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An Anthology of Japanese Poems
By Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto, Akira Yamamoto
Hardcover / Shambhala Library / 208 pages / 4 1/4 x 6 3/4 / ISBN 978-1-59030-730-4 / October 2009
You can buy Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems (Shambhala Library) at Amazon
This celebration of what is perhaps the most influential of all poetic forms takes haiku back to its Japanese roots, beginning with poems by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters Basho, Busson, and Issa, and going all the way up to the late twentieth century to provide a survey of haiku through the centuries, in all its minimalist glory. The translators have balanced faithfulness to the Japanese with an appreciation of the unique spirit of each poem to create English versions that evoke the joy and wonder of the originals with the same astonishing economy of language. An introduction by the translators and short biographies of the poets are included. Reproductions of woodblock prints and paintings accompany the poems.
Tags: haiku
Edited by Patricia S. Klein
Hardcover: 224 pages; Publisher: Random House Reference (March 14, 2006); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0375721444; ISBN-13: 978-0375721441; Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches.
You can buy Random House Treasury of Friendship Poems at Amazon
The latest addition to the Random House poetry treasury series is a charming collection of timeless poems celebrating the virtues of friendship. Features more than 100 poems from such greats as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Billy Collins. Compact jacketed hardcover gift edition with a ribbon page marker.
Patricia S. Klein is an author and book editor who lives in northern Virginia. Among her publications are A Year with C.S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco),Paved with Good Intentions (HarperSanFrancisco), Virtue and Vice (HarperSanFrancisco), Worship Without Words (Paraclete Press), and Just as We Were (Revell).
Tags: friendship poems, new poetry book, new release, poetry book
Poetry of the Soul in E-Book Format
by Clayton Bye
Paperback, ISBN 9780978177423
You can buy this eBook HERE.
This resonating collection of poems by Clayton Bye takes you into the deepest stirrings of the psyche. It plumbs a true fathom of passion, yearning, and acute self-discernment, from the center of the Self. The soul’s quest, its essence responding to the visceral reality–the joyous, the lovely, as well as the ugly–this is the journey upon which you will embark within these pages. –D. L. Keur
Here are some wonderful excerpts:
A Hole in the Clouds
radiant beams
a hole in the clouds
gossamer strands
speak out loud
warmed heart
a child’s eyes aglow
soul is livened
I drive slow
_
Loss
A crystal passage from here to there
but no light with which to see.
“So what?” he asks with bitterness,
that door is closed to me.
_
Found
Secret longings, mind burnt,
now loosed from my soul,
are sweet knives outward slicing,
hostbound on the wind;
Diamond ice, time-picked clean,
will melt asunder,
a heart met in morning hours,
her dark eyes of joy.
Tags: clayton bye, ebook, Poetry, soul poetry
by Caleb Barber
Paperback: 104 pages; Publisher: Red Hen Press; 1 edition (April 1, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 1597094692; ISBN-13: 978-1597094696; Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches.
Buy Beasts and Violins at Amazon
Beasts and Violins is a collection of American narrative poetry addressing themes of life and work in the western United States. The poems read like broken country songs sung from a paved farm: dead deer and train trips, a dog at the edge of the fire. Beasts and Violins begins with a dark birth and finishes at peace on the water, with the necessary stops in between.
ABOUT THE POET
Caleb Barber earned a BA from Western Washington University in English/Creative Writing, and received an MFA in poetry from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, based off of Whidbey Island. He currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, where he works days at an aerospace machine shop. He has been widely published in literary magazines, most notably with a feature in Poet Lore. He also has a poem in Best American Poetry 2009.
Tags: beasts and violins, caleb barber, new poetry, new poetry book, new poetry book release
by Deborah Digges
Hardcover: 72 pages; Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (May 11, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0307268462; ISBN-13: 978-0307268464; Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 0.6 inches.
The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems
This breathtaking collection of poems by Deborah Digges, published posthumously, brings us rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.
When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that returns to and expands the creative terrain we recognize as hers. Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.
The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.
ABOUT THE POET
The poet Deborah Digges was born and raised in Missouri. Her first collection, Vesper Sparrows, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University. Late in the Millennium was published in 1989, and Rough Music, which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize, was published in 1995. Trapeze appeared in 2004. Digges also wrote two memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). The recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Digges lived in Massachusetts, where she was a professor of English at Tufts University until her death in 2009.
Tags: Poetry, poetry book
New and Selected Poems
By Robert Hass
Hardcover: 368 pages; Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (March 23, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0061923826; ISBN-13: 978-0061923821; Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches.
You can buy The Apple Trees at Olema at Amazon.
The National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees at Olema is a cause for celebration.
The Apple Trees at Olema includes work from Robert Hass’s first five books—Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials—as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas.
From the beginning, his poems have seemed entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and nonhuman nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual. Over the years, he has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that seem to come from a skeptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived experience that a poem tries to apprehend.
Hass’s work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes—San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country—are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style—formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Milosz—combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch. It has made him immensely readable and his work widely admired.
ABOUT THE POET
Robert Hass’s books of poetry include Sun Under Wood: New Poems, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, andTwentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. His collection Time and Materials won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Tags: new release, Poetry, poetry book
by Deborah Coates
Not really haiku if you’re a purist, but, if you’re a cat lover, it’s just fine. That’s the judgement according to readers.
Hardcover: 144 pages; Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (September 1, 2001); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0446677507; ISBN-13: 978-0446677509; Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches.
You can buy Cat Haiku at Amazon
This humorous collection of 150 haikus captures the psyche of cats, and distills the essence of kitty behavior in the five-seven-five scheme of classic Japanese poetry. The poems are accompanied by line drawings.
Precocious, endearing, and always battling something they shouldn’t, CAT HAIKU is a humorous collection of 150 haikus, with accompanying line drawings, that captures the psyche of your favorite puss. This book distills the essence of kitty behavior in the 5,7,5 scheme of classic Japanese poetry.
You are my best friend, Person allergic to cats. Let me shed on you.
If the vet took your Temperature that way, I Bet you’d complain, too
A portrayal of cat mentality as hilarious as it is accurate, cat lovers everywhere will fall in love with this adorable book.
EXCERPT AND SAMPLE ILLUSTRATION
Tags: cat haiku, cat poetry, deborah coates, haiku, illustrated cat haiku, illustrated cat poetry, Poetry
by Melanie Siebert
Paperback: 96 pages; Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (March 30, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0771080336; ISBN-13: 978-0771080333; Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
You can buy Deepwater Vee at Amazon
Melanie Siebert’s stunning debut collection travels remote northern rivers, as well as two of Canada’s most threatened rivers, the Athabasca and the North Saskatchewan. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander Mackenzie’s dreams, a busker’s broken-down street riffs, and the borderland wanderings of a grandmother whose absence is felt as a presence. The poems’ currents are turbulent, braided, submerged. Narrative streams appear like tributaries glimpsed through brush, and then veer into unexpected territories, where boundaries blur – between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild – and loss carries with it both music and silence. In this virtuoso collection, Melanie Siebert has transformed language into that rarest thing, a singular poetic vision.
RANDOM EXCERPT
ABOUT THE POET
Melanie Siebert recently completed an MFA at the University of Victoria with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship. Her poetry has been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Event, and Prairie Fire. For more than ten years, she has worked as a guide on wilderness rivers across the north from Alaska to Baffin Island.
Tags: deepwater vee, ecology poetry, Melanie Siebert, Poetry, poetry book
Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Century Kyoto
Baisao | translated by Norman Waddell
The first translation into English of the work of Baisao, the celebrated poet and Zen teacher of Kyoto
Hardcover: 208 pages; Publisher: Counterpoint (May 28, 2008); Language: English; ISBN-10: 1582434131; ISBN-13: 978-1582434131; Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1 inches
You can buy The Old Tea Seller at Amazon
Baisao was an influential and unconventional figure in a culturally rich time period in Kyoto. A poet and Buddhist priest, he left the constrictions of temple life behind and at the age of forty-nine traveled to Kyoto, where he began to make his living by selling tea on the streets and at scenic places around the city. Yet Baisao dispensed much more than tea: though he would never purport to be a Zen master, his clientele, which consisted of influential artists, poets, and thinkers, considered a trip to his shop as having religious importance. His large bamboo wicker baskets provided Baisao and his customers with an occasion for conversation and poetry, as well as exceptional tea.
The poems, memoirs, and letters collected here trace his spiritual and physical journey over a long life. This book includes virtually all of his writings translated for the first time into English, together with the first biography of Baisao to appear in any language. It is bound to establish Baisao’s place alongside other Zen-inspired poets such as Basho and Ryokan.
REVIEWS
“Norman Waddell has brought us an important Japanese Zen poet who has been too long neglected . . . This book will stand as the definitive work on Baisao for many years.” —The Zen Site
“[A] delightful and exquisite volume . . . Norman Waddell has done a marvelous job pulling all of this material together.” —Spirituality and Practice
EXCERPTS
The Text
The Poetry
Tags: The Old Tea Seller, zen poet, zen poetry
Poems and Talks of a 14th-Century Chinese Hermit
Red Pine (Translator)
The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a 14th-Century Chinese Hermit
Stonehouse has been called “the greatest of all Zen monks who made poetry their medium of instruction.” His works have rarely been available in English, but now all of the hermit monk’s poetry, including the major poetic works, “Mountain Poems” and “Gathas,” as well as his most illuminating instructional dharma talks, can be read in Red Pine’s superb translations.
With Red Pine’s personal discovery in 1991 of the site of Stonehouse’s former hut, this edition provides rare firsthand understanding of the spiritual and physical realm of Stonehouse’s era. The Zen Works of Stonehouse is one of the classic texts of Zen, essential for anyone interested in Zen practice and tradition.
EXCEPRT
