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Geography III

10 best books like Geography III (Elizabeth Bishop): Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, The First Four Books of Poems, 77 Dream Songs, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, The Changing Light at Sandover, Praise, My Alexandria, Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, Desire: Poems

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
AuthorJohn Ashbery
ISBN0140586687
Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry.

I could...
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
AuthorYusef Komunyakaa
ISBN0819512117
Poetry "reconnects us to the act of dreaming ourselves into existence," Komunyakaa once wrote. Once you pause a minute to consider the pain that has served as an outline in this poet's life, and when you also consider the highfalutin awards and professorial prestige given to a man whom people still seem...
The First Four Books of Poems
AuthorLouise Glück
ISBN0880014776
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...
77 Dream Songs
AuthorJohn Berryman
ISBN0571207693
Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and...
Life Studies and For the Union Dead
AuthorRobert Lowell
ISBN0374506280
This review is cross-posted from my blog, so forgive the rather overwhelming length.

I’ve been a bad, bad little aspiring poet. Naughtily, I’ve avoided reading a single collection of poetry—by a male writer—in all my years of writing, and, perhaps more criminally, done so even throughout...
The Changing Light at Sandover
AuthorJames Merrill
ISBN0307263215
James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected...
Praise
AuthorRobert Hass
ISBN0880012420

By the way, speaking of praise: in spite of the fact that Robert Hass merits much of it, for the clarity, the immediacy, the trenchant images, and the thoughfulness of his verse, I still find myself unwilling to grant him my love—as I love Donne, Keats, Mew, O'Hara, and James Wright—because I...
My Alexandria
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0252022106
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....
Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993
AuthorHeather McHugh
ISBN0819512168
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...
Desire: Poems
AuthorFrank Bidart
ISBN0374525994
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...
The Good Thief
AuthorMarie Howe
ISBN0892551275
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....
Science and Steepleflower: Poetry
AuthorForrest Gander
ISBN0811213811
His poetry has been called "desperately beautiful" by Thom Gunn in Agni Review, and "original and fascinating" by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths...
Song
AuthorBrigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN1880238136
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....
Insomnia Diary
AuthorBob Hicok
ISBN0822958422
One of the best books of poetry I've read. Hicok can hit hard, but he doesn't lose himself in savagery--there's room in his attitude for sensitivity and bemusement. Often, when he does work with a bitter pen, he aims it at his own self, but even there he flavors his vinegar with compassion. Most importantly,...
The Branch Will Not Break
AuthorJames Wright
ISBN0819510181

“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...
Winter Stars
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822935112
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...
Modern Life
AuthorMatthea Harvey
ISBN1555974805
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....
The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Revised Edition)
AuthorWeldon Kees
ISBN0803258283

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...
The End of Beauty
AuthorJorie Graham
ISBN0880016167
This podcast (a Q&A between Graham and Silverblatt) helped me tremendously in my reading of Graham: http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/jor...

I love the story in this of Graham's teenage daughter coming to her and saying that she felt "bad." Graham's response: a thesaurus, to look...
A Little White Shadow
AuthorMary Ruefle
ISBN1933517034
Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-century book, Ruefle’s ninth publication brings new meaning to an old story. What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate...
Blind Huber
AuthorNick Flynn
ISBN1555973736
Award-winning poet Nick Flynn takes readers into the dangerous and irresistible center of the hive

I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens' hands, my words
make them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,
& his hands go in.
—from "Blind Huber"

Blindness...
Cocktails
AuthorD.A. Powell
ISBN1555973957
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...
White Buildings: Poems
AuthorHart Crane
ISBN0871401797
This first book of poems by hart Crane, one of his three major collections, was originally published in 1926. The themes in White Buildings are abstract and metaphysical, but Crane's associations and images spring from the American scene. Eugene O'Neill wrote: "Hart Crane's poems are profound and...
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