Anthony Hecht, now in his eightieth year, has earned a place alongside such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to his Collected Earlier Poems (continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater.He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribesTentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,Comes to a minute point,Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,Preoccupied, intentOn a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant scriptIncised with twin steel blades and qualifiedPerfectly to express,With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly grippedBehind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,A glancing happiness.From the Hardcover edition.

Collected Later Poems

Literature & Fiction

HECHT, Anthony

Poetry

The Waywiser Press

This volume gathers poems from Harrison's first three books-- The Singing Underneath, Signs of Arrival, and Feeding the Fire-- over two decades of poetry, and a handful of more recent poems.

The Names of Things: New & Selected Poems

Harrison, Jeffrey

Poetry. The poems in Joseph Harrison's second collection, IDENTITY THEFT, map the erosions and betrayals of selfhood, both cyberspace-age and age-old. If the high-speed title poem and the other menacing 'Trajectories' of the book's first section register the disintegration of identity under contemporary pressures, social and technological, the focus of the book's second sequence, 'Odes and Elegies,' is more personal and retrospective, dealing with the curtailment of identity by loss and encroaching mortality. The third section's 'Tropes' suggest that language and art, which might seem to hold the promise of preserving something of the self, transform those who use them beyond recognition, while some of the final section's 'Odes' put our current identity crisis in a longer historical perspective. IDENTITY THEFT pursues these concerns through poems in a variety of forms, displaying a range of scale, tone, and subject, poems that are funny yet serious, informed by the past but fully present, both idiosyncratic and resonant."Joseph Harrison's new volume is a wonderful leap in his poetic development. Harrison fuses formal control with a rich interiority and composes many poems that deserve to become canonical."--Harold Bloom"How deeply satisfying it is to read a poet whose meditative, elegiac temperament is married happily to verbal wit, even laugh-out-loud humor. Joseph Harrison is that rare poet, one whose command of craft suits him equally to produce a two-line 'Ode' ('O elevated visionary thoughts, / Where are you now?') and a ten-page public poem ('To George Washington in Baltimore') on that American giant who understood the 'human scale.' A poet so giddy with wordplay that he dares to rhyme 'my palm is piloted' with 'Pontius Pilated' and 'pirated,' Harrison addresses nonetheless the most serious concerns. Wary of our technology-dominated present and future, in which 'IDENTITY THEFT' is no joke (and 'what fave new world is beckoning?'), Harrison makes his fingerprint evident in all of these poems--an implicit affirmation of something unique in each of us."--Mary Jo Salter"The title poem of Joseph Harrison's second book is a witty and headlong discussion of how one's self, if any, is constituted. We are a patchwork, it develops, and the same might be said of Harrison's book, which makes continual and expert use of Spenser, Wordsworth, Horace, Villon, and other predecessors. If this makes IDENTITY THEFT seem a three-ring circus, the important point is that Harrison is a superlative ringmaster: his book throughout is governed by that playfulness and performance which, as Frost said, are required in poetry however impassioned or serious. I found myself particularly moved by 'Who They Were,' which recalls the poet's mother and father in the stanza of Tennyson's 'In Memoriam'."--Richard Wilbur"Harrison is the author of two remarkable books: SOMEONE ELSE'S NAME … and IDENTITY THEFT … He is a consummate craftsman...He uses language with exquisite precision to register the erosion of language and in this...he is both irrepressibly humorous and scathingly satirical. Harrison is a poet of great formal flamboyance. There seems to be no measure, no verse-form, at which he is not quite utterly dazzling. His poems exhibit a resonant awareness of the entire tradition of English verse and he's not diffident about displaying it. If he revels in echoes, these are mastered echoes, audaciously launched both in homage to tradition and its defence...Perhaps it will sound solemn to call...Joseph Harrison [a poet] by vocation. But the wit, the beauty and the brilliant strangeness of [his] poems--perhaps even [his] inspired mischief--come with the calling. And luckily for us, [he's] … 'having a good time'."--Eric Ormsby

Identity Theft

Harrison, Joseph

A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

Poetry. Set up rather like an encyclopedia, and containing urgent information about pretty much everything--from the Big Bang to the second shooter on the grassy knoll--Greg Williamson's A MOST MARVELOUS PIECE OF LUCK is a collection of sonnets unlike any other. The main character, an unnamed Everyman--a salesman, a poet, a conspiracy wonk, "the last man left alive"--a (somewhat) loveable loser, gets knocked off in the ninth line of every entry and is thereby condemned to being "old-fashioned, out of step, passé" for the duration. Though full of science, A MOST MARVELOUS PIECE OF LUCK is anything but forbidding, and though full of dead people, and inescapably dark, it also manages, somehow, to be hilariously funny. The award-winning author of The Silent Partner and Errors in the Script is at the top of his game in this wildly inventive, formally spectacular and hugely accomplished book.

Greg Williamson

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Equal parts church hymnal and outlaw country album, Carrie Jerrell's AFTER THE REVIVAL exudes a reverence for all things run down and wrecked. From abandoned coal mines to overgrown cemeteries, to rivers full of leeches; from tornados to demolition derbies, to weddings gone wrong, the places and events explored in this dazzling debut collection give rise to playful, poignant meditations on the shifty limits of language, memory, faith, and love. Employing free verse as well as traditional verse forms, AFTER THE REVIVAL is full-throated, full-throttle poetry as technically nimble as it is unflinchingly voiced. It invites readers to celebrate the sacred, the secular, and the intersection of the two, and to sing "as if we weren't trapped on cinder blocks, but free" "Carrie Jerrell is a poised, mature and brilliant poet. Her distinctive genius, what makes her unlike anybody else I know, is her ability to bring together such a heterogeneous mix of worlds and influences—to be open to everything formal and informal, profane and sacred, foreign and home grown."—from judge Alan Shapiro's Foreword "The poems in this book are full of idiosyncratic wit, keen social intelligence and a kind of sass that makes great use of both the honey and the sting. That's pleasure enough to encounter, but add to this Jerrell's enviable formal assuredness and you have a book that announces a bright new voice to contemporary American poetry."—Erin Belieu "AFTER THE REVIVAL is a book of rich, tightly-packed poems suffused with the grit, rueful humor and pain of American country music."—Dorianne Laux "AFTER THE REVIVAL carefully mourns the vulnerability of rural America, from its people and their ways, to its small towns, to the land itself. There's a bell of desperation quietly ringing throughout this original and finely-observed book. Carrie Jerrell's poems are loaded with longing and anguish; they hit the page as homemade creations, gritty systems of memory and transformation, rough-hewn and vital."—Maurice Manning "Carrie Jerrell's poems are as lyrically alive, intelligent, and unforgettable as Hank Williams's best songs. A lover of paradox like John Donne, and as formally sophisticated, she moves between the divine and the profane in the blink of an eye. You can't match this book for mature feeling and its rare, hopeful, sorrowing intelligence."—Tom Sleigh

After the Revival

Jerrell, Carrie

Poetry. By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, SHORE ORDERED OCEAN, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself. "These are wonderful poems. Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She's far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation."—Bill Manhire "If you'd wondered where the dappled things had gone, how the tisket and tasket ended up, what the fickle, freckled, couple-colored pieces of life were up to, look no further. Dora Malech has woven them into her exuberant debut. And she's stuck in too the x-rays of Zeus and the horns of Moses. SHORE ORDERED OCEAN is by turns witty and wonderstruck, fragile and fierce. Best of all, it announces an extraordinary talent to be watched and cherished."—J. D. McClatchy "Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place—from Hopkins to the present. The result is as breathtaking as a dove release. She knows every word in the world is a book, that every center sought and found is continually thrown off, that the muscular is fragile and vice-versa, yet none of her old soul knowledge is ponderous, predictable, or dull, for she remains in love with that essential playfulness which is the innocence of art. Here is Malech on the birth of a child: '...unfold all / those origami limbs to test / the inevitable debutante bawl.' This book is an astonishing debut, one that makes me feel our original, lost language has found its way home."—Mary Ruefle

Shore Ordered Ocean

Malech, Dora

Childhood can be a confusing time, but not to Evan and Sage. They've got the world pretty well figured out, and are happy to explain it to their perplexed parents: ""A monkey and an ape are not the same,"" / said Sage. ""The monkey has a longer name."" In this book of funny, fanciful poems and woodcuts, Eric McHenry and Nicholas Garland pay tender tribute to parents and the children who run circles around them. ""This intimate, mischievious, and poignantly funny collection of poems shares the conversations, invented games, and minor squabbles of four family members, expecially precocious siblings Evan and younger sister Sage. . . Garland's chunky b&w woodcuts are a handsome complement, with an understated emotion that echoes that of the verse.""-Publishers Weekly ""A frolicking narrative poem about a very imaginative seven year old boy, his not quite two year old sister, and their bemused and befuddled mother and father.""-The Midwest Book Review

Mommy Daddy Evan Sage

Children's Books

Eric McHenry

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. In his splendid new collection, Mark Kraushaar addresses a tentative and awkward, sometimes funny though frequently heart-breaking struggle to find a path to meaning in the world, a task made more difficult still by the struggle itself. In Cake a man arriving too late for his own small birthday party, unable to cajole his exasperated and saddened wife and daughter into staying, watches them exit the diner in which the three have met, then finally opens a book. As the waitress approaches, the narrator asks, "And what in Hell is he reading?" Towards the end of Chiropractor Claims to Travel Through Time (a poem inspired by an AP story), the central character observes of his father, "He tried, I know, / but every evening / watching him watch the tv / I wondered what clues had eluded him. / Constricted, uncontent, incomplete, / what secret had he missed?" "Once a student told me her father said that when older people cry, they're weeping because the world is beautiful—they already know it's sad. Mark Kraushaar's poems, too, look beyond the sorrow and find instead a world that's almost unbearably lovely. I fell hard for Falling Brick Kills Local Man, Kraushaar's first book; I have an even bigger crush on this one."—David Kirby "A bell goes tolling over the landscape of Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE and its burden is Moment, moment... The word keeps recurring in this engrossing collection. Kraushaar sometimes seems temperamentally as much short story writer as poet (something to be regretted only by those who would keep poetry pure of life's muddy complexities), and many of his poems offer rich, beguiling, abbreviated narratives. The book abounds in character revelations perhaps too modest to be called epiphanies—but moments, even so, whose unlikely glimmerings are welcome and illuminating."—Brad Leithauser  "Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE is the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, 'linear' or predictably 'conventional.' These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for. The sensation of time is Kraushaar's ultimate subject, but he approaches time so imaginatively, so freshly, through such a detailed range of voices and occasions, in poems that unfold in such surprising yet inevitable ways that one feels as if every other possible subject for a poem—love, death, the struggles of dailiness, the fear of loss, friendship and work, childhood, contingency, and lack of faith—has been woven into the netting of this one obsession. This is a book to be enjoyed and savored, to be read with pleasure and gratitude, to be learned by heart."—Alan Shapiro

The Uncertainty Principle

Kraushaar, Mark

Poetry. Morri Creech's third collection of poems, THE SLEEP OF REASON, is a lyrical examination of liminal states of consciousness and experience — the shadowy terrain between sleep and waking, dream and nightmare, life and death, history and the present moment. Including both a surprising take on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and a dark meditation on the perils of the sublime, THE SLEEP OF REASON explores the anxieties, horrors, and dreams that flash just beneath the surface of the waking mind, combining formal elegance and an acknowledgment of literary tradition with a fresh, contemporary voice. "It's a rare thing in this day and age to encounter a poet unafraid to think out loud and, moreover, one who possesses the lyric gifts and intellectual savvy to translate those thoughts into the material realities of everyday life. Formal and mimetic, elegiac and acerbic, equally at home with a painting from the Dutch Golden Age and the circus sprawl of popular culture, THE SLEEP OF REASON is as accomplished and intrepid a book of poems as one is likely to find." —Sherod Santos "Situations in these poems are 'ordinary,' a man, say, at the start of a day, looking in a mirror, looking out a window, carrying out the trash, having a job, having a family, having a self, and wondering how it is doing, wondering what his future and his past and this day are; and writing about these things in beautiful expressive lines of verse, faithful measured lines with their varied subtle pressures and subtle cadences, responsive to the variety of pressures and cadences of the thoughts and feelings of the life being lived." —David Ferry

The Sleep of Reason

Creech, Morri

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

Almost Invisible

Biographies & Memoirs

STRAND, Mark

Leaders & Notable People

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

Books by The Waywiser Press