Breath
10 best books like Breath (Philip Levine): The First Four Books of Poems, Contemporary American Poetry, Memoir of the Hawk, My Alexandria, The Good Thief, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, The Branch Will Not Break, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, The Angel of History, Field Guide
| Author | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0880014776 |
Gluck's poetry focuses on emotions living just below a tranquil domesticity. Many of these poems seem angry or resentful of isolation within a relationship, but the language is moving enough to make each stanza evoke empathy. Through it all is the theme of mature love and what it means to maintain a relationship...
| Author | A. Poulin Jr. |
| ISBN | 0395745322 |
I own many books of poetry and a few poetry anthologies. It is rare that an anthology includes all of the poets whose work I admire, but this is one of those. As is the case for many anthologies, for those who are looking for samples of more experimental work, this is not for you. This includes the typical major...
Memoir of the Hawk creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown,...
| 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 | Marie Howe |
| ISBN | 0892551275 |
Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Ms. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence....
| Author | Alan Dugan |
| ISBN | 1583225129 |
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his...
| Author | James Wright |
| ISBN | 0819510181 |
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” When I first heard this Emily Dickinson quote, I knew exactly what she meant. After all, I had read The Branch Will Not Break when I was eighteen.
It was 1967. I was already writing verse--very bad verse--and...
| Author | Larry Levis |
| ISBN | 0822954540 |
For my money, this is Levis' best book. I admit there are times when I fluctuate between it and Elegy, which seems to be most people's favorite. But the longer sequence in this book, "The Perfection of Solitude," is one of the most sincere, confounding, and ambitious explorations into the lyric Levis...
| Author | Carolyn Forché |
| ISBN | 0060925841 |
Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. These poems reflect the effects of such experience:...
| Author | Robert Hass |
| ISBN | 0300076339 |
The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the...
| Author | Amiri Baraka |
| ISBN | 1568860145 |
Finally in print in a single volume, a selection from Baraka's mostly out-of-print collections of poetry, from 1961 to the present. Starting with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and concluding with recent limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, this selection traces the more than thirty...
| Author | Dean Young |
| ISBN | 0822956977 |
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine 1999 Poetry Book of the Year
With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes...
Philosophy is for the young. Poetry is for the aged.
I said that.
4 1/2
Well, for anyone who didn't catch the Dylan references (including the three words above) ... Not so far-fetched now, okay? And who was being complimented most? Maybe it was Charles, ...
Charles...
| Author | William Stafford |
| ISBN | 0060969164 |
Robert Bly edited and introduced this short selection of William Stafford’s poems. It is much needed, since Stafford is an extremely prolific poet, and it is good to have an excellent judge like Bly to look through all the good stuff and choose the most characteristic and best. (It was Stafford’s...
| Author | Donald Hall |
| ISBN | 0618340750 |
Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems...
| Author | Dorianne Laux |
| ISBN | 0918526779 |
I think I ordered this for my birthday in July last year but I have only just read it. Poetry that excites me is hard to find so when I suspect that a recently found collection may be good I hoard it, until one day ... when I can bear the anticipation no longer ... I dive in. Which is what I did this morning. I made...
| Author | Terrance Hayes |
| ISBN | 0142001392 |
The second collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award
Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson,...
| Author | Pablo Neruda |
| ISBN | 0520227085 |
The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of Neruda's odes. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas...
| Author | Amy Gerstler |
| ISBN | 0142000647 |
Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD...
