The Half-Finished Heaven

10 best books like The Half-Finished Heaven (Tomas Tranströmer): alphabet, So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, Incarnadine: Poems, Without End: New and Selected Poems, Late Wife, Blue Hour, Collected Poems, From the New World: Poems 1976-2012

AuthorInger Christensen
Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally...
AuthorUrsula K. Le Guin
ISBN1556595387
"It's hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin." --Salon

"She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." --Margaret Atwood

"There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le...
AuthorJane Hirshfield
ISBN0060929480
A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.

Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes...
AuthorJaroslav Seifert
ISBN0945774397
Just found this gem - had never heard of him before - at Old Harbor Books in Sitka, Alaska, where I am currently visiting. I am trying not to crack the spine as I read it but these poems are so good, I don't think I'll make it!

* * *

Jaroslav Seifert's words are bound together with something...
AuthorMary Szybist
ISBN1555976352
The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
                        -from “The Troubadours etc.”
 
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly...
AuthorAdam Zagajewski
ISBN0374528616
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he's been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"

Without...
AuthorClaudia Emerson
ISBN0807130842
In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...
AuthorCarolyn Forché
ISBN0060099135
"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems...
AuthorCzesław Miłosz
ISBN0880011742
ON PRAYER

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of...
AuthorJorie Graham
ISBN0062315404
An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham.

The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war...
AuthorGalway Kinnell
ISBN0618154450
That Silent Evening

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without...
AuthorFrank Stanford
ISBN1557281939
Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction,...
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822957930
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John

When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering...
AuthorWisława Szymborska
ISBN0393323854
Winner of the Heldt Prize for Translation. A new translation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, the wonders of nature's beauty, and the illusory...
AuthorRobert Bly
ISBN0807063932
Part poetry anthology, part critical treatise, Leaping Poetry is a major statement by one of American's most distinguished poets. Bly's thesis is that great works of art contain leaps within themselves: 'A poet who is leaping makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object...
AuthorMary Ruefle
"Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely...
AuthorMark Strand
ISBN0307262960
This eleventh collection by Mark Strand is a toast to life’s transience and abiding beauty. He begins with a group of light but haunting fables, populated by figures like the King, a tiny creature in ermine who has lost his desire to rule, and by the poet’s own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery...
AuthorDean Young
ISBN1556593112
Dean Young surmounts the failures of love and the body with his signature humor, verbal banter, and wild imaginative leaps. Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange....
AuthorCharles Simic
ISBN0547397097
In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues...
AuthorTimothy Donnelly
ISBN1933517476
"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman

Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested...
AuthorFrank Bidart
ISBN0374125953
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers,...
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