The Complete Poems
10 best books like The Complete Poems (Randall Jarrell): Above the River: The Complete Poems, The Selected Poetry, Selected Poems, Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, The Tunnel: Selected Poems, Collected Poems, 1920-1954, Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, New Selected Poems, The Blue Estuaries
| 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 | Robinson Jeffers |
| ISBN | 0804741085 |
In 1938 Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume that would remain in print for more than fifty years. For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general readers to keep Jeffers—in spite of the almost total academic neglect that followed his fame in the 1920s and...
| Author | John Ashbery |
| ISBN | 0140585532 |
From the early virtuosity of Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath through the triumphs of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to the brilliance of A Wave - each collection of John Ashbery's verse has broken new ground. Now, from the whole range of a lifetime's work, Ashbery has...
| 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 | Robert Lowell |
| ISBN | 0374506280 |
This review is cross-posted from my blog, so forgive the rather overwhelming length.
I’ve been a bad, bad little aspiring poet. Naughtily, I’ve avoided reading a single collection of poetry—by a male writer—in all my years of writing, and, perhaps more criminally, done so even throughout...
| Author | Russell Edson |
| ISBN | 0932440657 |
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...
| 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 | Heather McHugh |
| ISBN | 0819512168 |
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...
| Author | Philip Levine |
| ISBN | 0679740562 |
In ‘New and Selected Poems’, readers will find a real master craftsman at work. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your...
| 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 | Paul Muldoon |
| ISBN | 0374528446 |
"Ireland"
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.
Sven Birkerts has said, "It is not usual for a poet of Muldoon's years to have . . . an oeuvre disclosing significant shifts...
| 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 | 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 | Muriel Rukeyser |
| ISBN | 0822959240 |
Muriel Rukeyser held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language. She earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism. Her eloquent poetry of witness-of the Scottsboro...
| Author | Galway Kinnell |
| ISBN | 0395320461 |
Did you know Galway Kinnell was active in the Civil Rights movement, jailed in Louisiana for his role in voter registration activities? I didn't know that until I read the excerpts from Kinnell's long poem "The Last River" that are included in this 1982 compilation. "The Last River" is, interestingly,...
| 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 | William Stafford |
| ISBN | 0060969164 |
Robert Bly edited and introduced this short selection of William Stafford’s poems. It is much needed, since Stafford is an extremely prolific poet, and it is good to have an excellent judge like Bly to look through all the good stuff and choose the most characteristic and best. (It was Stafford’s...
| Author | James Schuyler |
| ISBN | 0374524033 |
§ James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, consists of a series of poems placed in three sections, in which “New Poems” make up the first cycle. In “New Poems,” which include 14 poems of varying length, Schuyler’s eye inhabits a place that owes not so much to a camera eye, but to a roving,...
| Author | A.R. Ammons |
| ISBN | 0393321924 |
I haven't finished reading ALL the poems here, but am going to take a break for awhile (I've read almost one third, from various time periods in this collection). I forget how I stumbled upon this poet--I think he was quoted on an anarchist site that Lara sent me (believe it or not)--but he is one that I'll...
| Author | Charles Wright |
| ISBN | 0374523266 |
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...
| Author | Basil Bunting |
| ISBN | 0811215636 |
A master of song poems which celebrate—and incarnate—the music of nature and history, love and mythology, religion and language, Basil Bunting (1900-1985) was a major figure in Modernist poetry, recognized by Pound and Zukofsky as early as the 1930s, and crowned, with the 1966 publication of...
| Author | Conrad Aiken |
| ISBN | 0195165470 |
Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence...
