Wesleyan Poetry

During his lifetime, Stéphanie Mallarmé (1842-1898) was recognized as one of the greatest modern French poets. He wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn away from it, marrying form and content in revolutionary ways that departed drastically from the more tightly controlled French tradition. Despite his status as one of the first modernists, much of Mallarmé's radicalism has been lost in translation. Finally, in this new collection by Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez, the magic and mastery of form and diction so striking in Mallarmé's French verse comes to life in English. Drawing from Poésies (1899 edition), Un coup de dés (A cast of dice), and the "Livre" (the "Book" - the overarching conceptual work left unfinished at the death of the poet), this collection captures Mallarmé's true linguistic brilliance, bringing the poems into our current context, while retaining the music, playfulness, and power of the originals. -- from back cover.

"Selected Writings of César Vallejo has all the best writing of a major Spanish modernist"--

A precise and passionate collection by a brave new voice in poetry.

"Aime Cesaire is most well known as the co-creator (with Leopold Senghor) of the concept of negritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, is a masterpiece of immense cultural significance and beauty and became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Andre Breton's introduction, "A Great Black Poet," situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Cesaire."--Cover page 4.

"Wesleyan University Press ed." Contains all of James Wright's poetry, including The Green Wall, Saint Judas, The Branch Will Not Break, etc.

"Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles--an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth."--Publisher's website.

"This extraordinary new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, "a serial novel for publication in the newspaper" that collapses the distinction between documentary and fiction. Loosely set in Los Angeles, the book scrutinizes our image-making, producing extreme and vivid images -- hyena, Muscle Beach in Venice, the Supreme Court, subway rides -- in order for them to be real."--Back cover.

"Poetry by Evie Shockley, critiquing daily life as well as responding to race- and gender-based violence"--

Most poems previously published in German in the author's Gesammelte Werke.

A collection of poems reflecting Dickey's determination to experiment, to take risks, and to stretch subject matter and methods.

"Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them."--p. of cover.

"Direct, informal, and richly evocative of his Jewish heritage and New York City home, Harvey Shapiro's poetry has occupied a unique place in American letters for over fifty years. This new collection brings together his latest work and much of his eleven previous collections, revealing the full arc of his carefully calibrated poetics. Shapiro engages themes including the immigrant experience, urban landmarks and lifestyles, family life, and war. The reader will see the more formal British-tinged cadences of his earlier work give way to the colloquial, personal nature of his later poems, and how Shapiro's candor and simplicity mark his work throughout the last five decades. Bringing the city and its balance of despair and exuberance into stark relief, this poetry is intimately attuned both to life's quiet disappointments and to its unanticipated miracles."--Jacket.

Donald Revell’s work, Arcady, draws its inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create a distinctly American poetic music. Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet’s intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet’s awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons’ passage and seasonal rituals. Revell’s sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives’s notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell’s words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.

"For nearly half a century, Kamau Brathwaite has been doing nothing short of rewriting the relationship between Africa and the aging ǹew world'--one exquisite and haunting syllable at a time. Elegguas, his newest book, is a tidalectic wave of remembrance and remonstrance. It is, as well, one of Brathwaite's most compassionate songs."--Mark Nowak, author of coal Mountain Elementary. "Kamau Brathwaite is the major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the great poets of the second part of the 20C anywhere. While framed by elegiac writings of a personal nature, this volume remains profoundly political through a range of elegies for departed public & political figures, and includes what I consider one of the greatest and most poignant political poems of the era, namely Brathwaite's ̀Poem for Walter Rodney.' The greatness of the work lies in the fact that the poet never falls into political rhetoric, but that his language, breathtakingly innovative & inventive at the formal level, always carries a lyrical and poetic charge of unequalled intensity."--Pierre Joris, author of Poasis and A Nomad Poetics. This Collection is a Stunning follow-up to Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Elegguas--a play on "elegy" and "Eleggua," the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad--is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and postmodernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke's Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries. Throughout his Poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds "nation-language," that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings ("calibanisms") and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. --Book Jacket.

A wide selection of the poems by one of the most important authors in contemporary Brazilian Literature. Poems are presented in the original Portuguese and the English translations by well-know poets such as Elizabeth Bishop.

For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation's most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Eagle's Mile, his most recent volume, was a triumphant success, a bold and innovative departure from his traditional verse. The New York Times declared, "Dickey continues to extend his vision as a major American poet," while Fred Chappell, himself a Bollingen Prize winner, wrote, "If there were a literary prize for Poetry That Has Shown Real Moxie, it ought to go to The Eagle's Mile." Now, The Whole Motion collects Dickey's oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems, ranging from his first book, Into the Stone, through the prize-winning Buckdancer's Choice, to The Eagle's Mile, as well as a selection of previously uncollected and unpublished "apprentice" works gathered under the title "Summons." The Whole Motion documents the development of a major literary figure, one who has greatly influenced a younger generation of poets; it illuminates the evolution of one of the finest poetic sensibilities of our times.

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"--a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform.