Recommendations based on "On the Beach at Night Alone"

W.B. Yeats's Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Timothy Webb in Penguin Modern Classics. Few have lived their ideas so passionately and nobly as W.B. Yeats in his love affairs, politics and poetry. From his youth in the 1880s, a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition, he grew into a great and innovative poet of the twentieth century. This selection of Yeats's work includes the final book from the unjustly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist. This edition breaks new ground by allowing the reader to engage with a dozen poems in alternative versions; in many other cases it provides significant variants, so that Yeats's struggle to revise his poetry can be experienced with unusual immediacy. It also includes explanatory and textual notes for each poem. W B Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the great and innovative poets of the twentieth century. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939. If you enjoyed Selected Poems, you might like The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, also available in Penguin Classics. 'A compelling poetic presence ... together with Joyce, Yeats made modern Irish poetry possible' Timothy Webb

"The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable" ( Miami Herald ). This has never been truer than in Long Life, a luminous collection of seventeen essays and ten poems.With the grace and precision that are the hallmarks of her work, Oliver shows us how writing "is a way of offering praise to the world" and suggests we see her poems as "little alleluias." Whether describing a goosefish stranded at low tide, the feeling of being baptized by the mist from a whale's blowhole, or the "connection between soul and landscape," Oliver invites readers to find themselves and their experiences at the center of her world. In Long Life she also speaks of poets and writers: Wordsworth's "whirlwind" of "beauty and strangeness"; Hawthorne's "sweet-tempered" side; and Emerson's belief that "a man's inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose."With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has created a breathtaking volume sure to add to her reputation as "one of our very best poets" (New York Times Book Review ).

The collection of prose poems known as Le Spleen de Paris is an important, puzzling, and yet relatively neglected area of Baudelaire's work. This is the first study in English that is exclusively concerned with these texts. Approaching the poems chronologically, Hiddleston focuses primarily on the position of the artist and his attitude towards his art, the often enigmatic and contradictory moral message the poems purpose to convey and, above all, the relationship between prose and poetry in this hybrid and, by the poet's own admission, "dangerous" genre.

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

The first of its kind--a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku.With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago. Many well-known poets in the past have tried their hands at the villanelle, and the form is enjoying a revival among poets writing today. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song." Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Sherman Alexie, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and many others whose poems demonstrate the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single, strict form.

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift for poetry lovers. In 1855 Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. The volume received great praise from leading Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. This encouraged what would become a lifelong project as Whitman expanded and rewrote the volume until his death in 1892. Whitman's innovative use of free verse and the quotidian achieved his aim of reaching out to the everyday American. This edition, based on the earliest published version of 1855, features Whitman's most famous poem 'Song of Myself', an American epic inspired by his personal experiences.

"The Waste Land" (1922) is widely recognized as a central text of modernism and is often described as the most important poem of the twentieth century.This guide begins with early reviews and discussions from the 1920s and '30s, considered alongside Eliot's own critical essays, showing how he set the critical terms by which his poem has been read. Examining the ways in which the poem became accepted as a literary classic, the guide then looks at New Critical and Formalist readings. The final chapters examine "deconstructive" readings that challenge "The Waste Land"'s assumed cultural power by looking at it in light of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, and cultural materialist reading practices.

The selected works of one of our finest American poetsThe thread that dangles us between a dark and a darker dark, Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided. Don’t touch it here, and don’t touch it there. Don’t touch it, in fact, anywhere—Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.—from “Scar Tissue”Over the course of his work—more than twenty books in total—Charles Wright has built “one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century” (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright’s poetry: “language, landscape, and the idea of God.” No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality.The recipient of almost every honor in poetry—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, to name a few—and a former poet laureate of the United States, Wright is an essential voice in American letters. Oblivion Banjo is the perfect distillation of his inimitable career—for devout fans and newcomers alike.

The fourth book in a multivolume history of modern Japanese literature by one of the world's most accomplished translators and scholars of Japanese culture and literature, this volume offers unparalleled insight into Japanese poetry, drama, and criticism.

Product DescriptionEach audio production is accompanied by a book containing the texts of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.John Ashbery (1927) was born in Rochester, New York. He has published 19 books of poetry includingGirls on the Run: A Poem (1999);Wakefulness (1998);And the Stars Were Shining (1994);A Wave (1984) which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize;Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and has also received the National Book Award, The Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York.From Library JournalPart 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 FlapEach audio production is accompanied by a book containing the texts of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.John Ashbery (1927) was born in Rochester, New York. He has published 19 books of poetry including Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); A Wave (1984) which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and has also received the National Book Award, The Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York.From AudioFile[Editor's Note: The following is a combined review with THE VOICE OF THE POET: Randall Jarrell.]--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