The Angel of History
10 best books like The Angel of History (Carolyn Forché): Dancing in Odessa, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, Contemporary American Poetry, Vita Nova, After, My Alexandria, Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Field Guide
| 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 | A. Poulin Jr. |
| ISBN | 0395745322 |
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...
| 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 | Jane Hirshfield |
| ISBN | 0060779195 |
My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...
| 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 | 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 | Jean Valentine |
| ISBN | 0819567132 |
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers...
| Author | Larry Levis |
| ISBN | 0822954540 |
For my money, this is Levis' best book. I admit there are times when I fluctuate between it and Elegy, which seems to be most people's favorite. But the longer sequence in this book, "The Perfection of Solitude," is one of the most sincere, confounding, and ambitious explorations into the lyric Levis...
| Author | Robert Hass |
| ISBN | 0300076339 |
The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the...
| Author | Joshua Marie Wilkinson |
| ISBN | 0877459819 |
Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem...
| 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 | Juliana Spahr |
| ISBN | 0520242955 |
Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought....
| Author | Alice Notley |
| ISBN | 0140588965 |
Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative...
| Author | Ruth Stone |
| ISBN | 1556592078 |
“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on...
Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor...
| Author | Frank Bidart |
| ISBN | 0374522715 |
I fear too many poets these days are considered "good" merely because they're different, their aesthetic hard, their poetry disarming. Bidart is all of these things, but deserving of our highest praises because his poetry transcends gimmicks to become a new verse, one that is beautiful and painful....
| 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,...
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions
| Author | Maurice Manning |
| ISBN | 0300089988 |
This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters,...
| Author | Aimee Nezhukumatathil |
| ISBN | 1932195459 |
The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals,...
