The Spirit Level

Author	Robert Pinsky
ISBN	0374167494

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised...

Author	Derek Walcott
ISBN	0374289298

A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career--the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the...

Author	Alice Oswald
ISBN	0571274161

The poetry of Alice Oswald is preternatural…preternaturally gorgeous, preternaturally immediate and relevant and precise. We want to sink into that language and be in that bright place—perhaps not to live (among the flashing swords), but to die there, amongst one’s brethren, with poetry...

Author	Richard Wilbur
ISBN	0156030799

With a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur stands as one of America's preeminent men of letters. Collected Poems 1943-2004 is the comprehensive collection of Wilbur's astonishing, timeless work. It will serve as the most referenced trove of this beloved poet's best...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	1929918089

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually...

Author	Patrick Kavanagh
ISBN	0393006948

I was introduced to Kavanagh’s work through several quotations in Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Those lines convinced me I had to seek out Kavanagh’s poetry.

Patrick Kavanagh wrote of Irish farm life, which he knew so well, without romantic sentimentality....

Author	Ciaran Carson
ISBN	0916390403

Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson’s third book of poetry, weaves together in a carefully sequenced volume prose pieces, long poems, lyrics, and haiku. His subjects include the permeable boundaries of Belfast neighborhoods, of memory, of public and private fear, and, indeed, of the forms of language...

Author	Jo Shapcott
ISBN	0571254705

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott...

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	Kathleen Jamie
ISBN	1555977022

Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, the latest collection by Kathleen Jamie, “the leading Scottish poet of her generation” (The Sunday Times)

See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;
d’you ever imagine chasing just...

Author	Don Paterson
ISBN	0571249574

In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within...

Author	Kay Ryan
ISBN	0802137172

Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0300076339

The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the...

Author	Stephen Dunn
ISBN	0393327434

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning....

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	Simon Armitage
ISBN	0571169821

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday

'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement

'The...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0060952563

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective:...

Author	Louis MacNeice
ISBN	0571197450

“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable...

Author	Eavan Boland
ISBN	0393308227

I think I'm going to set Boland aside and read something else for a while. While I thought her poem "The Journey" (not included in this collection) might qualify as an immortal masterwork, I generally prefer the compression and tightly-wound intensity of other feminist poets such as Plath.

"Outside...

Author	Christopher Reid
ISBN	0955455367

Memories. Weighty emptinesses. I live in a memory
the size and shape of a house.

As so often seems to happen to me, this collection came into my hands by serendipity. Perusing the shelves with poetry in the native language in the local library, A Scattering apparently had wandered off to...

Author	Raymond Carver
ISBN	0394755359

Sick with exile, they yearn homeward now, their eyes turned to the ultramarine. . .

Here it is, early April, and I can tell you, with total confidence, that Ultramarine is the best in show, the best book of the year for me. The winner.

It is, simply put, one of the best books I've ever encountered...