The Book of Nightmares

Author	Wisława Szymborska
ISBN	0156011468

Described by Robert Hass as "unquestionably one of the great living European poets" and by Charles Simic as "one of the finest poets living today," Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts. This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0880013346

I had a Creative Writing teacher who asked me once if I would like anyone other than myself to read my poetry. When I answered, “Yes,” she advised me to make the suffering in my poems more universal and less personal.

Poetry is obviously personal, but she explained to me that, if I had a husband...

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	Marie Howe
ISBN	0393318869

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared...

Author	Marianne Moore
ISBN	0140188517

How many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?

I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at least here in the UK) is a bit of a shame because she has an important voice in the world of poetry.

Her poetry is unusual and it’s very hard...

Author	Mary Oliver
ISBN	0316650048

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.

"American Primitive enchants me with the purity...

Author	Frank O'Hara
ISBN	0872860353

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations,...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0394715632

I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060909269

“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...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880012420

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...

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...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740589

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...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0918526833

Contents

I.
Furious Versionis

II.
The Interrogation
This Hour And What Is Dead
Arise, Go Down
My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud
For A New Citizen Of These United States
With Ruins

III.
This Room And Everything In It
The City...