Recommendations based on "Plutonian Ode: And Other Poems 1977-1980 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)"

“if you read this after I am deadIt means I made it”-“The Creation Coffin”The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski.In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death. He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein. He writes about war and fatherhood and cats and women. Free from the pressure to present a consistent persona, these poems present less of an aggressively disruptive character, and more a world-weary and empathetic person.

The essential poems of the inspirational thirteenth-century Persian philosopher, scholar and mysticThe founder of the order of the Whirling Dervishes, Rumi was also a poet of transcendental power. His verse speaks with the universal voice of the human soul and brims with exuberant energy and passion. Rich in natural imagery, from flowers to birds and rivers to stars, the poems have an elemental force that has remained undiminished through the centuries. Their themes - tolerance, goodness, the experience of God, charity and awareness through love - still resonate with millions of readers around the world.Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

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.

Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature. Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a life free from possessions, and his haiku are the work of an observant eye and a meditative mind, uncluttered by materialism and alive to the beauty of the world around him.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse therefore contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Robert Browning, a towering poetic presence of the Victorian era, was hailed by Henry James as a tremendous and incomparable modern. The sheer immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry ensure enduring appeal. Browning paints landscapes both suburban and sublime, combines lyric and demotic language, and introduces everyday events of the streets and marketplace into the rarified world of Victorian poetry.This edition includes examples from the early Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845); from the masterpieces Mena and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864), and from the less familiar works of his later years. Together they convey the intensity, the lyric beauty, and the vitality of Browning's poetry.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all.that bare branch that branch made blackby the rain the silver raindrophanging from the black branchBoss I like that black branchI like that shiny raindrop Bosstell me if I’m wrong but it makesme think you’re looking rightat me now isn’t that a lark for meto think you look that wayupside down like a tree frogBoss I’m not surprised at allI wouldn’t doubt it fora minute you’re always upto something I’ll say one thingyou’re all right all right you areeven when you’re hanging Boss

From Leaves of Grass to "Song of Myself," all of Whitman's poetry in one volumeIn 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work that defined him as one of America’s most influential voices and that he added to throughout his life. A collection of astonishing originality and intensity, it spoke of politics, sexual emancipation, and what it meant to be an American. From the joyful “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” to the elegiac “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s art fuses oratory, journalism, and song in a vivid celebration of humanity. Containing all Whitman’s known poetic work, this edition reprints the final, or “deathbed,” edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). Earlier versions of many poems are also given, including the 1855 “Song of Myself.” • Features a completely new—and fuller—introduction discussing the development of Whitman's poetic career, his influence on later American poets, and his impact on the American cultural sensibility• Includes chronology, updated suggestions for further reading, and extensive notesFor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

'The first poet in the world in some things', is how John Donne was described by his contemporary Ben Jonson. Yet it is only this century that Donne has been indisputably established as a great poet—and even, many feel, the greatest love poet of them all. Jonson went on to remark that 'That Donne, for not keeping of an accent, deserved hanging', yet Donne's rhythms, once thought 'unmusical' are now recognized as the natural rhythms of the speaking voice; his 'eccentricity' as a complex self-doubt; his 'obscurity' the reflection of a brilliantly learned and allusive mind. Poets such as Eliot and Empson have found Donne's poetry profoundly attuned to our modern age, while Yeats' glowing comment will always be true: 'the intricacy and subtlety of his imagination are the length and depth of the furrow made by his passion.' This volume, superbly edited by Professor Smith, is the first complete edition to make a serious attempt to guide the reader closely through the complexities of Donne's poetry. Considerable attention has been paid to the text, and a selection of the important manuscript variants are included. This edition is also the first to make use of the newly discovered manuscript of the verse letter to Lady Carey and Mistress Essex Rich.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gl�ck hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. She notes, "Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form."