The Complete Poems

Author	Robert Lowell
ISBN	0374530327

Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems...

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	John Ashbery
ISBN	0140586687

Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry.

I could...

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	Delmore Schwartz
ISBN	0811201910

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...

Author	A.R. Ammons
ISBN	0393303969

I read this collection on the basis of a poem I read upon open the book to a random page...
I said
Mr. Schafer
did you get up to see the comet:

and
he said
Oh no
let it go by, I don't care:
- Dominion (pg. 43)

This poem contains the humour of a poet who once referred...

Author	Eugenio Montale
ISBN	0374526257

Winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Premio Montale, an acclaimed translation of Italy's greatest modern poet

Eugenio Montale is universally recognized as having brought the great Italian lyric tradition that begins with Dante into the twentieth century with unrivaled...

Author	Louise Bogan
ISBN	0374524610

I found one truly memorable poem in the collection, a sharp observation transformed by a peculiar sensibility, a formula advocated elsewhere in the book but rarely followed. Even in this instance, the poem would have been better served if the last line had been removed.

Roman Fountain

Up...

Author

James Merrill

The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on...

Author	H.D.
ISBN	0811209717

Of special significance are the "Uncollected and Unpublished Poems (1912-1944)," the third section of the book, written mainly in the 1930s, during H. D.'s supposed "fallow" period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only...

Author	John Berryman
ISBN	0374522812

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...

Author	Wallace Stevens
ISBN	1883011450

The Library of America is not a cheap publishing house, but their editions are worth every penny you pay for them.
Stevens is an incredibly enigmatic poet you'll spend hours trying to figure out. Sometimes you'll crack his works, sometimes you won't, sometimes you will and you won't like what you...

Author	Charles Olson
ISBN	0520055950

Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's...

Author	Robert Creeley
ISBN	0520241584

Robert Creely, Wilmington, N.C., June 29, 1981: There is a sense of increment, of accumulation, in these poems that is very dear to me. Like it or not, it outwits whatever I then thought to say and gains thereby whatever I was in saying it. Thankfully, I was never what I thought I was, certainly never enough. Otherwise,...

Author	Weldon Kees
ISBN	0803258283

During his forty-first year, Weldon Kees’ depression deepened. He had institutionalized Ann, his wife of sixteen years, when a mammoth drinking binge (plus her compulsive TV viewing of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings) precipitated a psychotic episode; her failure to stay in treatment afterward...

Author	Zbigniew Herbert
ISBN	0060783907

This outstanding new translation brings a uniformity of voice to Zbigniew Herbert's entire poetic output, from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his final volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue Of the Storm. Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's...

Author	William Carlos Williams
ISBN	0811211886

You really need to read the Collected to understand Williams. The various Selecteds out there really don't do this remarkable poet justice (though the review I read of Pinsky's new edited volume of Williams was positive--haven't checked that out yet). Williams was not just an Imagist poet, writing...

Author	George Oppen
ISBN	0811214885

George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost...

Author	Louis Zukofsky
ISBN	0801846684

My sweet unworded, we fall into disuse,
The sense that attached to us persists
Despite the yellow page of local history

Sir Edmund Hilary encounters Roberto Duran(1), a meeting burnished in fugue -- one containing labor history and untranslated fragments, replete with diacritics...

Author	Frank O'Hara
ISBN	0520201663

Frank O’Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up....