In his third book of poems, Mark Levine continues his exploration of the rhythms and forms of memory. The Wilds is set in the border regions between natural and cultivated states, childhood and adulthood, past and present. "We were boys," says the speaker of the opening poem, "boyish, almost girls./Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled." Austere and lyrical, the music of these poems resonates with echoes of poetic tradition-Wyatt, Jonson, Milton, Eliot-yet is singularly modern.

The Wilds (New California Poetry) (Volume 17)

Literature & Fiction

HILLMAN, Brenda

LeVine, Mark

Hass, Robert

Gander, Forrest

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then’s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife. Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

Facts for Visitors: Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 12)

Reddy, Srikanth

Bedient, Calvin

Reference

Carol Snow's award-winning poetry has been admired and celebrated as "work of difficult beauty" (Robert Hass), "ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference" (Boston Review), teaching us "how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith" (Jorie Graham). In this, her third volume, Snow continues to mine the language to its most mysterious depths and to explore the possibilities its meanings and mechanics hold for definition, transformation, and emotional truth. These poems place us before, and in, language--as we stand before, and in, the world. The Seventy Prepositions comprises three suites of poems. The first, "Vocabulary Sentences," reflects on words and reality by taking as a formal motif the sort of sentences used to test vocabulary skills in elementary school. The poems of the second suite, "Vantage," gather loosely around questions of perspective and perception. The closing suite finds its inspiration in the Japanese dry-landscape gardens known as karesansui, such as the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Here the poet approaches composition as one faces a "miniature Zen garden," choosing and positioning words rather than stones, formally, precisely, evocatively.

The Seventy Prepositions: Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 10)

SNOW, CAROL

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style―its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 18)

Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei

Loose Sugar

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." ?Harvard Review An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry. During an enchantment in the life Do you love a living person &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;absolutely? Tell them now. In a half-unwieldy life you made, under the hyaline sky, while the dead &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;drank from zigzag pools nearby, if they saved you in your wild incapacities, &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in timing of the world's harm in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal, &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;when others said you should feel grateful &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to be minimally adequate for the world's triple exposure or some tired committee... &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The ones who love us, how do they break through our defenses? &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We're tired today. Come back later. Their baffled voices melting our wax walls with a candle, the ones who understand what being is?the glowing, the broken, the wheels, the brave ones? &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;they have their courage, you have yours,,,; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;when you meet the one you love, it is so rare. When you meet the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.

Fear, romance, war, dreams, music, the past, architecture, ghosts, illness, travel, and evolution are the themes for this collection of poems

White Dress (Wesleyan New Poets)

Fortress (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Winner of the Commonwealth Club Book Award, Silver Medal for Poetry (1990) In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control –; because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

From the depths of sorrow following the sudden death of her closest female mentor, Brenda Hillman asks anguished questions in this book of poems about separation, spiritual transcendence, and the difference between life and death. Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her. Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.

Death Tractates (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HILLMAN, Brenda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HILLMAN, Brenda

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HILLMAN, Brenda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wilds (New California Poetry) (Volume 17)

Facts for Visitors: Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 12)

The Seventy Prepositions: Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 10)

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 18)

Loose Sugar

In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

White Dress (Wesleyan New Poets)

Fortress (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Death Tractates (Wesleyan Poetry Series)