Collected Poems

Author	Frank O'Hara
ISBN	0394719735

Frank O'Hara's poems are made for weather like this: bright high summer with air so warm and thick it feels like you could swim in it, when it's easy to forget you or the world has ever been cold. Summery, happy and joyful aren't ideas commonly associated with poetry for grownups but here they're intrinsic…...

Author	Lorine Niedecker
ISBN	0520224337

"The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one...

Author	Delmore Schwartz
ISBN	0811201910

When this book was first published (as Summer Knowledge) in 1959.
Delmore Schwartz was still riding a crest, the golden boy of the literary scene—a position he had commanded ever since the appearance of his first collection of stories and poems in 1938. Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious...

Author	Brenda Hillman
ISBN	0819522430

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold,...

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 Merrill

The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on...

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

D.A. Powell

Came back to this book again after having read some of it before. The intro is great, too; this passage blew me away:

"As memory required me to revisit the deaths of many of these men, I realized that I ran the danger of writing a collection in which death was a consequence of my "lifestyle." (I use...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555974805

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....

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	John Ashbery
ISBN	0880015470

Most critics would agree that John Ashbery is one of 20th-century American poetry's finest voices. Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted...

Author	Ted Berrigan
ISBN	0520251555

Amazing collection. For those of us who had owned (and in my case, worn out) So Going Around Cities, the Collected surprises, since it is HUGE! and has a lot of work that we (or I) hadn't seen before. I knew Ted's work for years, sat in a class of his (with Alice) back in the 1970's at Naropa. For me, Ted's work...

Author	A.R. Ammons
ISBN	0393321924

I haven't finished reading ALL the poems here, but am going to take a break for awhile (I've read almost one third, from various time periods in this collection). I forget how I stumbled upon this poet--I think he was quoted on an anarchist site that Lara sent me (believe it or not)--but he is one that I'll...

Author	Jack Spicer
ISBN	0819568872

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative...

Author	George Oppen
ISBN	0811214885

George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost...

Author	Basil Bunting
ISBN	0811215636

A master of song poems which celebrate—and incarnate—the music of nature and history, love and mythology, religion and language, Basil Bunting (1900-1985) was a major figure in Modernist poetry, recognized by Pound and Zukofsky as early as the 1930s, and crowned, with the 1966 publication of...

Author	Frank Bidart
ISBN	0374522715

I fear too many poets these days are considered "good" merely because they're different, their aesthetic hard, their poetry disarming. Bidart is all of these things, but deserving of our highest praises because his poetry transcends gimmicks to become a new verse, one that is beautiful and painful....