Product Description: In these remarkable conversations with poets from across Canada, readers will rediscover the wonder that drives the imagination. Angels, cyberspace, and prayer; the sex lives of vegatables, and medieval monks who lived in caves; travels across land and through ideas; all these and more are touched on in this collection...read more

Product Description: The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy...read more

Product Description: Poets of labouring class origin were published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were popular and important in their day but few are available today. This is a collection of some of those poems from the 18th century.

A brief biographical sketch of Francis Child prefaces his compilation of versions of and commentary upon English and Scottish traditional ballads

With this book, Alan Wald launches a bold and passionate account of the U.S. Literary Left from the 1920s through the 1960s. Exiles from a Future Time, the first volume of a trilogy, focuses on the forging of a Communist-led literary tradition in the 1930s. Exploring writers' intimate lives and heartfelt political commitments, Wald draws on original research in scores of archives and personal collections of papers; correspondence and interviews with hundreds of writers and their friends and families; and a treasure trove of unpublished memoirs, fiction, and poetry. In fashioning a "humanscape" of the Literary Left, Wald not only reassesses acclaimed authors but also returns to memory dozens of forgotten, talented writers. The authors range from the familiar Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, and Muriel Rukeyser to William Attaway, John Malcolm Brinnin, Stanley Burnshaw, Joy Davidman, Sol Funaroff, Joseph Freeman, Alfred Hayes, Eugene Clay Holmes, V. J. Jerome, Ruth Lechlitner, and Frances Winwar.Focusing on the formation of the tradition and the organization of the Cultural Left, Wald investigates the "elective affinity" of its avant-garde poets, the "Afro-cosmopolitanism" of its Black radical literary movement, and the uneasy negotiation between feminist concerns and class identity among its women writers. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Eyes Free: The first full length (300 p.) spoken word memoir of the current generation of poets. Chronicles the life(style) of Taalam Acey, a full time, traveling spoken word artist...sleeping on subways and in motels... From the Greyhound bus trips through the deep south to being treated to international flights...read more

Product Description: In this examination of Sir Philip Sidney, author of the famous romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia , and his family, Elizabeth Mazzola argues that families are a form of poetic projects. The Sidney family, and members of the so-called 'Sidney circle' aimed to celebrate Sir Philip's life through literary tradition - they repeatedly turned to writing their own poetry as a vehicle to analyze or extend familial connections...read more

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) has been acknowledged by writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Adrienne Rich and R.S. Thomas as one of the central poets of the 20th century. Justin Quinn offers a fundamental reassessment of Stevens's work and the connections it makes between nature, community and art. He engages fully with the recent wave of historicist criticism, and displays the shortcomings of this approach, not only for a reading of Stevens, but also for literature in general. Quinn asks in his introduction ""why shouldn't there be a criticism which attends to the societal contexts of poetry without reneging on responsibilities to poetry as a discourse distinct from politics and ideology, one with its own special rhetorical funds and resources, which can nevertheless allow it to comment on the political aspects of our lives in special ways?"" His book responds to that requirement and is a valuable contribution to the critical debate on Wallace Stevens's poetry. ""Among the many strengths of this superb, highly recommended study is Quinn's deep knowledge of Stevens's life and Pennsylvania background.""-Choice

Product Description: Poet, critic, biographer, and Catholic intellectual Paul Mariani delivers huge armfuls of experience and knowledge in this wide-ranging collection of twenty-four essays. As a man of faith in a secular world, Mariani brings to light issues surrounding spirituality and poetry through discussions of the Gnostics, Roman history, the Bible, John of the Cross, Rilke, Robert Pack, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and the poets he most admires―Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The book offers an interpretation of a posthumously published poem by Edwin Muir (1887-1959), beginning ''The heart could never speak / But that the Word was spoken.'' The poem is read as summing up Muir's lifelong struggle with fundamental questions about the meaning of existence, questions often developed in dialogue with such figures as Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Kafka...read more

Product Description: Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) was truly a British man of letters in the finest sense of the term. As a young man he co-founded the influential magazine, The Review, and started a short while later the magazine Tomorrow. He was for a time the fiction and poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and went on to found The New Review...read more

Product Description: A wise, absorbing, and surprising introduction to poetry written in English, from one of England's leading poetsJames Fenton is that rare scholar "not ashamed to admit that he mostly reads for pleasure" (Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books)...read more

Product Description: Dag Norberg's analysis and interpretation of Medieval Latin versification, which was published in French in 1958 and remains the standard work on the subject, appears here for the first time in English with a detailed, scholarly introduction by Jan Ziolkowski that reviews the developments of the past fifty years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film...read more