Poetry

The poems of Hafiz are masterpieces of sacred poetry that nurture the heart, soul, and mind. With learned insight and a delicate hand, Daniel Ladinsky explores the many emotions addressed in these verses. His renderings, presented here in 365 poignant poems--including a section based on the translations of Hafiz by Ralph Waldo Emerson--capture the compelling wisdom of one of the most revered Sufi poets. Intimate and often spiritual, these poems are beautifully sensuous, playful, wacky, and pr...

Art and Artists: Poems is a sumptuous collection of visions in verse--the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others. A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats's "...

Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth cen...

Diving into the ambivalences and contradictions that are as characteristic of a family as her triumphs, Jerrold Yam’s rousing debut poetry collection is a reaction to the precarious tilt from adolescence to adulthood. The poems—which invoke subjects as diverse as childbirth, celebrity culture and National Service— extend beyond a struggle for acceptance amid the transience of modern Singapore and into the universal territory of teenagehood. Growing up suggests an inexorable shift to adult sen...

In poems that shuttle between Singapore and Australia, award-winning poet Boey Kim Cheng seeks to establish a new senseof self and home on the shifting ground between memory and imagination. A noodle-maker in Melbourne triggers connective threads to the poet’s birthplace. A train crossing over the Johor-Singapore Causeway evokes the dislocating experience of interstitial existence. After six long years, one of Singapore’s greatest modern voices returns with a work of profound insight and erud...

John Yau engages art criticism, social theory, and syntactical dexterity to confront the problems of aging, meaning, and identity. Insisting that "True poets and artists know where language ends, which is why they go there," Yau presses against the limits of language, creating poems that are at once cryptic, playful, and insightful. Included in its entirety is his groundbreaking serial poem, "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," and a new series invoking the monochromatic painter Yves Klein. Paperback...

June Fourth Elegies is a collection of the poems Liu Xiaobo wrote each year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. An extraordinarily moving testimony and an historical document of singular importance, it is dedicated to 'the Tiananmen Mothers and for those who can remember'. In this bilingual volume, Liu's poetry is for the first time published freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original.Paperback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 136 x 216 mmISBN: 978022...

In this brilliant collection of new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant and revisits kitschy concepts like 'love' and 'illness', now relegated to the museum of obsolescence. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe, accompanying the discoveries, failures and oddities of human existence and establishing Smith as ...

In Love Dreaming and Other Poems Cobby Eckermann bears witness to a deep commitment to her traditional kin, culture and language as she tells the story of her search for her family on the traditional Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha lands in the north west of South Australia.Paperback: 64 pagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781922181053LPublished by Vagabond Press

Matthew Arnold praised The Illiad disguise but as themselves. To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Troja...

Translated by Rika Lesser Winner of the 2006 Nordic Council's Literature Prize, Swedish writer Goeran Sonnevi is undoubtedly one of the most important poets working today. In Mozart's Third Brain, his thirteenth book of verse, he attempts "a commentary on everything" - politics, current events, mathematics, love, ethics, music, philosophy, nature. Through the impeccable skill of award-winning translator Rika Lesser, Sonnevi's long-form poem comes to life in English with the full force of its ...

Jamie McKendrick's sixth collection starts from the far flung ('out there' is the nothing - or the something - of outer space), ascertaining the mood of an observer on Uranus, or the perils of medieval travel, or listening for the speech of alien landscapes. Closer to home, the poems adopt an outsiderish stance as they ponder the business of non-belonging and draw up wry inventories of marginality - finding room for those whom history has forgotten (the inhabitants of a drowned valley in Wale...

Since its first appearance in book form in 1978 Gerald Dawe's poetry has been praised for its 'feeling of unpadded completeness and unforced structure' (Alastair MacLean, TLS). His achievement has been described by Dennis O'Driscoll as 'brave and risk-taking, finely tuned and perfectly pitched' and, by John McAuliffe, as 'serious and seriously enjoyable', Selected Poems is a generous representation of this gifted poet's work. Spanning over thirty-five years, in poems that move through Irish c...

In 1915, Edgar Lee Masters published a book of dramatic monologues written in free verse about a fictional town called Spoon River, based on the Midwestern towns where he grew up. The shocking scandals and secret tragedies of Spoon River were immediately recognized by readers as authentic. Masters raises the dead "sleeping on the hill" in their village cemetery to tell the truth about their lives, and their testimony topples the American myth of the moral superiority of small-town life. Spoon...

Cyril Wong’s prose poems remark, instruct, exclaim and curse at a world long settled into its desire-ridden forms. These protracted sentences both attack and reflect on the miasma of memory, working life, the delusions of family life, and the paradoxes of lust and love, moving between meditative moments, philosophical arguments and cryptic to lyrical tongue-lashings. Time, or our failure to exist meaningfully beyond its dimensions, forms the heartbeat of this book.Paperback: 68 PagesProduct D...

Alfian Sa’at’s first unpublished collection of writings composed when he was 22, it was first distributed unofficially to selected friends and colleagues. Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, wil...

translated by Edith Grossman A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Góngora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is at onc...

This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wisława Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. T...

Cyril Wong’s latest collection of poems brings into play his background in music. Reminiscent of a concerto, an orchestra is invoked by poems that celebrate the lives of lovers distant and near, while a single narrative arises like a solo instrument amidst their chords, often blurring a distinction between the universal and the particular. This narrative is a love story that pierces through the shadow of the inevitable, accompanied by dreams and a re-interpretation of the myth of Shiva and Mo...

In Transparent Strangers, the city is more than steel and glass: it is also a landscape where emotion is as much architecture as it is part of human experience. With subjects ranging from burial sites to Taiwanese dramas, this debut collection of poems meditates on the distance we must cross with words to make the everyday unfamiliar again; if only to understand ourselves better.Paperback: 82 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789810732738Published by Math Paper Press

A ghost steps out of its body after a suicide and looks back at it in wonder. The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and a desire to depart. Recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize, this collection is Cyril Wong’s most personal sequence of poems, held together by memories about family life and intimate relationships, these moments charged with the pain of love, dreams and death and an unflinching exploration of the self.Paperback: 100 PagesProduct Dimens...

The first of its kind--a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku. With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago. Many well-known poets in the past have tried their hands at the villanelle, and the form is enjoying a rev...