Above the River: The Complete Poems

Author	Charles Simic
ISBN	0156983508

Throw a pebble into the pool and
see it dissolve into shimmering currents,
carrying burdens of ashen leaves that autumn
has swept beneath the silent tremors, teaming to cry
their laments; Or hide behind a ripe tree and cast a glance,
all the way to that faint window where a boy, on...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060909269

“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...

Author	Adam Zagajewski
ISBN	0374528616

I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he's been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"

Without...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880012129

my boyfriend studied with robert haas in grad school. my dad lives in the same neighborhood as robert haas and keeps meeting him at uc berkeley lectures where they end up seated together. when my dad and my boyfriend met, they bonded by unceasingly talking about robert haas as "bob." this sounds slightly...

Author	Russell Edson
ISBN	0932440657

Never having done any creative writing as an adult, I took my first writing course many years ago, back when I was in my late thirties. I was given conventional short stories and poems as models but nothing really clicked with me, that is, I knew I wanted to write but wasn’t really inspired by...

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	Heather McHugh
ISBN	0819512168

When McHugh got the MacArhtur nod last year, it made me scramble to find some of her work on the internets, but as anyone who's read McHugh knows, I think that's a bad way to read her work.... These are poems that I think require a level of attention, to sound as well as idea, that I can't quite sustain when I'm...

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	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822956489

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of...

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1880238136

I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740562

In ‘New and Selected Poems’, readers will find a real master craftsman at work. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your...

Author	Randall Jarrell
ISBN	0374513058

Poet, novelist, critic, and teacher, Randall Jarrell was a diverse literary talent with a distinctive voice, by turns imaginative, realistic, sensitive, and ironic. His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet...

Author	Richard Hugo
ISBN	0393307840

I think of this collection as an unintentional autobiography. If you read the poems from start to finish in the order presented, you follow Richard Hugo's progression from loneliness to love and friendship, addiction through recovery, and depression to hope. Most appealing of all are his poems revealing...

Author	John Berryman
ISBN	0374522812

John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which...

Author	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556591942

Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness...

Author	Charles Olson
ISBN	0520055950

Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's...

Author	Weldon Kees
ISBN	0803258283

During his forty-first year, Weldon Kees’ depression deepened. He had institutionalized Ann, his wife of sixteen years, when a mammoth drinking binge (plus her compulsive TV viewing of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings) precipitated a psychotic episode; her failure to stay in treatment afterward...

Author

Stephen Dunn

I like to immerse myself in an artist's work. It's always best to read three or four books by the same author at the same time. This way, one becomes comfortable with a particular vision or voice. Reading all of Charles Dickens or all of Jane Austen is thrilling because their worlds become yours, and for...

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374523266

The heart of this volume is made up of long journal-like dated entries in free verse. Deliciously absorbing and meditative, they concern themselves with landscapes and the natural world, with ideas, memory, and autobiography. I think of poetry as a kind of wisdom. I get the idea Wright dedicates his...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0395120985

1
This book
is at least
a week
overdue
having sat on a table in front of the television
after one failed attempt (by me) to
read it
but it just looks so
Badass
with the arcane symbols
and worn typography
and shit
so I saved it to try again, swearing
I...

Author	Jack Gilbert
ISBN	0679747672

JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and...