Recommendations based on "Back Through Interruption"

'Yes, we did many things, then - all Beautiful ...' Lyrical, powerful poems about love, sexuality, sun-soaked Greece and the gods. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Sappho (c.630-570 BCE). Sappho's Stung with Love is available in Penguin Classics.

Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his ‘creative violence’ and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus and the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and ‘resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors.' The poems, letters, and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life and published posthumously in 1918.His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice. Intense, vital, and individual, his writing is the ‘terrible crystal’ through which the soul—the inscape, the nature of things—may be illuminated.

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

It is the astonishment of Louise Glück's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape―Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain―persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.From the outset ("Come here / Come here, little one"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms."From within the earth'sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy friend the moon rises:she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.

This selection of Frost's poetry contains forty poems spanning his early and mature collections including choices from A Boy's Will, North of Boston, West-Running Brook, A Further Range, and In the Clearing. This edition has comprehensive notes on the poems and an Approaches section offering commentary and activities on key themes and techniques within the poetry, such as Frost's pastoral imagery, his friendship with Edward Thomas, and his narrative and lyric voices.

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have "authority, daring, and] a language of color and sure movement," says series judge W.S. Merwin. From Seven Chimeras The way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons; each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, colored beads falling away.

An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the National Poetry Series CompetitionIn this ­­­powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew ZapruderIn Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.   Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Product Description Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) a Tennessee native, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. His first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the army. Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945, with his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, which bitterly documents the intense fears and moral struggles of a young soldier. He is highly regarded as a peerless literary essayist and is considered the most astute poetry critic of his generation. Jarrell was struck by a car and killed at the age of 50, in a death that may or may not have been a suicide. From Library Journal Part of an eight-tape series, these audiocassettes of the poets reading their own works include some never-released recordings. Each tape includes a book with the text of the poems, information about the poets, suggested reading, and a commentary by editor J.D. McClatchy. In some poems the audio differs from the printed text; in the Ashbery and Jarrell books, each piece is dated. While the tape quality is adequate, the reviewer's copies did have an audible hiss. The Jarrell cassette, which includes additional commentary not found on the other two tapes (the definition of a ball turret gunner and the story behind "Eighth Air Force"), also had a slight echo. Five American Women was occasionally difficult to understand owing to the timbre of the readers' (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, and others) voices. Recommended for public libraries. Laurie Selwyn, San Antonio P.L. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Inside Flap Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) a Tennessee native, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University. His first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the army. Jarrell's reputation as a poet was established in 1945, with his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, which bitterly documents the intense fears and moral struggles of a young soldier. He is highly regarded as a peerless literary essayist and is considered the most astute poetry critic of his generation. Jarrell was struck by a car and killed at the age of 50, in a death that may or may not have been a suicide. From AudioFile [Editor's Note: The following is a combined review with THE VOICE OF THE POET: John Ashbery.]--Modern American poets read their own work in this handsome series from Random House. Each 70-minute offering is edited from various rare archival recordings and packaged with an illustrated paperback containing the text of the taped poems and commentary by series editor J.D. McClatchy of THE YALE REVIEW. To versephiles, nothing tops hearing lines delivered by their author. As Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney states, it is "always a unique illumination." Producer Jane Garmey has taken great care to ferret out, assemble, and restore these illuminations. Edifying for the student, a delight for the aficionado, a must for libraries. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

A curated compendium of poetry and prose from the award-winning poet Mary Oliver, including the book-length masterpiece The Leaf and the Cloud, the collection What Do We Know, andessays from Long Life-with a foreword by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz. For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's breathtaking poetry of touch and transcendence, as well as for those coming to her words for the first time, Little Alleluias is a revelation. These works observe, search, pause, astonish, and give thanks to both love and the natural world. In constant conversation with the sublime, (i.e. "Are you afraid? / Somewhere a thousand swans are flying / through winter's worst storm."), Oliver has the rare skill of rendering existence: her poems bring movement to stillness, and people to the Earth, themselves, and each other. Her essays declare her heart and her home, too, alongside thoughts on Wordsworth, Emerson, and Hawthorne-the odes and elegies of Provincetown's resident poet. On each page, Mary Oliver invites us to walk through her minutes, her moments, and revere the light and dark and rainbowed clothes of world alongside her. With three distinct books collected in one volume for the first time, Little Alleluias asks what passes and what persists, and offers readers the peace that every life deserves. "Hers is a purposeful language, one that looks not just with attention but with sensual intention, and though awestruck, seeks to hold, even briefly, the unknowns of the energies that make any life. Little alleluias, she called her writings. Not meant to define but to praise, to rejoice in the maker and what has been made, to dare be heard as a whisper or a shout in this immense world."-Natalie Diaz, in her Foreword