The Shadow of Sirius

Author

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan, named the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry 2010, is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs,...

Author	Natasha Trethewey
ISBN	0618872655

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0393065421

Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States s most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward...

Author	Carl Dennis
ISBN	0141002301

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that...

Author

Charles Simic

Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and not least, the sardonic humor all his own. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of contemporary...

Author	Claudia Emerson
ISBN	0807130842

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...

Author	Paul Muldoon
ISBN	0374528845

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,...

Author	Franz Wright
ISBN	0375710019

In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0307595420

A revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms.

Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into a moment’s essence and exchange something of herself...

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374525366

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...

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	James Wright
ISBN	0819560227

I may skip a detailed review on this, simply because poetry reviews are a real ass kicker for me. Like work. But, that said, it deserves one. Wright is one best poets I've read (and I've read A LOT). One reason for this is that he's SO American in his settings and voice. If you like Whitman, you should like this...

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	C.K. Williams
ISBN	0374527067

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent...

Author	Stephen Dunn
ISBN	0393322327

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's...

Author	Ted Kooser
ISBN	1556592019

American author Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0061349607

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.

His...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679765840

Brilliant, engaging, human and personal. Levine is one of the greats.

Ask for Nothing

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward...

Author	Rae Armantrout
ISBN	0819568791

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded...

Author	Gregory Pardlo
ISBN	1935536508

From Epicurus to Sam Cook, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson,...

Author	Mark Strand
ISBN	0375701370

Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny....

Author	Laura Kasischke
ISBN	1556593333

Laura Kasischke's poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space,...

Author	Ruth Stone
ISBN	1556592078

“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on...