77 Dream Songs

Author	John Ashbery
ISBN	0140586687

Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry.

I could...

Author	Claudia Emerson
ISBN	0807130842

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...

Author	Paul Muldoon
ISBN	0374528845

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,...

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374525366

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0252022106

A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered....

Author	James Tate
ISBN	0819511927

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger...

Author	James Wright
ISBN	0819560227

I may skip a detailed review on this, simply because poetry reviews are a real ass kicker for me. Like work. But, that said, it deserves one. Wright is one best poets I've read (and I've read A LOT). One reason for this is that he's SO American in his settings and voice. If you like Whitman, you should like this...

Author	Matthew Zapruder
ISBN	1556592442

“Zapruder’s hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales.”—Publishers Weekly


Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In his second collection he...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0395320461

Did you know Galway Kinnell was active in the Civil Rights movement, jailed in Louisiana for his role in voter registration activities? I didn't know that until I read the excerpts from Kinnell's long poem "The Last River" that are included in this 1982 compilation. "The Last River" is, interestingly,...

Author	Nathaniel Mackey
ISBN	0811216527

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic...

Author	C.K. Williams
ISBN	0374527067

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679765840

Brilliant, engaging, human and personal. Levine is one of the greats.

Ask for Nothing

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward...

Author	Michael Dickman
ISBN	1556592892

"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly

"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length...

Author	Tomas Tranströmer
ISBN	1904634486

In this, his 75th year, Tomas Transtromer can be clearly recognised not just as Sweden's most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Transtromer is...

Author	Richard Wilbur
ISBN	0156654911

Reading the first half of this volume was giving me an inferiority complex as a poet. But as I made my way progressively backward through his work I eventually became bored. Wilbur writes so consistently beautifully in his maturity that his earlier poems rarely compare, though in Ceremony, we do get...

Author	Conrad Aiken
ISBN	0195165470

Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence...

Author	Olga Broumas
ISBN	0300021119

Olga Broumas foi a 72a poeta a ganhar Yale Series of Young Poets e a primeira nao-anglofona que escreveu em inglês como segunda lingua. Nasceu na Grécia e assim como Safo, também escreve poemas saficos.
A primeira parte é intitulada Twelve Aspects of God, ela homeageia as deusas, semi-deusas,...

Author

W.H. Auden

When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom...

Author	W.D. Snodgrass
ISBN	0394722205

This Pulitzer Prize winner is considered to be the first volume of "confessional poetry." Snodgrass hated the term, but it can't be denied that something new began with Heart's Needle (1959). It is as resolutely formal as Yeats or Frost, yet remarkably frank about the particulars of its pain.

Snodgrass...

Author

Robert Frost

New Hampshire is a volume of poems written by Robert Frost, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. The titular poem is the longest, and it has cross-references to 14 of the following poems. These are the "Notes" in the book title. The "Grace Notes" are the 30 final poems. Contained in this collection...

Author	W.S. Merwin
ISBN	0689103433

Reading Merwin is like reading a puzzle and it´s usually worth the mental effort to get to the heart of his logic. It reminds me of reading the Edda kennings from the old Icelanders, who wrote of objects in a roundabout, playful manner (frozen wave = mountain, etc...). But here, Merwin applies something...

Author	James Schuyler
ISBN	0374516227

"The flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and effects of light that Schuyler describes with such �lan, even if only glimpsed from the window of his apartment, could easily be transposed to the poetry written in Japan or Persia many centuries ago. Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost...

Author

Elizabeth Bishop

I don't know enough about reading poetry to weigh in with an educated opinion. I can say that I found a number of the pieces in this collection captivating, and others less so. I'll be interested to see how "North & South" (her debut collection, from 1946) compares with her final collection, "Geography...

Author	George Oppen
ISBN	0811203360

If possible I would recommend listening to Oppen read this himself
There is something so fragile and weary in his reading that punches me in the heart especially hard when there is a sort of immediate self undermining in his poetry, the first instance of this (and me having my heart broken) is the forth...

Author	Anne Sexton
ISBN	0395081807

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: A gripping poetry collection mapping the thorny journey from madness to hope.

Anne Sexton won immediate recognition as a strong voice in American poetry with the 1960 publication of her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, followed by critical acclaim of her...