Recommendations based on "The Givenness of Things: Essays"

A comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry. It includes selection that range from initial offerings such as "Tinker's Wife" and "Inniskeen July Evening" to his tragic masterpiece "The Great Hunger" (1942) and celebratory verse, "To Hell with Common Sense" and "Come Dance with Kitty Stobling."

Whitman's most beloved poem, "Song of Myself," illustrated, illuminated, and presented like never before. Walt Whitman’s iconic collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, has earned a reputation as a sacred American text. Whitman himself made such comparisons, going so far as to use biblical verse as a model for his own. So it’s only appropriate that artist and illustrator Allen Crawford has chosen to illuminate―like medieval monks with their own holy scriptures―Whitman’s masterpiece and the core of his poetic vision, “Song of Myself.” Crawford has turned the original sixty-page poem from Whitman’s 1855 edition into a sprawling 234-page work of art. The handwritten text and illustrations intermingle in a way that’s both surprising and wholly in tune with the spirit of the poem―they’re exuberant, rough, and wild. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is a sensational reading experience, an artifact in its own right, and a masterful tribute to the Good Gray Poet.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDIt was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-Second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max’s Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous, the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists’ ascent, a prelude to fame.

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.

Following Her Widely Acclaimed Autobiography Of Red (a Spellbinding Achievement --susan Sontag), A New Collection Of Poetry And Prose That Displays Anne Carson's Signature Mixture Of Opposites--the Classic And The Modern, Cinema And Print, Narrative And Verse. In Men In The Off Hours, Carson Reinvents Figures As Diverse As Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, And Audubon. She Views The Writings Of Sappho, St. Augustine, And Catullus Through A Modern Lens. She Sets Up Startling Juxtapositions (lazarus Among Video Paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf And Thucydides Discussing War). And In A Final Prose Poem, She Meditates On The Recent Death Of Her Mother. With Its Quiet, Acute Spirituality, Its Fearless Wit And Sensuality, And Its Joyful Understanding That The Fact Of The Matter For Humans Is Imperfection, Men In The Off Hours Shows Us The Most Exciting Poet Writing In English Today (michael Ondaatje) At Her Best.

Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning poet Mary Oliver."This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."—Library JournalWith consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature."This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person." –Mary Oliver

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poetA Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees―The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.―from "tributaries"Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines―expansive, fluent, and full―manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

An Instant New York Times BestsellerThe author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Kind of Woman returns with a collection of erasure poems created from notes she received from followers, supporters and detractors—an artform that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires readers to transform what is ugly or painful in their own lives into something beautiful.“I'm sure you could benefit from jumping on a treadmill”“Women WANT a male leader . . . It’s honest to god the basic human playbook”These are some of the thousands of messages that Kate Baer has received online. Like countless other writers—particularly women—with profiles on the internet, as Kate’s online presence grew, so did the darker messages crowding her inbox. These missives from strangers have ranged from “advice” and opinions to outright harassment.At first, these messages resulted in an immediate delete and block. Until, on a whim, Kate decided to transform the cruelty into art, using it to create fresh and intriguing poems. These pieces, along with ones made from notes of gratitude and love, as well as from the words of public figures, have become some of her most beloved work.I Hope This Finds You Well is drawn from those works: a book of poetry birthed in the darkness of the internet that offers light and hope. By cleverly building on the harsh negativity and hate women often receive—and combining it with heartwarming messages of support, gratitude, and connection, Kate Baer offers us a lesson in empowerment, showing how we too can turn bitterness into beauty.

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.

A proven bestseller time and time again, Robert Frost's Poems contains all of Robert Frost's best-known poems-and dozens more-in a portable anthology. Here are "Birches," "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Two Tramps at Mudtime," "Choose Something Like a Star," and "The Gift Outright," which Frost read at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy." An essential addition to every home library, Robert Frost's Poems is a celebration of the New England countryside, Frost's appreciation of common folk, and his wonderful understanding of the human condition. These classic verses touch our hearts and leave behind a lasting impression.* Over 100 poems* All Frost's best known verses from throughout his life