Poezja

From the introduction by Galway Kinnell:

The poems of Walt Whitman meant little to me when I read them in high school and college. Luckily, when I was teaching at the University of Grenoble in my late twenties, I was required to give a course on Whitman. My experience of Leaves of Grass then was intense. . . . Soon I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymn-like, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to the creatures and things of our world. . . . Once again, as when I first began writing, it seemed it might be possible to say everything in poetry.

From the introduction by Stanley Kunitz:

Blake speaks more directly to us, anticipating the issues, conflicts, and anxieties of the modern world, than any of his contemporaries. It could be argued that he dared, in fact, to be the first modern poet. . . .

Above all, Blake teaches us that the imagination is a portion of the divine principle, that "Energy is Eternal Delight," and that "everything that lives is Holy." Human liberty and imagination have never been better served.

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

From the introduction by Seamus Heaney:

Wordsworth's power over us stems from the manifest strength of his efforts to integrate several strenuous and potentially contradictory efforts. Indeed, it is not until Yeats that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness are so truly and responsibly combined.

He is an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern, a finder and keeper of the self as subject, a theorist and apologist whose preface to...

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To...

An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses on examples of the poet's variations in sonnet structure. Here is the voice of Millay, whose prophetic vision, devotion to freedom, and intellectual daring combine with her mastery of the sonnet form to speak eloquently for the human spirit.

A second book of poetry by Louise Erdich, author of the bestselling and award winning novels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks.

Baptisim by blood, water, or desire is necessary for salvation in Roman Catholic tradition, and baptism of desire in the term used for the leap of trust by which a sincere believer can experience spiritual regeneration.Louise Erdrich's poems are acts of redemption. Everywhere evident is Erdrich's unique capacity for finding the perfect word, the fresh, yet absolutely right, metaphor that makes her wrk both profound and...

- The Upanishads - The Book of Psalms - Lao-tzu - The Bhagavad Gita - Chuang-tzu - The Odes of Solomon - Seng-ts'an - Han-shan - Li Po - Tu Fu - Layman P'ang - Kukai - Tung-shan - Symeon the New Theologian - Izumi Shikibu - Su Tung-p'o - Hildegard of Bingen - Francis of Assisi - Wu-men - Dogen - Rumi - Mechthild of Magdeburg - Dante - Kabir Mirabai - William Shakespeare - George Herbert - Bunan - Gensei - Angelus Silesius - Thomas Traherne - Basho -...

The best of Bukowski's novels, stories, and poems, this collection reads like an autobiography, relating the extraordinary story of his life and offering a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience. A must for this counterculture idol's legion of fans.

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the...

From the award-winning poet and novelist--a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

Welcome to the meticulously observed world of Frieda Hughes. It is a world of tangible materiality constantly on the brink of change, a world populated with foxes and fire, fathers and lovers, mothers and birdmen--a world that is ultimately combustible, fragile, fearsome, and elegiacally beautiful. Hughes maps the landscape, both within and without, in language possessed of an almost painterly sensitivity and a sublime mastery of craft. The self she depicts is one who is tested by loss, danger, betrayal, and abandonment, yet one who is transformed through experience into a world beyond...