American poets continuum series ;

Finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry A landmark collection by one of America's major black poets, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 includes all of Lucille Clifton's first four published collections of extraordinary vibrant poetry—Good Times, Good News About the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-Headed Woman—as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations.

Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass's Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity--personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence--all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass's poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you--a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin's Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child's birth, a kiss,/ or even me--in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on--thinking of you."

The long-awaited tenth collection of poetry from the Shelley Memorial Prize-winning poet Lucille Clifton.

Overview: Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 is the culminating achievement of Lucille's Clifton longstanding poetry career. This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting and The Terrible Stories. Clifton employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues.

Long respected for bringing his poetic vision to histories, stories and legends, William Heyen captures the successes and shortcomings of the world's most visible family - The Royals. Through poems that both startle and delight, Diana, Charles, & the Queen reimagines the lives of those born and wed into the House of Windsor. A young Elizabeth contemplates love while crying into a cloth woven by Mahatma Gandhi; a gallant Charles courts a wide-eyed Diana with anecdotes of his travels; and Mother Teresa reads in the papers about Diana giving "the royal finger/to a photographer who'd crowded her/once too often." Gradually, we see the marriage of Diana and Charles crumbling, and the Windsors contemplating their role in Britain's future.

William Heyen's Crazy Horse in Stillness is a powerful collection of more than 400 poems that explores the collision of North America's two civilizations - one moving in a cyclical, visionary rhythm of primal timelessness; the other racing in a linear time-driven thrust to fulfill its "manifest destiny.". This collision transpires through the lives and mythic personas of General George Armstrong Custer and the Sioux warrior-mystic Crazy Horse, both of whom believed themselves messianic, embodying the visionary and the historical. Crazy Horse in Stillness weaves their childhoods, adult lives and deaths, and the places, incidences and people through which they stand in relief: Elizabeth Custer, Lone Bear, the Civil War, the Great Plains, the 7th Cavalry, the Lakota, the buffalo and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The poems ask the reader to follow the wandering North American tribes and the expansionist Westerners, and, ultimately, to find epiphany in the hills where the spirit of Crazy Horse remains free.