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Life Studies and For the Union Dead

10 best books like Life Studies and For the Union Dead (Robert Lowell): Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels / The Flowering of the Rod, Averno, Above the River: The Complete Poems, The Country Between Us, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, Sun under Wood, Contemporary American Poetry, Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge, The Tunnel: Selected Poems, Geography III

Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels / The Flowering of the Rod
AuthorH.D.
ISBN0811213994
As civilian war poetry (written under the shattering impact of World War II). Trilogy's three long poems rank with T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" and Ezra Pound's "Pisan Cantos." The first book of the Trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall," published in the midst of the "fifty thousand incidents" of the London...
Averno
AuthorLouise Glück
ISBN0374530742
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the...
Above the River: The Complete Poems
AuthorJames Wright
ISBN0374522820
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,...
The Country Between Us
AuthorCarolyn Forché
ISBN0060909269
“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...
The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
AuthorWallace Stevens
ISBN0679724451
As a phrase and idea, "the palm at the end of the mind" serves well in illustrating the distinctive elegance of Wallace Stevens' poetry. He had a way of boosting odd notions into the aesthetic stratosphere; appealing enigmas were his forte. What palm and why at the end of the mind and how did it get there?

Stevens'...
Sun under Wood
AuthorRobert Hass
ISBN0880015578
Robert Hass demonstrates once again the unmistakable intelligence and original voice that have won him both literary acclaim and the affection of a broad general readership. Here Hass extends and deepens his ongoing explorations of nature and human history, solitude, and the bonds of children,...
Contemporary American Poetry
AuthorA. Poulin Jr.
ISBN0395745322
I own many books of poetry and a few poetry anthologies. It is rare that an anthology includes all of the poets whose work I admire, but this is one of those. As is the case for many anthologies, for those who are looking for samples of more experimental work, this is not for you. This includes the typical major...
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge
AuthorDelmore Schwartz
ISBN0811201910
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...
The Tunnel: Selected Poems
AuthorRussell Edson
ISBN0932440657


Never having done any creative writing as an adult, I took my first writing course many years ago, back when I was in my late thirties. I was given conventional short stories and poems as models but nothing really clicked with me, that is, I knew I wanted to write but wasn’t really inspired by...
Geography III
AuthorElizabeth Bishop
ISBN0374514402
Second read. I haven’t the faintest recollection of writing the below review in 2014. .
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...
The Complete Poems
AuthorRandall Jarrell
ISBN0374513058
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...
Tea
AuthorD.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...
Collected Poems, 1937-1971
AuthorJohn Berryman
ISBN0374522812
John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which...
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems
AuthorC.D. Wright
ISBN1556591942
Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness...
Here, Bullet
AuthorBrian Turner
ISBN1882295552
Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James’ own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes...
What Work Is
AuthorPhilip Levine
ISBN0679740589
Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous...
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990
AuthorCharles Wright
ISBN0374523266
The heart of this volume is made up of long journal-like dated entries in free verse. Deliciously absorbing and meditative, they concern themselves with landscapes and the natural world, with ideas, memory, and autobiography. I think of poetry as a kind of wisdom. I get the idea Wright dedicates his...
Selected Poems
AuthorMary Ruefle
"Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely...
The Collected Poems
AuthorStanley Kunitz
ISBN0393322947
The early poems, long unavailable in any edition, sound themes that have always engaged Kunitz: life's meaning, the relation of time to eternity, kinship with nature, and loss, most poignantly that of his father. But despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz remains ardent in celebrating life....
Sweet Machine
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0060952563
Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective:...
Heart's Needle
AuthorW.D. Snodgrass
ISBN0394722205

This Pulitzer Prize winner is considered to be the first volume of "confessional poetry." Snodgrass hated the term, but it can't be denied that something new began with Heart's Needle (1959). It is as resolutely formal as Yeats or Frost, yet remarkably frank about the particulars of its pain.

Snodgrass...
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