In the literary world James Laughlin is best known as the publisher of New Directions Books. But he has also been a dedicated poet. His work is both modern - rich in technical experiment - and ancient - grounded in the Greek and Latin poets. Guy Davenport has called Laughlin "a very ironic Roman poet, and a very salty Greek one. Which is not to say that he imitates anybody, or offers plaster casts of antiquities. He is the youngest and most modern poet now writing in the United States. He is the real thing." Laughlin describes himself as a writer of light verse. He can be witty but underneath the wit there are often pungent truths about the human condition. His work is notable for its range of subject matter, the originality of its invention, his restoration of the classical tradition, his wordplay, his satire, and the intensity of his love poems. Few poets have dealt with the quandaries of love so acutely since Rochester and Herrick. "Who else today," asks the critic Marjorie Perloff, "writes such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstacy to loss"?This volume collects Laughlin's poems from 1935 to 1993. His Random Stories and Random Essays are also published by Moyer Bell.

Product Description: Awake the voice!  Awake the string! Dark and dull night fly hence away, And give the honor of this day That sees December turned to May.            ―William Herrick Christmas Poems is a pleasing and diverse selection of classic holiday poems that goes all the way back to an eclogue of Virgil, moves along to a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Paul Dunbar, Rilke, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E...read more

Product Description: Poetry. Translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldmann and James Laughlin. "LIKE IT OR NOT is a thematically and stylistically linked volume of seven poems, a brief title poem followed by six extended ones, each prefaced by a pair of sharp epigraphs from writers as diverse as Swift, Proust, and Mishima...read more

Taking his inspiration from the Greek and Latin classical poets, the author offers a collection of love poems by turns bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, and witty, and marked always by a directness and humanity that speaks to lovers of all time.

The founder of New Directions publishing, who passed away in 1997, left behind this collection of 249 pentastichs, poems comprised of five lines with no regard to metrics, written in a natural cadence and culled primarily from marginal jottings in other books.

A collection of two hundred poems reflects on such topics as love, aging, children, writing, and travel

Product Description: The Lost Fragments is a special collection by James Laughlin, who recently passed away, limited to only 250 copies, and will not be reprinted. Laughlin writes that my "ancestor, James, a 'thrifty farmer, ' sold his patch of land near Portaferry, Co Down to emigrate in 1834", to Pittsburgh, thus the poet invites his readers into his world and takes them to Ireland via the memories of his many visits there...read more

The thirty-year correspondence between the religious writer and his faithful publisher traces the widening of Merton's focus from the internal to the social and global, and the development of his consciousness of himself as a public writer. (view table of contents)

Poems examine the hidden memories, thoughts, and emotions in each individual

(view table of contents)

Product Description: A lifetime of memories, a lifetime of writing, a lifetime of publishing (since 1936) - what to do, how to say it, what is the organic form? If you are James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, poet and friend of poets, you adapt the narrative metric of one friend (Kenneth Rexoth) to tell the very personal stories of your other friends with verve, compassion, and a shrewd eye to the emotional truth of complex relationships...read more

Product Description: Book by Laughlin, James

Selected letters depict the development of the friendship between Schwartz and Laughlin, a young publisher

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Product Description: A selection of rich and varied essays which together form a personal and literary autobiography of writer and publisher James Laughlin. Sunning on spine. Edges of jacket and book worn. Closed tear on upper right corner of jacket. Corners bumped...read more

Product Description: Book by Laughlin, James

Product Description: Book by Laughlin, James