciardi's precise observations, heightened command of language, and sure mastery of form.

Essays reveal the author's thoughts on the painstaking craftmanship involved in the art of writing poetry.

From Twenty Books of Verse published between 1940 and 1993, John Ciardi gives us poems of love written with care and honest discernment; poems of the natural world that reveal humanity's kinship to spiders and nebulae, oceans and thickets; and poems that tellingly render the ritual dance of human life and mortality. Ciardi declared in the Saturday Review that (e)very good poet writes one poem more than his index shows and that is the total poem of all the others put together. For Ciardi, that total poem is The Collected Poems of John Ciardi, a work that reveals the poet's assurance of line...

In The Purgatorio, Dante describes his journey to the renunciation of sin, accepting his suffering in preparation for his coming into the presence of God. This brilliant translation of Dante's canticle crystallizes the great poet's immortal conception of the aspiring soul.

In The Paradiso, Dante explores the goal of human striving: the merging of individual destiny with universal order. One of the towering creations of world literature, this epic discovery of truth is a work of mystical intensity? an immortal hymn to God, Nature, Eternity, and Love.