Baudelaire: Poems

Author	Robert Pinsky
ISBN	0374167494

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised...

Author	John Milton
ISBN	0385023510

Preface
Table of Dates
Further Reading

Poems 1645

--On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
--A Paraphrase on Psalm 114
--Psalm 136
--The Passion
--On Time
--Upon the Circumcision
--At a Solemn Music
--An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
--Song....

Author	Marianne Moore
ISBN	0140188517

How many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?

I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at least here in the UK) is a bit of a shame because she has an important voice in the world of poetry.

Her poetry is unusual and it’s very hard...

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	Alfred Tennyson
ISBN	1400041872

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a more complex writer than his status as Queen Victoria’s favorite poet might suggest. Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries....

Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
ISBN	0374286434

This powerful new collection of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry delves into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships,...

Author

Rainer Maria Rilke

I would like to step out of my heart’s door
and be under the great sky.
— Rilke, “Lament”
A myriad of shades, a plethora of images, the juxtaposition of sentiments which soothe and unsettle. A miscellany of visuals and existential hues. A mélange of nuances and distinctive sounds....

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	Adrienne Rich
ISBN	0393319849

"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move." In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures—the midnight salvage—we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work...

Author	Peter Washington
ISBN	0679429069

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060779195

My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...

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	John Hollander
ISBN	1400043883

A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.

From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched...

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	Edgar Allan Poe
ISBN	0679445056

Poe wrote few poems, few of which are any good. His technical expertise is excellent but nearly all of his poems lack substance; they are like brass clockworks, shiny, complex, dazzling to look at, difficult to craft, but ultimately lifeless. I suspect Poe knew this too and that he was simply attempting...

Author	Anna Akhmatova
ISBN	0307264246

A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova—denounced by the Soviet regime for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference”—is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Before the revolution, Akhmatova...

Author	John Donne
ISBN	0907482244

The second in my series (3) of reviews of John Donne as read in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne.

This collection of his Holy Sonnets (often called the "Westmoreland sequence") contains 19 sonnets written by Donne from his conversion to Anglicanism up until his death. These...

Author

Arthur Rimbaud

This is an interesting collection as it begins with some of his earliest known poems and moves right on through to when he gave up on writing shortly before he left to pursue his fortunes abroad. There is so much we don't know about the man and what he actually thought.

I think that is why Rimbaud...

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	Eavan Boland
ISBN	0393324249

Boland uses the first half of this collection to set out her thoughts on the nature of love, and the remaining poems display her mastery of diverse topics. She uses her Irish identity to good effect, as also her experience of migration, and it is always clear that the poet is a woman with things to say from...

Author	Andrew Marvell
ISBN	0140424571

Member of Parliament, tutor to Oliver Cromwell's ward, satirist and friend of John Milton, Andrew Marvell was one of the most interesting and important poets of the seventeenth century. The Complete Poems demonstrates his unique skill and immense diversity to the full, and includes lyrical love-poetry,...

Author	Paul Éluard
ISBN	0714539953

De Primeiro em Primeiro de Maio


Como da mesma árvore sendo as folhas
Nós somos reunidos por vento sufocante
Miséria é a noite e a guerra dilúvio
Do espelho que nos estendem apenas resta o chumbo

E não é só de ontem mas de sempre que ousam
Votarem-nos ao nada...