Eustache Deschamps studied under the tutelage of Guillaume de Marchault, traveled in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt-where he was said to have been made a slave-and eventually become recognized as one of the great French medieval poets. He was the first writer to dissociate lyric poetry from its musical setting and his witty perceptions comment on nearly all aspects of daily life: from women's underwear to gluttonous diners, from praise of famous writers to scorn for the unscrupulous of all ranks, from the delights of youth to the horrors of war. This volume provides facing-page, dual-language...

The first U.S. publication of a Polish poet whose struggles with spiritual issues spark comparisons to Czeslaw Milosz

Modern Poems on the Bible is a collection of imaginative and engaging contemporary responses to the Bible. Guided by the classic rabbinic genre of midrash conceived 1,500 years ago, Curzon chooses poems from Jewish and non-Jewish writers alike and places them beside the biblical passages that were their inspiration. Among the more than 170 poems in this collection are those by some of the great modern poets, including Yeats, Rilke, Auden and Amichai. There are also poems by master prose writers: Primo Levi, Jorge Luis Borges, and D.H. Lawrence, to name a few.