ADS $10/month (1 & 2), $8/month (3 & 4) & $5/month (5-10)
by Maurice Manning
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780547249612 ; $22.00; ISBN-10: 0547249616; Hardcover ; 112 pages; Publication Date: 04/09/2010; Trim Size: 6.00 x 9.00
Buy “The Common Man” from Amazon.com
ABOUT THIS POETRY BOOK
The Common Man, Maurice Manning’s fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the book’s title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait–by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic–of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man’s accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning’s reputation as one of his generation’s most important and original voices.
ABOUT THE POET
MAURICE MANNING, the author of four collections of poetry, was awarded the 2009 Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning, a former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, teaches at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College.
Tags: good poetry, Maurice Manning, new release, poems, Poetry, poetry book, The Common Man
- ISBN-13/EAN: 9780547249650 ; $25.00
- ISBN-10: 0547249659
- Hardcover ; 208 pages
- Pre-Order; Publication Date: 04/08/2010
- Trim Size: 6.13 x 9.00
Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of failure and loss, in his previous book particularly, make him a poet for our times, a poet who can write “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair.” Yet he remains oddly undaunted: “sometimes, late at night / we, my happiness and I, reminisce / lifelong antagonists / enjoying each other’s company.”
The God of Loneliness, a major collection of Schultz’s work, includes poems from his five books (Like Wings,Deep Within the Ravine, The Holy Worm of Praise, Living in the Past, Failure) and fourteen new poems. It is a volume to cherish, from “one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest” (Tony Hoagland), and it will be an essential addition to the history of American poetry.
Tags: poems, Poet Philip Schultz, Poetry, poetry book, Selected and New Poems, The God of Loneliness
- Hardcover: 64 pages
- Publisher: Graywolf Press (February 17, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 155597516X
- ISBN-13: 978-1555975166
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
This fourth collection from Powell (Cocktails) is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up. The San Francisco–based poet has lived with, and written about, HIV for a decade, and his own illness remains a subject here; so does his celebration of gay eroticism, of love in the spirit and in the flesh. Democrac (Powell pointedly omits the Y) shows 21st-century queer anguish and outrage: does god discriminate, slashing some flags, it asks, while farther above the chapels pale heaven expires. Powell goes on to investigate many more sources of sadness and happiness, solidarity and discontent: Cancer inside a little sea takes on environmental degradation: child to come, what will you make of this scratched paradise. The unruly long lines of Powell’s previous work here join more conventional-looking stanzaic lyrics; they join, too, two ultra-long poems, printed sideways, entitled Cinemascope and centerfold. This book will be remembered for years, for its serious feelings, their swerves, their tears, its jokes. A poem to a crab louse abuts a scene from the biblical binding of Isaac, and a poem in which the Twin Towers fall segues from bedroom to public space and then back: lips can say anything but first they say goodbye. –Publishers Weekly
EXCERPT
cosmos, late blooming
already the warm days taper to a plumate end: sky, where is your featherbed
some portion for me to fall to, in my contused and stricken state
not the extravagant robe I bartered for: tatters, pinked edges, unpressed
lord, I’m a homely child, scrabbling in the midden for my keep
why should you send this strapping gardener, hay in his teeth, to tend me
now that the showy crown begins to dip like a paper saucer
surely he’ll not content with corrupted flesh that dismantles daily
so singular this closing act: spectacular ruin, the spark that descends in air
might he find no thrill in this trodden bower. ragamuffin sum of veins
in my mouth the mausoleum of refusal: everything died inside me
including fish and vegetables, language and lovers, desire, yes, and passion
how could I make room in this crypt for another sorrow: caretaker:
lost man, these brambles part for your boots, denizened to my lot
your hand upon my stem now grasps the last shoots of summer
choose me for your chaplet, sweetheart. wasted were my early flowers
—-
sprig of lilac
in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues
spent perfumes. dust up on the lapel where a moment I rested
yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass
the gnats were here: they smelled the wilt and blight. they salivated
in the folds of my garments: you could practically taste the rot
look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart: it broke open in your hands
oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping
we kissed briefly in the deathless spring. the koi pond hummed with flies
unbutton me now from your grasp. no, hold tighter, let me disappear
into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek
—-
corydon & alexis, redux
and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters
oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs
what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don’t birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn’t the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape.
guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush
what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue
silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if stars go out when we shut out sleep eyes
From Chronic. © 2009 by D.A. Powell. All rights reserved.
Tags: best poetry, best poetry book, Chronic, D A Powell, new poetry, new poetry book, Poetry
ISBN: 9780061986932; ISBN10: 0061986933; Imprint: HarperCollins e-books ; On Sale: 12/1/2009; Format: E-Book; Trimsize: ; Pages: 0; $19.99; Ages: 18 and Up
The poetry of John Ashbery has been awarded virtually every conceivable literary prize including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Planisphere is a new collection by one of America’s most innovative and influential poets—an exceptional artist whose work stands alongside the finest of Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane. For more than half a century Ashbery has been producing timeless works such as Chinese Whispers, Hotel Lautréamont, A Wave, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Where Shall I Wander. Planisphere is proof that the master only improves with age.
EXCERPT
Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made thousands of years ago by one of the first
wheels as it rolled along. It never came back
to see what it had done, and the rut
just stayed there, not thinking of itself
or calling attention to itself in any way.
Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat
in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it
away. Always it was available to itself
when it wished to be, which wasn’t often.
Then there was a cup and ball theory
I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.
Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you
once upon a time, between everybody’s sound sleep
and waking afterward, trying to piece together
what had happened. The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,
having come to know each other years later
when our interest in zoning had revived again.
Tags: best poetry, best poetry book, John Ashbury, new poetry, new poetry book, Planisphere, Poetry
Selected Poems 1946-2006
by Donald Hall
White Apples and the Taste of Stone is the definitive lifetime work of an American master — with a bound-in audio CD of selections read by the author.
One of the most significant poets of his generation, Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, including the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, with new poems recently published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. Greatly anticipated, this is Hall’s first selected volume in fifteen years, and also the first to include poems from his seminal bestseller, Without.
The bound-in audio CD was specially recorded by Hall for this publication — more than an hour of favorite poems from throughout the book. Hall’s distinctive, sonorous voice and inimitable humor provide a perfect companion for fans of his work and for classroom use.
EXCERPTS CAN BE READ HERE: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/mtitledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=689521
You can purchase here: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=689521
- ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618537211 ; $30.00
ISBN-10: 061853721X
Book and CD ; 448 pages
2 Pieces
Publication Date: 04/03/2006
Trim Size: 6.00 x 9.00
For the month of March, I am looking for some of your favorite Rant Poems. Rant poetry is similar to slams. Think on your feet, improvisionable and fun.
Does the current economic situation have you tearing your hair out? Do the car manufacturers have you longing for the days of two wheeled transportation? Rant write it with style and grace and send them in.
ISBN: 9780061349607; ISBN10: 0061349607; Imprint: Ecco ; On Sale: 10/9/2007; Format: Hardcover; Trimsize: 6 x 9; Pages: 96; $22.95; Ages: 18 and Up
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 familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. “It has always been Mr. Hass’s aim,” the New York Times Book Review wrote, “to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every thing else, into his poetry.”
Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.
Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty’s seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty’s subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire’s transformative power, and art’s ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry’s most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
“The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (BOXED SIGNATURE REVIEW BY REGINALD SHEPHERD)
A wonderful collection of poems of nature, but, more, about life and its ebb and flow. Like tides. Like breathing.
Arranged in four parts and illustrated with exquisitely beautiful pictures by photographer Al Past, this book with its grace in perspective will be a welcome addition to any poetry lover’s permanent library. Delicate and poignant, one finds rapture and sorrow, joy and penetrating, if poignant, elegance, both.
EXCERPT FROM “At Night on Winterstar”:
There is quietness here
on this pinnacle at six thousand feet
where balsams sway in breezes
from the west
and speak to the weary traveler
in airy tones redolent
with scents of
the mountain forest at night.
Welcome to Poetry at The Deepening with Paula Blois.
2010 is a good year to begin including poetry at The Deepening. I can’t think of anyone more suitable to lead this department than Paula Blois.
