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One Secret Thing
by Sharon OldsSharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revision, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power.
Ovid Revisited: The Poet in Exile
by Jo-Marie ClaassenIn time for the bimillennium of Ovid's relegation to Tomis on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Jo-Marie Claassen here revises and integrates into a more popular format two decades of scholarship on Ovid's exile. Some twenty articles and reviews from scholarly journals have been shortened, rearranged and merged into seven chapters, which, together with some new material, offer a wide-ranging overview of the exiled poet and his works. "Ovid Revisited" treats the poems from exile as the literary culmination of Ovid's oeuvre, ascribing the poet's resilience in the face of extreme hardship to the relief that his poetry afforded him. An introduction considers the phenomenon of Ovid's continued popularity, explains the importance of chronology in reading the exilic poems and gives a brief summary of the contents of the 'Tristia' and 'Epistulae ex Ponto'. The rest of the book ranges from consideration of Ovid's relationship with the emperor and with his own poetry, to his ubiquitous humour, to his skill in metrics, vocabulary and verbal play, and to his use of mythological figures from earlier parts of his oeuvre. The degree to which Ovid universalised the sufferings of the dispossessed is assessed in a chapter comparing his exilic works with modern exilic literature. An excursus considers various directions in Ovidian studies today.
Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace
by R. WhiteThis timely book traces ideas of pacifism in English literature, particularly poetry. Early chapters, drawing on religious and secular traditions, provide intellectual contexts. There follows a chronological analysis of literature which rejects war and celebrates peace, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era, 800-1500: A History of Persian Literature Vol. II (History of Persian Literature #Vol.6)
by Ehsan YarshaterThe second volume in this series presents the reader with an extensive study of some major genres of Persian poetry from the first centuries after the rise of Islam to the end of the Timurid era and the inauguration of Safavid rule in the beginning of the sixteenth century. The authors explore the development of poetic genres, from the panegyric (qaside), to short lyrical poems (ghazal), and the quatrains (roba'i), tracing the stylistic evolution of Persian poetry up to 1500 and examine the vital role of these poetic forms within the rich landscape of Persian literature.
Petrarch in Romantic England
by E. ZuccatoThe Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets. This book analyses the way Petrarch was read and re-written by Romantic figures. The result is a history of the Romantic-era sonnet and a new lens for understanding English Romantic poetry.
Pindar (Ancients In Action Ser.)
by Anne Pippin BurnettOf all the lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work has been best preserved. His odes to victorious Greek athletes were entertainments designed for performance in a hospitable atmosphere of drinking, dining and jokes. The victor has known the favour of the god whose contest he entered, and has brought back pan-Hellenic fame to his family, friends and city. To extend this glory and make it permanent, he has commissioned a song of praise, had dancers trained to sing it, and summoned an audience of kinsmen, neighbours and friends to enjoy it. Pindar's odes contain invocations and prayers, but their most characteristic effects are achieved thhrough the depiction of fragments of myth. Anne Pippin Burnett argues that these passages were meant neither as mere decoration nor as moral instruction, but served rather as a dramatic mechanism by which dancers brought an experience of another world to guests gathered in the banqueting suite of the victor.
The Poems of John Donne: Epigrams, Verse Letters To Friends, Love-lyrics, Love-elegies, Satire (Longman Annotated English Poets)
by Robin RobbinsJohn Donne (1572-1631) is firmly fixed in the canon of English literature. "No man is an island" and "For whom the bell tolls" are just two of his phrases known by virtually everyone. The Poems of John Donne is a two volume edition of Donne's poems based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of his work from composition to circulation and reception. Donne's output is tremendously varied in style and form and demonstrates his ability to change his writing according to context and occasion. This edition presents the text of all his known poems, from the epigrams, songs and satires written for fellow young men about town, to the more mature verse-epistles and memorial elegies written for his patrons. Volume One contains the Epigrams, Verse Letters to Friends, Love Lyrics, Love Elegies and Satires.
The Poems of John Donne: Volume One (Longman Annotated English Poets)
by Robin RobbinsJohn Donne (1572-1631) is firmly fixed in the canon of English literature. "No man is an island" and "For whom the bell tolls" are just two of his phrases known by virtually everyone. The Poems of John Donne is a two volume edition of Donne's poems based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of his work from composition to circulation and reception. Donne's output is tremendously varied in style and form and demonstrates his ability to change his writing according to context and occasion. This edition presents the text of all his known poems, from the epigrams, songs and satires written for fellow young men about town, to the more mature verse-epistles and memorial elegies written for his patrons. Volume One contains the Epigrams, Verse Letters to Friends, Love Lyrics, Love Elegies and Satires.
Poems of John Milton: With Notes
by John Milton Claire TomalinJohn Milton was a master of almost every type of verse, from the classical to the religious and from the lyrical to the epic. This is a new selection of his poems, edited and introduced by Claire Tomalin.
The Poems of Oswald Von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77–1445) (The New Middle Ages)
by Albrecht ClassenThis book offers the first complete English translation of the poems by the late-medieval German (Tyrolean) Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/1377-1445). Oswald von Wolkenstein was one of the leading poets of his time and created some of the most exciting, experimental, and also deeply religious-conservative poetry of the entire Middle Ages and far beyond. German scholarship and musicologists have long recognized the extraordinary strength and power of Oswald s Middle High German songs, both in terms of his poetic imagery and his musical performance. This book proves Oswald's uvre to be one of the most idiosyncratic and individualistic in the entire late Middle Ages. Classen reveals how Oswald continued the medieval tradition, yet was a true innovator, exploring new attitudes toward love, sexuality, travel, war, politics, language, music, and, above all, his own individuality.
Poems of Robert Burns Selected by Ian Rankin
by Ian Rankin Robert BurnsThe farmer’s boy from Ayrshire who went on to be the most acclaimed of all Scottish poets, celebrated around the world, Robert Burns is a greater and more varied artist than those that know him only through annual Burns’ Suppers and choruses of his ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at New Year could imagine. This new selection by Ian Rankin of verses and lyrics from Scotland’s national poet, the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’, reveals a writer capable of evoking tremendous sympathetic power from his readers and with an easy, astonishing command of the sounds and rhythms of both standard English and the evocative Scots tongue. It also reveals an artist of incredible range. His ‘Tam O’ Shanter’, with its midnight pursuit of witches from a grisly graveyard dance, is gripping, fantastical and funny in equal measure, ‘Is there for honest poverty’ beautifully expresses the egalitarian spirit by which Burns became a political hero for so many, and sentiments both romantic (‘Ae Fond Kiss’) and bawdy (‘The Fornicator’) co-exist in this canny selection of the best of the Scottish Bard.
Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (Verbal Art: Studies in Poetics)
by Michael EskinPoetic Affairs deals with the complex and fascinating interface between literature and life through the prism of the lives and works of three outstanding poets: the German-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920–1970); the Leningrad native, U.S. poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996); and Germany's premier contemporary poet, Durs Grünbein (born 1962). Focusing on their poetic dialogues with such interlocutors as Shakespeare, Seneca, and Byron, respectively—veritable love affairs unfolding in and through poetry—Eskin offers unprecedented readings of Celan's, Brodsky's, and Grünbein's lives and works and discloses the ways in which poetry articulates and remains faithful to the manifold "truths"—historical, political, poetic, erotic—determining human existence.
Poetic Language and Political Engagement in the Poetry of Keats (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Jack L. SilerIn this incisive volume Siler traces the uneasy relationship between the content of Keats' poems and social history. In the process, he discovers that the early poems are linked with the mission statement of the radical journal Annals of the Fine Arts, whilst the poems after Endymion reveal a poet more concerned with the nature of poetic representation--its why and wherefore.
Poetic Language and Political Engagement in the Poetry of Keats (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Jack L. SilerIn this incisive volume Siler traces the uneasy relationship between the content of Keats' poems and social history. In the process, he discovers that the early poems are linked with the mission statement of the radical journal Annals of the Fine Arts, whilst the poems after Endymion reveal a poet more concerned with the nature of poetic representation--its why and wherefore.
Poetry & Displacement (Poetry &... #1)
by Stan SmithThe paradigmatic figure of twentieth-century history is the ‘displaced person’, a concept which emerged from the demographic migrations, deportations and genocidal purges that accompanied two world wars, the destruction and construction of nation states and the restructuring of the global order which they occasioned. These processes almost inevitably fostered a poetry of exile and expatriation intimately bound up with the experience of modernity and the culture of modernism, culminating, in the postcolonial era, with the globalisation of displacement as the determining condition of postmodernity. In this timely new volume renowned poetry critic Stan Smith examines a number of poets – Plath, Larkin, Heaney, Walcott, Middleton, Fisher, Duffy – through the lens of displacement.
Poetry Of The First World War
by York Notes Tom RankThe 'York Notes' series covers major works from medieval to modern English literature, and classic and contemporary works from Europe, America, the Commonwealth and the Third World.
Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process
by Richard M. BerlinPoets on Prozac shatters the notion that madness fuels creativity by giving voice to contemporary poets who have battled myriad psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.The sixteen essays collected here address many provocative questions: Does emotional distress inspire great work? Is artistry enhanced or diminished by mental illness? What effect does substance abuse have on esthetic vision? Do psychoactive medications impinge on ingenuity? Can treatment enhance inherent talents, or does relieving emotional pain shut off the creative process?Featuring examples of each contributor’s poetry before, during, and after treatment, this original and thoughtful collection finally puts to rest the idea that a tortured soul is one’s finest muse.
Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure (Classical Literature and Society)
by A. M. KeithIn Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure, Alison Keith explores Propertius' elegiac poetry in the context of early imperial Roman society. Examining a variety of themes associated with both Propertian poetics (such genre theory, poetic models, the girlfriend, the rival) and the poet's social context within the early Augustan principate (such as Roman imperialism, the elite male cursus honorum, Augustus' building projects) she offers a synthetic overview of Propertius' achievement in his four books of elegies. She considers the neglected relationship of rhetoric to Propertian elegiac poetics, as well as Propertius' debt to the classical literary tradition, and she explores themes in the corpus that reflect the Augustan imperial context in which Propertius lived and wrote. Arguing for neither a pro- nor an anti-Augustanism on display in Propertian elegy, Keith brings to light the multiple ways in which Roman imperial rule, the new pax Augusta, and new forms of elite Roman political competition intersect in and inform Propertius' poetry. The volume aims to contribute to our understanding of both Latin literature and Augustan culture its sustained exploration of refractions of the Roman 'imperialist enterprise' in Propertius' elegiac poetry.
Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood And Other Felicitous Persuasions
by Michael D. SnedikerMichael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement. Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects. Dickinson, Snediker argues, expresses joy and grace as much as pain and loss, and the myriad cryptic smiles in Hart Crane's White Building contradict prevailing narratives of Crane's apocryphal literary failures and eventual suicide. Snediker's ambitious and sophisticated study, informed by thinkers such as Winnicott, Deleuze, and de Man, both supplements and challenges the work of queer theory's leading figures, including Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Queer Optimism revises our understanding of queer love and affiliation, examining Spicer's serial collusion with matinee idol Billy the Kid as well as the critically neglected force of Bishop's epistolary and poetic reparations of the drowned figure of Hart Crane. In doing so, Snediker persuasively reconceives a theoretical field of optimism that was previously unavailable to scrupulous critical inquiry and provides a groundbreaking approach to modern American poetry and poetics.
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
The Reality Street Book Of Sonnets (PDF)
by Jeff HilsonWith no fewer than 84 contributors, this is a truly groundbreaking anthology. There are plenty of modern sonnet anthologies around; but none that have delved so thoroughly into the myriad ways poets have stretched, deconstructed and re-composed the venerable form, including visual and concrete sonnets. We take as our time frame 1945 to the 21st century, with poets ranging from Edwin Denby (born - 1903) to those currently in their twenties. Jeff Hilson, the editor, contributes an introductory essay. It's contributors include: Robert Adamson, Jeremy Adler, Tim Atkins, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Rachel Blau duPlessis, Christian Bok, Sean Bonney, Ebbe Borregaard, Jonathan Brannen, Pam Brown, Laynie Browne, Thomas A Clark, Adrian Clarke, John Clarke, Bob Cobbing, Clark Coolidge, Kelvin Corcoran, Beverly Dahlen, Ian Davidson, Edwin Denby, Laurie Duggan, Paul Dutton, Ken Edwards, Michael Farrell, Allen Fisher, Kathleen Fraser, William Fuller, John Gibbens, Harry Gilonis, Giles Goodland, Bill Griffiths, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Anselm Hollo, Lyn Hejinian, Piers Hugill, Peter Jaeger, Elizabeth James, Lisa Jarnot, Keith Jebb, Justin Katko, John Kinsella, Philip Kuhn, Michelle Leggott, Tony Lopez, Chris McCabe, Steve McCaffery, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Makin, Peter Manson, Brian Marley, Bernadette Mayer, Jay Millar, David Miller, and Peter Minter.
Red Rover (Phoenix Poets)
by Susan StewartRed Rover is both the name of a children’s game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The “red rover” is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape our fate. In her most innovative work to date, award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart remembers the antithetical forces—falling and rising, coming and going, circling and centering—revealed in such games and traces them out to many other cycles. Ranging among traditional, open, and newly-invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, Red Rover begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.
Say Goodnight to the Sleepy Animals (Say Hello #4)
by Ian WhybrowIt's night-time and Cat is going to say goodnight to all her animal friends. Meet a dog, a barn owl and even some fluffy little rabbits. Toddlers will love joining in with all the animal noises in this delightful story – perfect for reading at bedtime!With simple rhyming text by Ian Whybrow, author of the bestselling The Tickle Book and The Bedtime Bear, and lots of cuddly animals, beautifully illustrated by Ed Eaves, Say Goodnight to the Sleepy Animals! is favourite with both parents and children.Enjoy more books in the Say Hello series: Say Hello to the Snowy Animals! and Say Hello to the Animals!