Crossing the Water
10 best books like Crossing the Water (Sylvia Plath): Collected Sonnets, Smoke, The Country Between Us, Vita Nova, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, The Unswept Room, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Fire to Fire
| Author | Edna St. Vincent Millay |
| ISBN | 0060910917 |
More than 180 sonnets selected from Millay's books of poems -- including 20 sonnets from Mine the Harvest not contained in previous editions of her Collected Sonnets -- are brought together in this new, expanded edition. An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses...
| Author | Dorianne Laux |
| ISBN | 1880238861 |
Dorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully...
| 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 | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0060957956 |
Since, 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book...
| Author | Elizabeth Bishop |
| ISBN | 0374530769 |
From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside...
| 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 | 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 | Sharon Olds |
| ISBN | 0375709983 |
From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.
From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation...
| Author | Anne Sexton |
| ISBN | 0395081793 |
This book of Sexton poems has the cumulative impact of a good novel. It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight...
| Author | Mark Doty |
| ISBN | 0060752475 |
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop...
What should I do?
Should I pretend that I'm not desperately in love with this book? With Raymond Carver's writing?
Should I reveal to you that other poetry readers would probably give this collection a 3 or 4 star rating, shrug their shoulders, and toss it carelessly back on the shelf?...
| Author | Edward Butscher |
| ISBN | 0971059829 |
I was really looking forward to reading this book, and I did enjoy reading about the life of Sylvia Plath. However. The tone in Butscher's writing upset me quite a bit. He spends much of the book analyzing Sylvia's poetry. Her early poetry, he keeps damning as unsophisticated and not noteworthy. She was...
| Author | Anne Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0395937604 |
This book is unfair to Sylvia Plath, seemingly in an attempt to appease those who are still alive and have control over her estate. I take greatest issue not with the glossing over of Ted Hughes' abandonment and infidelity to Sylvia (and leaving her a single mother in the 1960s) but Stevenson's...
