Field Guide
10 best books like Field Guide (Robert Hass): Dancing in Odessa, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, Black Zodiac, Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, Loose Sugar, Desire: Poems, Song, The Father, The Branch Will Not Break
| Author | Ilya Kaminsky |
| ISBN | 1932195122 |
Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language....
| Author | Jorie Graham |
| ISBN | 0880014768 |
The Dream of the Unified Field is a selection of Jorie Graham's poems from five collections, including:
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
,
Erosion
,
The End of Beauty
,
Region of Unlikeness
, and
Materialism
...
From
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
...
The slow overture of...
| Author | Tony Hoagland |
| ISBN | 1555974554 |
The anticipated first collection of essays by celebrated poet Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me
Meanness, the very thing that is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless...
| Author | Charles Wright |
| ISBN | 0374525366 |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...
| Author | Heather McHugh |
| ISBN | 0819512168 |
When McHugh got the MacArhtur nod last year, it made me scramble to find some of her work on the internets, but as anyone who's read McHugh knows, I think that's a bad way to read her work.... These are poems that I think require a level of attention, to sound as well as idea, that I can't quite sustain when I'm...
| 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 | Frank Bidart |
| ISBN | 0374525994 |
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
I hate and--love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.--from "Catullus: Excrucior" In Frank Bidart's collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first...
| Author | Brigit Pegeen Kelly |
| ISBN | 1880238136 |
I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....
| Author | Sharon Olds |
| ISBN | 0679740023 |
The Father is a sequence of poems, a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death. It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion...
| 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 | Karyna McGlynn |
| ISBN | 1932511768 |
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration...
| Author | Carolyn Forché |
| ISBN | 0300019858 |
The language and images of Carolyn Forché’s poetry are so closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body’s functioning, that it is surprising to realize how many of her poems deal with uprootedness—hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, the loss of...
| Author | John Ashbery |
| ISBN | 0912946474 |
I used to read more poetry in the past, this is the first complete volume that I've read in a while. This one I read because it is quoted in Siri Hustvedt's Memories of the Future. I usually find that out of 50 poems, there are 2 or 3 that I can relate to, that speak to me. This doesn't mean the others are weak: With...
| Author | Kevin Young |
| ISBN | 0375709894 |
In this jaunty and intimate collection, Kevin Young invents a language as shimmying and comic, as low-down and high-hearted, as the music from which he draws inspiration. With titles such as “Stride Piano,” “Gutbucket,” and “Can-Can,” these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized...
| Author | Lucie Brock-Broido |
| ISBN | 0679765999 |
I ordered this book from a second-hand site and enjoyed the annotations a previous reader included in this collection. Reading someone else's thoughts on the poems and their editing suggestions (which actually made a couple poems better!) was really fun and interesting.
More to do with the...
| Author | Dorianne Laux |
| ISBN | 1880238071 |
Hadn't read this in a dozen or more years (thanks again Boone), and it's hot-damn fantastic. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, "After Twelve Days of Rain," which you can hear her read here:
Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went...
| Author | Larry Levis |
| ISBN | 0822957930 |
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John
When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering...
| Author | Dean Young |
| ISBN | 1932416692 |
People have often tried to pin down what it is that Dean Young does. He has been variously called a New Age surrealist, son of the New York School, a comically tragic poet who knows the pain at the heart of a joke, a lunatic, a stuffed bunny, and a fire engine of the Romantic imagination. But if these things...
| Author | Ashley Capps |
| ISBN | 1931968373 |
In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe...
| Author | Galway Kinnell |
| ISBN | 0395120985 |
1
This book
is at least
a week
overdue
having sat on a table in front of the television
after one failed attempt (by me) to
read it
but it just looks so
Badass
with the arcane symbols
and worn typography
and shit
so I saved it to try again, swearing
I...
| Author | Bob Hicok |
| ISBN | 0822959534 |
I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day of shy...
| Author | D.A. Powell |
| ISBN | 1555973957 |
kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home
no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"
In...
| Author | A.R. Ammons |
| ISBN | 0393324117 |
"A. R. Ammons's poem with the unforgettable title is a defense of meaning—'this,' the poet says, 'are awash in ideality.' Garbage is an epic of ideas: all life—not that of human beings alone, but every species—is shown to be part of an ultimate reality. Eternity is here and now. The argument ranges...
