The Beforelife
10 best books like The Beforelife (Franz Wright): The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, Second Space: New Poems, Deepstep Come Shining, Collected Poems, Insomnia Diary, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, The Branch Will Not Break, Refusing Heaven, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, The Lost Pilot
| 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 | Czesław Miłosz |
| ISBN | 0060755245 |
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as...
In C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining, the eye and the ear are center. In the book, the result of a road trip taken with photographer Deborah Luster through Georgia and the Carolinas, the speaker of the poem is the “hand of the selenographer, mapper of lost roads.” Wright’s...
This celebratory volume gives us the entire career of Donald Justice between two covers, including a rich handful of poems written since New and Selected Poems was published in 1995. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace...
| Author | Bob Hicok |
| ISBN | 0822958422 |
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,...
| Author | Alan Dugan |
| ISBN | 1583225129 |
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his...
| 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...
More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and...
| 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 | James Tate |
| ISBN | 0300009879 |
Late Harvest
I look up and see
a white buffalo
emerging from the
enormous red gates
of a cattle truck
lumbering into
the mouth of the sun.
The prairie chickens
do not seem to fear
me; neither do the
girls in cellophane
fields, near me, hear me
changing...
| 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 | Graham Foust |
| ISBN | 0978746716 |
Poetry. Graham Foust's third book offers agile poems of dread and humor. Robert Creeley writes, "These poems move in close to luxuriant circles, round and round each particular syllable, neither hurrying nor dragging behind--just there. At times there seems an almost physical presence to them,...
| Author | Philip Schultz |
| ISBN | 0151015260 |
First a disclaimer. I'm not much for LONG poems. I struggle with them because I have to focus and slow myself down with poetry. Doing that over 50 pages seems cruel if not unusual. No wonder my Paradise Lost class in college was such a devilish disaster!
When I picked up Schultz's failure, I didn't...
| Author | Charles Simic |
| ISBN | 0151012148 |
This new collection of poems from Charles Simic demonstrates once again his wit, moral acuity, and brilliant use of imagery. His settings are a farmhouse porch, a used-clothing store, empty station platforms; his subjects love, futility, and the sense of an individual life lived among a crowd of literal...
| Author | Alice Notley |
| ISBN | 0143118935 |
A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert.
Award-winning, Paris-based poet Alice Notley's adventurous new book is inspired by the life of Marie, a woman who resided in the dump outside Notley's hometown in the Southwestern desert of America. In...
About the Author:
Louise Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and...
| Author | Jerome Rothenberg |
| ISBN | 0520072278 |
As we come to the end of the century, the entire vista of modern poetry has dramatically changed. Poems for the Millennium captures the essence of that change, and unlike any anthology available today, it reveals the revolutionary concepts at the very heart of twentieth-century poetry.
International...
| Author | Richard Hugo |
| ISBN | 0393307840 |
I think of this collection as an unintentional autobiography. If you read the poems from start to finish in the order presented, you follow Richard Hugo's progression from loneliness to love and friendship, addiction through recovery, and depression to hope. Most appealing of all are his poems revealing...
Beckman’s new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is,...
