Anna Akhmatova

Author	Osip Mandelstam
ISBN	1590170911

Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian poetry but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan...

Author	Rudyard Kipling
ISBN	0307267113

Beloved for his fanciful and engrossing children’s literature, controversial for his enthusiasm for British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most widely read writers of Victorian and modern English literature. In addition to writing more than two dozen works of fiction, including...

Author	W.H. Auden
ISBN	0679443673

The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Auden is just another reminder of his exhilarating lyric power and his understanding of love and longing in all their sacred and profane guises. One...

Author	Du Fu
ISBN	0811211002

Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...

Author	Wisława Szymborska
ISBN	0151012202

From a writer whom Charles Simic calls "one of the finest poets living" comes a collection of witty, compassionate, contemplative, and always surprising poems. Szymborska writes with verve about everything from love unremembered to keys mislaid in the grass. The poems will appear, for the first...

Author	Tomas Tranströmer
ISBN	0811216721

The Collected Poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Tranströmer, now available in this comprehensive edition.

In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.

Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of...

Author	Robert Frost
ISBN	0679455140

From one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not...

Author	Percy Bysshe Shelley
ISBN	0679429093

Imagine this scene: Somewhere in the awesome surroundings of the French Alps, incessant summer rains covering the valleys with a moist, foggy veil. Inside a cottage, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, are discussing life, principle and the mysterious fears of human nature, which...

Author	John Keats
ISBN	0679433198

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
As a dedicated book reviewer, it is my job to say why I like certain books and dislike others. When it comes to nonfiction, this is reasonably straightforward: if the exposition is clear, if the arguments are logical, if the ideas are reasonable—then it is a worthy...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0375401857

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece...

Author	Alexander Pushkin
ISBN	0375406727

Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...

Author	Langston Hughes
ISBN	0375405518

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a...

Author	Hilda Schiff
ISBN	0312143575

The only known collection of its kind currently in print, this important volume includes the work of 59 poets--among them Auden, Brecht, Celan, Jarrell, Levi, Milosz, Plath, Sexton, Spender, Wiesel, and Yevtushenko--writing on a range of subjects that are indelibly linked with the Holocaust. Collecting...

Author	Paul Schmidt
ISBN	1590171918

A New York Review Books Original

A master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English

In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians,...

Author	Giuseppe Ungaretti
ISBN	0374528926

A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight...

Author	Gillian Avery
ISBN	0679436413

I came across this beautifully rendered collection of Russian fairy tales, quite by accident, while looking for a book that would suit as a gift. I couldn’t tell at first as it was shelved in between two other books with its cover concealed, but as soon as I pulled it out I saw a cover which begged to be opened....

Author	Gerard Manley Hopkins
ISBN	0679444696

The poet feels nature, life, so deeply he is overwhelmed. He sometimes invents words and grammar to express his ecstasy. I just love Hopkins for this, for his passion.

Two of my favorite poems:


Pied Beauty

Glory be to G-d for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour...

Author	Samuel Taylor Coleridge
ISBN	0393979040

Review title: Coleridge through a keyhole

I had any prose by Coleridge on my Christmas wish list so my daughter the English PhD gave me this 775 page selection from his poetry and prose, and lest you think this is anything close to complete you don't know Coleridge. Here is one quick data point...

Author	Federico García Lorca
ISBN	0374528551

Selected verse from the poet who "expanded the scope of lyric poetry" (Rafael Campo, The Washington Post).

The work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's greatest modernist poet, has long been admired for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. The revised Selected Verse, which...

Author	Timothy Donnelly
ISBN	1933517476

"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman

Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested...

Author	Sheila Fitzpatrick
ISBN	0691145334

Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably...

Author	Sylvia Plath
ISBN	0316712280

Yes, THE Sylvia Plath wrote a picture book for kids, which I now have finally read thanks to Miriam. Sweet, warm watercolor illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully that remind us Plath was a mother who in fact like most mothers read stories to her children. And wrote them.

A bed for fishing, a bed...

Author	Stephen Kotkin
ISBN	0679642765

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection,...

Author	Tonio Andrade
ISBN	0691135975

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42....