UNITED STATES AUTHOR · POETRY · COLLECTIONS
John Hollander
Xaviera Hollander (born 15 June 1943) is a Dutch former call girl, madam and author. She is best known for her best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story.
Courage my soul, now learn to wield The weight of thine immortal shield.
— from Selected poems, 1990
Most acclaimed
Christmas Poems
Eighteen selections include offerings by Harry Behn, X.J. Kennedy, Christina Rossetti, and John Ciardi.
Selected poetry
"Thomas Carlyle commented over 150 years ago that the name Goethe conjured up something vague and monstrous to English ears - a reaction still recognizable today. As a contribution towards redressing this situation this volume, published on the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth, contains the largest selection of his poetry in English verse translation ever published. The poems (alongside their German originals) are arranged chronologically and, among much else, include his most famous lyric verse, longer poems in their entirety, passages from his poetic drama Faust and from his popular, but in English little-known, romantic idyll Hermann and Dorothea, and the whole of his long-suppressed masterpiece The Diary, sometimes referred to as the most erotic moral poem ever written. A substantial introduction sets the poetic work in the context of Goethe's often surprisingly unsettled life."--BOOK JACKET.
Selected poems
1990
Charles Olson, the poet who coined the word post-modern and helped shape the generation that would emerge under its mantle, is known for the immense range of his intellectual and poetic reach. Here, in this selection by Robert Creeley, Olson's personal friend and literary ally, is the more "intimate order" of the poet who sought to embrace all of history and human thought. Olson came from working-class immigrant roots in a Massachusetts mill town. A scholar of profound originality and vision, he worked for Roosevelt's administration during the war years, then at Black Mountain, the prototypical experimental college and enclave of avantgarde writers and artists. In 1957 he settled in Gloucester, a town on the shore north of Boston where he had spent summers as a child. It was Gloucester, with its richness of history and human use, that provided the ground of The Maximus Poems, begun as letters some years before and which over the next two decades grew into a masterwork of epic dimensions. From the more than three hundred poems making up The Maximus Poems and the comparable number in Olson's Collected Poems, Creeley's selection makes available for the first time an essential sampling of Olson's poetry. Included are paradigmatic early works like "The Kingfishers," which Guy Davenport called "the most modern of American poems, the most energetically influential text in the last thirty-five years," as well as familiar pieces from Maximus like "Maximus, to Gloucester" and "Celestial Evening." Also represented are less known poems, such as "The chain of memory is resurrection" and "The Lamp," works that reveal a more personal side of this major American poet. Together these poems demonstrate Olson's genius and grace, a poet as at home in Gloucester as in the cosmos, a reckoner with dreams and myths, and "Western man at the limit of himself."