Milton composes his last extended work as a tragedy according to the classical Unities of Time, Place and Action. Nevertheless it “never was intended for the stage” and is here declaimed by a single reader. Samson the blinded captive, in company with the Chorus of friends and countrymen, receives his visitors on their varying missions and through them his violent story is vividly recalled. Then he is summoned to give a final demonstration of God-given strength to entertain the Philistines, his captors. Famously – and of course, offstage – his performance brings the house down.

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

Adepte du camping depuis 2001, vivant sous les palmiers durant l’hiver et dans les pommes en été, elle vous invite à goûter chaque jour qui passe en savourant toute la beauté de la Nature. Elle vous invite à partager son idéal de vie, quelques temps forts de son existence, les leçons qu’elle en a tirées ainsi que le rêve d’Espoir qui ne cesse de l’habiter.

This is a posthumous collection of poems. Though Axel Soestmeyer did not live to see the poems into print, this edition Chr(45) faithful to his intentions Chr(45) makes public the complex expression of an emotional thinker and intelligent lover. His mastery of vocabulary and the liberties he took with syntax and rhythm permit him to control a vital inspiration that could easily have slipped into vulgarity. Axel Soestmeyer assigns to the sexual and the spiritual similar roles, revealing not the facile moral solution of conformism but an understanding of the savage stuff which constitutes the human and his relationship to others and, ultimately, to God.

Rough Wilderness chronicles one of the most famous tales of love, betrayal and redemption. Heloise and Abelard were medieval scholars whose taboo-breaking affair shocked clerics and fellow scholars and assured the star-crossed pair a place in history. These poems are contemporary in subject and tone, but also explore some of the more complex modes that have come down to us, including sonnets, pantoums, villanelles and others.

In linked poems of great individual power, Kenneth Radu addresses the matter of Romania, the country of his ancestors, summoning figures from myth, distant and recent history, and the arts. The cast of characters includes Dracula, Prince Vlad the Impaler, and the devil -- all related to Ceausescu himself -- as well as an immigrant and his wife, and the great Romanian pianists Dinu Lipatti and Radu Lupu, and a bride who courageously battles the devil for control of her wedding. These interweave with a narrator in the present -- a gardener-pianist -- to create a long poem that is both an exorcism and a celebration, an enactment of the human capacity to survive and regenerate spiritually.

In 1907, a shy bank clerk sent a collection of his poems south from the Yukon to be privately published and shared with a small group of friends. Fate intervened, however, and Robert Service became a household name across North America and throughout the British Commonwealth. Words were Service's lifelong passion, and he set them on many stages. But it was his Dan McGrew, Sam McGee and other players of the Great White North who glittered with a golden glow and forever made him the "Bard of the Yukon" and the de facto Poet Laureate of Alaska. Enid Mallory's Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon sheds new light on the life and career of this intriguing and intensely private man, and celebrates the poet's verse. This edition includes a selection of some of the most loved Service poems, including "The Cremation of Sam McGee," "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," "The Call of the Wild," "The Spell of the Yukon" and "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill."

On “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould”: “The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: ‘Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved,’ as Robert Frost said.” — Jeffery DonaldsonAbsorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.

Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career.

On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended interview with Dennis Lee about the book, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

Riffs is a story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style—with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, claustrophobic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable.

Tell me what you cherish, won’t
just walk; give me lifetime,
not renege. I have no other use. Living I flubbed.
But mouth to mouth I could sometimes ache into words.
—from Riffs (#85)

Praise for Riffs:

“Riffs is the book that unites his various voices and lyrical personae. It is a book in which all of his poetic attitudes are in harmony with one another.” —Paul Vermeersch, from the Introduction.