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.

Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.

"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.

Left dead after our cultures were broken by triumphant enemies, our stories changed to suit others. We now change them again to suit ourselves. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls purports to give power to the dead--voices to the victims of genocide both ancient and contemporary--and presence to women. Medea did not kill her sons; Dido founds a city, over and over again, the city of the present author's poetry. In these poems the poet asserts that though her art comes from a tradition as broken as Afghanistan's statuary, there is always a culture to pass on to one's children, and one is always involved in doing so. We are the ghouls, the drinkers of the blood-sacs, and we insist that we are alive.

"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.

Presents a collection of meditative poems about knowledge, nature, the universe, bodily sensations, emotions, and identity.

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

"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.

Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one's emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: "poetry, like music, is not just song." It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "into transient examples of shaped behavior." Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes are nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.--Amazon.com.

"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.

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.