Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape.
Poetry
- Author:Momaday, N. ScottSummary:
- Author:Fraser, MichaelSummary:
It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the swords raised and lives lost by the thousands of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War--of whom hundreds were Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their African Brethren. Commemorating the dismal treatment they experienced at the hands of Confederates and White Union soldiers alike, and brilliantly capturing the language and rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser's The Day-Breakers is a powerful and original new perspective on Black experience.
- Author:Day, BrianSummary:
The Daring of Paradise reconfigures stories and images from both multiple religions and from fairy tales, cracking them open to release new light. Poems probe the intense devotion in the letters of Paul and the sensuality shimmering within the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They cast lines across religious divides, gather elements of incarnate spirituality, and consider how, in our present moment, religion might speak to the body of the Earth. Both contemplative and provocative, The Daring of Paradise reveals a world shot through with desire and expands the ambit of devotional poetry, listening to "that polished emptiness pressing upon speech" and the "illicit locutions sung and fluted / through the back alleys of heaven."
- Author:Nardo, Desi DiSummary:
The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada’s ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible. A journey of introspection and awakening, where life and death, the numinous and the mundane, and dream and reality are subtly interchangeable, and where often the intricate and impalpable levels of the human and animal spirit and psyche are entwined and illumed.
- Author:Christle, HeatherSummary:
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women's tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle's investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness.
- Author:Sexton, AnneSummary:
The collected works of Anne Sexton showcase the astonishing career of one of the twentieth century's most influential poets For Anne Sexton, writing served as both a means of expressing the inner turmoil she experienced for most of her life and as a therapeutic force through which she exorcised her demons. Some of the richest poetic descriptions of depression, anxiety, and desperate hope can be found within Sexton's work. The Complete Poems, which includes the eight collections published during her life, two posthumously published books, and other poems collected after her death, brings together her remarkable body of work with all of its range of emotion. With her first collection, the haunting To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Sexton stunned critics with her frank treatment of subjects like masturbation, incest, and abortion, blazing a trail for representations of the body, particularly the female body, in poetry. She documented four years of mental illness in her moving Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Live or Die, and reimagined classic fairy tales as macabre and sardonic poems in Transformations. The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book finished in her lifetime, is an earnest and affecting meditation on the existence of God. As a whole, The Complete Poems reveals a brilliant yet tormented poet who bared her deepest urges, fears, and desires in order to create extraordinarily striking and enduring art.
- Author:Dickinson, EmilySummary:
This collection of Emily Dickinson's work contains 444 of the nearly 1,800 poems that the prolific yet reclusive American poet privately penned during her lifetime. Although her bold and non-traditional writing style met with mixed reviews when first published, Dickinson is now considered one of America's greatest poets. Included here are such famous poems as "Because I could not stop for Death", "I'm nobody! Who are you'", and "Hope is the thing with feathers". Themes of love, loss, death, and immortality imbue Dickinson's work with a timeless quality; her unconventional poetry continues to provide insight into the human condition. This is an unabridged compilation of three series of Dickinson's poetry edited and published by her friends after her death-the first series in 1890, the second in 1891, and the third in 1896.
- Author:Johnstone, JimSummary:
Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge's opium dreams, Johnstone's narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities—“in everything, there is a second state”—Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating; a poet whose savagely austere forms, electrically precise images and keyed-up rhythms reveal an obsession with the mind-altering properties of language itself.
- Author:Hall, KateSummary:
Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly 'know' something, one must first recognize its traces in something else. 'Kate Hall unites philosophy and wisdom - without forgetting the chipotle-lime mustard.' – Montreal Review of Books 'The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes, the certainty of everyday life ... Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.' – The Dominion 'These are profoundly perfect poems.' – Eye Weekly 'A whimsical and enlightening riff on the philosophic nature of knowing ... Hall's imagination liberates language and subject at every blink.' – Winnipeg Free Press
- Author:Park, JeffSummary:
This striking volume effortlessly draws the reader in, exhaling the vitality of music greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Miles Davis and many more. Here is a book for both jazz fans and poetry readers as it pays tribute to great musicians, with poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition. Park's passion for jazz comes through with writing that ranges in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration. The collection also includes an introductory essay, and insightful 'liner notes' by the author.
- Author:Neruda, PabloSummary:
Surrounded by sea, sun, and Capri's natural splendors, Neruda addressed these poems to his lover Matilde Urrutia. This complete collection has become a classic for love-struck readers around the world, passionately sensuous and exploding with all the erotic energy of a new love.
- Author:Chaucer, GeoffreySummary:
At the Tabard Inn, thirty travelers of widely varying classes and occupations are gathering to make the annual pilgrimage to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. It is agreed that each traveler will tell four tales to help pass the time and that the host of the inn will judge the tales and reward the best storyteller with a free supper upon their return. Thus we hear, translated into modern English, twenty-some tales, told in the voices of knight and merchant, wife and miller, squire and nun, and many more. Some are bawdy, some spiritual, some romantic, some mysterious, some chivalrous. Between the stories, the travelers converse, joke, and argue, revealing much of their individual outlooks upon life as well as what life was like in late fourteenth-century England.
- Author:Rogers, LindaSummary:
These poems test the capacity of individuals, families, communities, and the earth itself to stand the pressures of modern life. They walk the tightrope over the chasm between male and female, love and hate, child and adult, war and peace, and now and forever, attempting to find balance and reconcile the one with the many.
- Author:DeVries, Rachel GuidoSummary:
Death and its many mysteries are explored in these autobiographical poems about the passing of the poet's beloved brother, the dementia that claimed her father, and the inevitable bodily changes that come with age. Experimenting with traditional forms such as elegies and dirges, the poems keep coming back to the paradoxes of love and loss. Finally, though, solace comes in shimmering poems that connect with the poet's two earlier collections and celebrate the beauty of rural upstate New York.
- Author:Jones, DanielSummary:
First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just 26, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist's lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning 'poetry' on its head before its author (then known simply as 'Jones') swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible. This long-overdue revised edition brings Jones' unforgettable voice to a new generation of readers and includes the complete text of the original collection (including Jones' own sardonic assessments of his own poetry), a new preface by poet/critic Kevin Connolly, and postscript commentary from many of Jones' closest friends and literary colleagues.
- Author:Chenette, SueSummary:
In unflinching lyrics, Sue Chenette confronts her father’s depression and death. Probing memories, fingering mementos – a square nail, a sketch on a napkin – she examines them for what they may reveal of the father she was sure she knew, deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems are a journey through grief, both a search for the father she loved and a searching look into a father/daughter relationship.
- Author:Guttman, NaomiSummary:
Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions
in this sweeping novella-in-verse.If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne’s thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?
Amid a fictional marriage in a state of malaise and a real world on the edge of environmental disaster, Guttman lays open moments of vexation and tenderness, of grief, guilt, betrayal and love. Sounding through these moments are the harpsichord and the loom, drawing Donny and Ari, their sons Stephan and Onno, their corgie and their parrot, into the long weave of myth, art and human history.
Donny envies her the order of her threads, neatness of the loom, palettes of skeins piled
high. Compare this to the score he must unwind, ingest, to play by heart. The orchestra
accompanying the voices is Orfeo’s lyre.
—from “Rehearsals: Mastery”Praise for Naomi Guttman:
“Richly detailed, passionate, witty, despairing, and brave, the lyric force of these poems conveys most of all a deep knowledge and love of a complex but recognizable world.” — Peter Meinke
- Author:Leckie, RossSummary:
No postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan War. Ross Leckie can capture the fleeting moments when we fully enter the world and believe we belong.
At this low point in our country’s cultural history, when more and more writers have become topical “content providers” for the ever-gaping maw of the society of the spectacle, those few artists like Ross Leckie who carefully craft their work within the poetic tradition, and who show respect for all the needs – aural, esthetic, and intellectual – of the most discerning readers, are more than ever to be valued.
- Author:Thibaudeau, ColleenSummary:
Granddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake a Colleen Thibaudeau wordscape for any other. Her poems might have been written just after the imagination was invented. So lithe and playful, so naturally leaping even in elegy, they would seem like fabulous accidents if Colleen hadn't been making them, with no loss of freshness, for over forty years. There is a lifetime of poems in this book.
- Author:Tolmie, SarahSummary:
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture. Some poems are personal - a parent tries to explain to a child why a grandfather is in hospital, or stages a funeral for a child's imaginary friend - while others comment on how death figures in the news, on TV, and in social media. Some poems ask if there is any place left for poets in our rituals of memory and commemoration. A few examine the apocalyptic language of climate change. Others poke fun at the death-defying claims of posthumanism. A thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns, The Art of Dying begins and ends with the fact of death, and strips away our euphemisms about it.
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