Human Wishes

Author	Charles Simic
ISBN	0156983508

Throw a pebble into the pool and
see it dissolve into shimmering currents,
carrying burdens of ashen leaves that autumn
has swept beneath the silent tremors, teaming to cry
their laments; Or hide behind a ripe tree and cast a glance,
all the way to that faint window where a boy, on...

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	James Wright
ISBN	0374522820

One of the most admired American poets of his generation, James Wright (1927-80) wrote contemplative, sturdy, and generous poems with an honesty, clarity, and stylistic range matched by very few--then or now. From his Deep Image-inspired lyrics to his Whtimanesque renderings of Neruda, Vallejo,...

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	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	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	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	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	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822956489

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine 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...

Author	Forrest Gander
ISBN	0811213811

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...

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	Dean Young
ISBN	0822957809

Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the...

Author	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	0374526982

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway...

Author	Gabrielle Calvocoressi
ISBN	0892553154

Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the...

Author	Jack Gilbert
ISBN	0394523865

4 Stars for the 1982 portion of the book. 3 Stars for the context of 1962. 1962 was to me, a lot of searching in vague, philosophical and sometimes superfluous ways. 1982 was funny and raw, drawing more vividly from everyday, yet unordinary experiences. There is more beauty and simplicity in those observations...

Author	Tony Hoagland
ISBN	0299135845

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction...

Author	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556592736

C.D. Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”

Rising,...