Basho

$26.95

A lavish collector’s edition of the complete poems of eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō—with a new index that contains the full Japanese text of the original poems.

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bashō, 980 poems in all.

In Fitzsimons’s beautiful rendering, Bashō is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bashō for the first time, this beautiful collector’s edition of Fitzsimons’s elegant award-winning translation, with the original Japanese (including kanji, hiragana, and katakana), allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.

The Serpent and the Fire

$34.95

Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology—an experiment in omnipoetics with Javier Taboada—reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries

The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American “omnipoetics.”

The Serpent and the Fire is divided into four chronological sections—from early pre-Columbian times to the immediately contemporary—and five thematic sections that move freely across languages and shifting geographical boundaries to underscore the complexities, conflicts, contradictions, and continuities of the poetry of the Americas. The book also boasts contextualizing commentaries to connect the poets and poems in dialogue across time and space.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

$29.95

Tilda Swinton’s Top Ten Favorite Books for T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions while simultaneously struggling to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit. Fady Joudah’s foreword, new to this edition, addresses Darwish’s enduring legacy following his death in 2008.

The Iliad and the Odyssey Boxed Set

$65.00

“The best line-for-line translation.”—London Review of Books

“A notable achievement.”—Times Literary Supplement

A stunning set of Homer’s epics, brilliantly translated by leading scholar of the ancient world Peter Green.

Hailed by reviewers and readers alike, Peter Green’s landmark translations of Homer’s timeless epics are now available for the first time in this striking and sleekly designed collector-worthy set. With the verve and pathos of the original oral tradition, Green captures the beauty and complexity, the surging thunder and quiet lyricism, of the Iliad and the Odyssey for a new generation of readers. The translations are vivid and careful, accurate without being out of reach, while the detailed synopses and notes include perceptive observations about Homer’s characters and themes. This widely acclaimed, must-have collection will be a treasured addition to every reader’s bookshelf.

Jangar

$19.95

The first English translation of a Kalmyk epic nearly lost to history.

This is the first English translation of Jangar, the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads, who are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan’s medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by the son of Genghis Khan, Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized, and orally transmitted some of the most transformative developments, both victorious and tragic, in the history of civilizations. A tribute to the protectors of the mythical country Bumba, Jangar reflects the hopes and aspirations of the Kalmyk people as well as their centuries-long struggle for their cultural existence.

This new English translation is more than a tribute to the artistic creativity and imagination of the Kalmyk people—it is also an important step in their struggle for cultural survival. It was only after centuries of oral transmission that the songs and stories surrounding Jangar were written down. When the first translation, into Russian, finally appeared, Stalin had the entire Kalmyk population deported to Siberia and ordered that their national literature be eliminated from the published world. This Soviet repression has had enormous consequences for world literature, silencing nomadic voices and keeping hidden their distinctive contributions. Making Jangar available in English is a landmark event, bringing a lost classic to the world’s attention and restoring the voices of an almost-erased tradition at the heart of the history of Eurasia.

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

$34.95

"An essential book in the study of an always fascinating author."—Times Literary Supplement

Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

Exilee and Temps Morts

$27.95

In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, is now an internationally studied work of autobiography. This volume, spanning the period between 1976 and 1982, brings together Cha’s previously uncollected writings and text-based pieces with images. Exilee and Temps Morts are two related poem sequences that explore themes of language, memory, displacement, and alienation—issues that continue to resonate with artists today. Back in print with a new cover, this stunning selection of Cha’s works gives readers a fuller view of a major figure in late twentieth-century art.

Copublished by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Basho

$17.95

This is the essential English edition of the complete poems of the eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō.

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bashō, 980 poems in all. Andrew Fitzsimons’ translation is the first to adhere strictly to form: all of the poems are translated following the syllabic count of the originals. This book also translates a number of Bashō’s headnotes to poems ignored by previous English-language translators.

In Fitzsimons’ beautiful rendering, Bashō is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone.

His poetry explores the full range of social experience in Edo Japan as he moved among friends and followers high and low, the elite and the demi-monde, the less fortunate: poor farmers, abandoned children, disregarded elders. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bashō for the first time, Fitzsimons’ elegant translation—with an insightful introduction and helpful notes—allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.

Technicians of the Sacred, Third Edition

$34.95

Jerome Rothenberg's seminal anthology moves across temporal and geographical boundaries to expand poetic tradition and ultimately make sense of our shared humanity.

"A core text for poets and musicians looking to explore ritual and meaning beyond the conventions of their genres."—New York Times

Hailed by Robert Creeley as “both a deeply useful book and an unequivocal delight” and by the LA Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the late 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg’s landmark anthology Technicians of the Sacred has educated and inspired generations of poets, artists, musicians, and other readers, exposing them to the multiple possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Juxtaposing “primitive” and archaic works of art from many cultures with each other and with avant-garde and experimental poetry, Jerome Rothenberg contends that literature extends beyond specific temporal and geographic boundaries, while acting as a retort to those who would call that larger humanity into question. A half-century since its original publication, this revised and expanded third edition provides readers with a wealth of newly gathered and translated texts from recently reinvigorated indigenous cultures, bringing the volume into the present and further extending the range and depth of what we recognize and read as poetry.

Technicians of the Sacred, Third Edition

Memory for Forgetfulness

$29.95

One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).

Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.

Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. Sinan Antoon’s foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwish’s work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years.

Selected Poems of Fanny Howe

$26.95

One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.

Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.

Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.

The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:

Zero built a nest

in my navel. Incurable

Longing. Blood too—

From violent actions

It's a nest belonging to one

But zero uses it

And its pleasure is its own

—from The Quietist

The Language of Inquiry

$34.95

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.

Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

The Odes

$19.95

One of the most celebrated poets of the classical world, Pindar wrote odes for athletes that provide a unique perspective on the social and political life of ancient Greece. Commissioned in honor of successful contestants at the Olympic games and other Panhellenic contests, these odes were performed in the victors’ hometowns and conferred enduring recognition on their achievements.

Andrew M. Miller’s superb new translation captures the beauty of Pindar’s forty-five surviving victory odes, preserving the rhythm, elegance, and imagery for which they have been admired since antiquity while adhering closely to the meaning of the original Greek. This edition provides a comprehensive introduction and interpretive notes to guide readers through the intricacies of the poems and the worldview that they embody.

The Aeneid of Virgil, 35th Anniversary Edition

$29.95

This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.

The Aeneid of Virgil, 35th Anniversary Edition

The Maximus Poems

$47.95

Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975) in an authoritative version.

Lorine Niedecker

$34.95

"The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.

Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech.

This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.

Expanding Verse

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

Poems for the Millennium, Volume One

$41.95

As we come to the end of the century, the entire vista of modern poetry has dramatically changed. Poems for the Millennium captures the essence of that change, and unlike any anthology available today, it reveals the revolutionary concepts at the very heart of twentieth-century poetry. International in its coverage, these volumes depart from the established poetic modes that grew out of the nineteenth century and instead bring together the movements that radically altered the ways that art and language express the human condition.

The first volume offers three "galleries" of individual poets—figures such as Mallarmé, Stein, Rilke, Tzara, Mayakovsky, Pound, H.D., Vallejo, Artaud, Césaire, and Tsvetayeva. Included, too, are sections dedicated to some of the most significant pre-World War II movements in poetry and the other arts: Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, and Negritude. The second volume will extend the gathering to the present, forming a synthesizing, global anthology that surpasses other collections in its international scope and experimental range.

Poet-editors Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris provide informative and irreverent commentaries throughout. They challenge old truths and propose alternative directions, in the tradition of the revolutionary manifestos that have marked the art and poetry of the twentieth century. The result is both an essential source book for experiencing the full range of this century's poetic possibilities and a powerful statement on the future of poetry in the millennium ahead.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975

$34.95

Robert Creely, Wilmington, N.C., June 29, 1981:

There is a sense of increment, of accumulation, in these poems that is very dear to me. Like it or not, it outwits whatever I then thought to say and gains thereby whatever I was in saying it. Thankfully, I was never what I thought I was, certainly never enough.

Otherwise, when it came time to think specifically of this collection and of what might be decorously omitted, I decided to stick with my initial judgments, book by tender book, because these were the occasions most definitive of what the poems might mean, either to me or to anyone else. To define their value in hindsight would be to miss the factual life they had either made manifest or engendered. So everything that was printed in a book between the dates of 1945 and 1975 is here included as are also those poems published in magazines or broadsides. In short, all that was in print is here.

I'm delighted that they are all finally together, respected, included, each with their place--like some ultimate family reunion! I feel much relieved to see them now as a company at last.

I'm tempted to invoke again those poets who served as a measure and resource for me all my life as a poet. But either they will be heard here, in the words and rhythms themselves, or one will simply know the. This time I am, in this respect, alone these are my poems. We are a singular compact.

Finally, there's no end to any of it, or none we'll know that simply. But I'm very relieved that this much, like they say, is done. So be it.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975

Shakespeare's Metrical Art

$33.95

This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

$26.95

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace —from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again—touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

Gertrude Stein

$29.95

This selection of Gertrude Stein's work is taken from the period between 1905 and 1936, when the iconic modernist poet was engaged in an astounding number of still-surprising literary experiments, whose innovations continue to influence all the arts. Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a "continuous present," an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era—from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time. Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative "reading poesis" for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it.

Sappho

$17.95

These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct—the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

$24.95

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene."—New York Times

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen and with an introduction by John Ashbery, captures the full range of one of postwar America's most original and influential poets. Born in Massachusetts in 1926, O'Hara became the quintessential voice of mid-century Manhattan, evolving a witty, mercurial, and glamorous urban poetry that captured the artistic scene of 1950s to '60s New York. Including poems from his dazzling early experimental verses of the late 1940s to his more reflective work before his untimely death at the age of forty, the collection reveals O'Hara's inventive voice, blending French post-symbolism, surrealist, and Dada techniques and the everyday American experience into a uniquely postmodern poetics. First published posthumously in 1972, this landmark collection affirms Frank O'Hara's central place in American poetry: witty, fantastical, vital.

Cover image for The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, isbn: 9780520430136

Why/Why Not

$24.95

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.

Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain—the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens—to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.

Cover image for Why/Why Not, isbn: 9780520937116

The Serpent and the Fire

$34.95

Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology—an experiment in omnipoetics with Javier Taboada—reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries

The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American “omnipoetics.”

The Serpent and the Fire is divided into four chronological sections—from early pre-Columbian times to the immediately contemporary—and five thematic sections that move freely across languages and shifting geographical boundaries to underscore the complexities, conflicts, contradictions, and continuities of the poetry of the Americas. The book also boasts contextualizing commentaries to connect the poets and poems in dialogue across time and space.

Cover image for The Serpent and the Fire, isbn: 9780520972759

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

$26.95

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace —from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again—touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

Cover image for This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, isbn: 9780520938274

The Greek Attitude to Poetry and History

$39.95

SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES, Volume Twenty-seven: The Greek Attitude to Poetry and History examines the interplay between poetry and history in ancient Greece, focusing on figures like Homer, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Demosthenes, while deliberately excluding Xenophon and later historians like Polybius. The study halts at the fourth century BCE due to the author’s limited time for researching later periods and the need to preserve the topic’s depth. Originating from lectures on Aristotle's Poetics delivered in Glasgow, the work retains its lecture style with minor scholarly additions. The title reflects an exploration of Greek poetry addressing historical themes and history adopting poetic modes, offering insights into the cultural and intellectual traditions of the time. Despite its fragmentary nature, the book provides a focused analysis of the dynamic relationship between historical narrative and poetic expression in ancient Greece.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.

An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry

$39.95

This bilingual anthology is the first attempt to present a substantial collection of contemporary Arabic poetry in the English language. It acquaints the English-speaking reader with the modern development of one of the world's major poetic traditions, and affords insight into the contemporary cultural situation of the Arab peoples.

English translations of Arabic poetry have suffered from aspirations to geographic completeness of representation and excessive concern with the Neo-Classicist school. The present anthology regards poetic quality as the primary criterion of selection and displays an emphatic interest in the poets of free verse. It presents three successive generations--the Syro-Americans, the Egyptian modernist, and the poets of free-verse movement--linked together by a progressive shift from emphasis on form to emphasis on content and form a relatively detached portrayal of the outside world to a concern with the expression of individual experience. Numerous contemporary poets make their first appearance in English, some of them having written pieces specially for this anthology.

It is hoped that the bilingual character of the anthology will suit it for use by students of Arabic literature. At the same time, the book is intended for a wider readership with general poetic and literary interests. An important criterion in composing the anthology was the viability of a poem, in its English translation, as a piece of literature as well as the excellence of its Arabic original; if the translators have been successful in applying this criterion, the anthology should afford much aesthetic pleasure. The work should be of considerable interest also to students of comparative literature, as it demonstrates the influence on modern Arab letters of several Western poets, notably Eliot, Yeats, and Pound.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Ramayana

$17.95

An elegant translation of the beloved epic tale of Prince Rama

Few works of literature have inspired so vast an audience across so many radically different languages and cultures as the Ramayana, written in Sanskrit over 2,000 years ago by a poet known to us as Valmiki. William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama—with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil—in a length and with a style that make the great epic accessible without compromising the spirit and lyricism of the original.

The Poetry of Homer

$39.95

Sather Classical Lectures: The Poetry of Homer, Volume Fifteen provides a profound exploration of Homeric poetry through the lens of its poetic essence rather than its historical or critical origins. Prepared by Samuel Eliot Bassett before his untimely passing in 1936, the lectures argue for a renewed focus on the unity and artistry of the Iliad and Odyssey—monumental works that stand as foundational texts in Western literature. Eschewing the distractions of 19th-century Higher Criticism, which sought to fragment and analyze the origins of Homeric texts, Bassett advocates for a meticulous examination of the poems themselves to illuminate their universal and enduring poetic qualities.

The volume emphasizes the necessity of treating Homer as a singular poetic force, whether or not historical authorship can be definitively proven. By employing a scientific method rooted in evidence-based generalizations and interpretive analysis, Bassett seeks to uncover the principles that elevate Homeric poetry to its celebrated status. Asserting that Homer’s works are not merely historical artifacts but vibrant literary achievements, the lectures challenge scholars to shift their focus from speculative authorship debates to the intrinsic artistry of the texts. This volume stands as both a tribute to Bassett’s scholarly rigor and a call to deepen the appreciation of Homer’s unparalleled contribution to literature.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1938.

Medea

$12.95

Renowned poet and acclaimed translator Charles Martin faithfully captures Euripides’s dramatic tone and style in this searing tale of revenge and sacrifice.

The Medea of Euripides is one of the greatest of all Greek tragedies and arguably the one with the most significance today. A barbarian woman brought to Corinth and there abandoned by her Greek husband, Medea seeks vengeance on Jason and is willing to strike out against his new wife and family—even slaughtering the sons she has born him. At its center is Medea herself, a character who refuses definition: Is she a hero, a witch, a psychopath, a goddess? All that can be said for certain is that she is a woman who has loved, has suffered, and will stop at nothing for vengeance.

In this stunning translation, poet Charles Martin captures the rhythms of Euripides’ original text through contemporary rhyme and meter that speak directly to modern readers. An introduction by classicist and poet A.E. Stallings examines the complex and multifaceted Medea in patriarchal ancient Greece. Perfect in and out of the classroom as well as for theatrical performance, this faithful translation succeeds like no other.

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

$49.95

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai

$24.95

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was Israel's most popular poet, as well as a literary figure of international reputation. In this collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved poems, including forty poems from his later work. A new foreword by C.K. Williams, written especially for this edition, addresses Amichai’s enduring legacy and sets his poetry in the context of the new millennium.

Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus

$39.95

This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus

Ian Hamilton Finlay

$63.00

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique “poem of place” in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

$26.95

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique “poem of place” in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

Voyager

$26.95

Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

The Poetry of Yunus Emre, A Turkish Sufi Poet

$36.95

The popularity of Yunus Emre, who is often referred to as the Turkish national poet, has endured for six centuries. Yunus is the most important representative of early Turkish mysticism; he can be considered the founder of Alevi-Bektasi literature, and his influence on later tekke poetry was enormous. His ilahis (hymns) have played an important role in sufi ceremonies. Grace Martin Smith's translation of Yunus's poetry will acquaint the non-Turkish reader with the art and thinking of one of Turkey's most significant poets and will be helpful to students of both modern and Ottoman Turkish and to all those interested in Islamic poetry and piety.

The Poetry of Yunus Emre, A Turkish Sufi Poet

Paul Celan

$34.95

The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to René Char and Jean-Paul Sartre—all appearing here for the first time in English.

On Earth

$24.95

Robert Creeley, one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes the text of the last paper Creeley gave—an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. On Earth reminds us what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

Calligrammes

$34.95

This fully annotated bilingual edition of Calligrammes makes available a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but also in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire—Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice—died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.

Duino Elegies

$17.95

Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed, after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, at the Château Muzot in the Swiss Valais. Rilke considered them his greatest achievement, and, as MacIntyre suggests, they are "among the great and unforgettable poetry of the world."

Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.

Complete Poems

$33.95

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe.

With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Postwar Polish Poetry

$29.95

This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland. The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry.

Forest of Eyes

$34.95

One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.

Of Indigo and Saffron

$26.95

This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems—grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world—chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

$34.95

This new, compact Selected Poems offers for the first time a balanced survey of Robert Creeley's entire sixty years of poetic accomplishment. It showcases the works that made him one of the most beloved and significant writers of the past century while inviting a new recognition of his enduring commitments, fluency, and power.

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

The Complete Poetry

$46.95

This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939).

Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision—perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature—in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work.

Miyazawa Kenji

$34.95

The poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was an early twentieth-century Japanese modernist who today is known worldwide for his poetry and stories as well as his devotion to Buddhism. Miyazawa Kenji: Selections collects a wide range of his poetry and provides an excellent introduction to his life and work. Miyazawa was a teacher of agriculture by profession and largely unknown as a poet until after his death. Since then his work has increasingly attracted a devoted following, especially among ecologists, Buddhists, and the literary avant-garde. This volume includes poems translated by Gary Snyder, who was the first to translate a substantial body of Miyazawa’s work into English. Hiroaki Sato’s own superb translations, many never before published, demonstrate his deep familiarity with Miyazawa’s poetry. His remarkable introduction considers the poet’s significance and suggests ways for contemporary readers to approach his work. It further places developments in Japanese poetry into a global context during the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition the book features a Foreword by the poet Geoffrey O’Brien and essays by Tanikawa Shuntaro, Yoshimasu Gozo, and Michael O’Brien.

Ours

$26.95

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

$41.95

This landmark collection brings Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry together in a single authoritative volume for the first time. Edited by the poet Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons, The Collected Poems demonstrates the remarkable range, power, and importance of Berrigan's work.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005

$34.95

This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment—the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 will stand together with The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2000 as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005

Sleeping with the Dictionary

$23.95

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse.

Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

Sappho

$17.95

These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct—the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

Cover image for Sappho, isbn: 9780520393318

Dionysiaca

$95.00

Nonnus of Panopolis's Dionysiaca is the longest and most ambitious epic poem to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity. Written by an Egyptian Christian in the fifth century CE, this stunning mythological adventure explores the birth, upbringing, exploits, and ultimate apotheosis of the god Dionysus, including his establishment of mystery cults, discovery of the vine, conquest of India, and troubling relationships with mortal women. Its 48 books offer a portrait, viewed through a Dionysiac lens, of pagan polytheism in its entirety, a multifaceted mythical system that, despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, retained its grip on the imagination in Nonnus's day.

This new translation renders Nonnus's extraordinary poetic achievement into elegant but accessible English. It includes a substantial introduction and an extensive glossary of names and places. The last great pagan epic of classical antiquity, the Dionysiaca contains unparalleled insights into late antique attitudes to religion, the Greek literary tradition, sexuality, race, and the body. It tells the richest story possible of the transition between the pagan epic tradition and late antique Christianity.

Dionysiaca

$45.00

Nonnus of Panopolis's Dionysiaca is the longest and most ambitious epic poem to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity. Written by an Egyptian Christian in the fifth century CE, this stunning mythological adventure explores the birth, upbringing, exploits, and ultimate apotheosis of the god Dionysus, including his establishment of mystery cults, discovery of the vine, conquest of India, and troubling relationships with mortal women. Its 48 books offer a portrait, viewed through a Dionysiac lens, of pagan polytheism in its entirety, a multifaceted mythical system that, despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, retained its grip on the imagination in Nonnus's day.

This new translation renders Nonnus's extraordinary poetic achievement into elegant but accessible English. It includes a substantial introduction and an extensive glossary of names and places. The last great pagan epic of classical antiquity, the Dionysiaca contains unparalleled insights into late antique attitudes to religion, the Greek literary tradition, sexuality, race, and the body. It tells the richest story possible of the transition between the pagan epic tradition and late antique Christianity.

Dionysiaca

$0.00

Nonnus of Panopolis's Dionysiaca is the longest and most ambitious epic poem to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity. Written by an Egyptian Christian in the fifth century CE, this stunning mythological adventure explores the birth, upbringing, exploits, and ultimate apotheosis of the god Dionysus, including his establishment of mystery cults, discovery of the vine, conquest of India, and troubling relationships with mortal women. Its 48 books offer a portrait, viewed through a Dionysiac lens, of pagan polytheism in its entirety, a multifaceted mythical system that, despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, retained its grip on the imagination in Nonnus's day.

This new translation renders Nonnus's extraordinary poetic achievement into elegant but accessible English. It includes a substantial introduction and an extensive glossary of names and places. The last great pagan epic of classical antiquity, the Dionysiaca contains unparalleled insights into late antique attitudes to religion, the Greek literary tradition, sexuality, race, and the body. It tells the richest story possible of the transition between the pagan epic tradition and late antique Christianity.

Cover image for Dionysiaca, isbn: 9780520426474

The Guns and Flags Project

$23.95

Obsessed with work and dream, shot through with weather and color, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's spirited debut pursues the possibility of the lyric itself--whether the voice raised "with melodies/and thinking" can be rescued from the ongoing disaster of progress. In roving five-beat lines the poems pass again and again through scenes of liminality--sunset and dawn, falling asleep and waking up, border crossings--searching there for a potential ethics and politics of vision, a mutating, rhythmic "project" to oppose the inert spectacle of guns and flags. Like Ashbery stoked on sonics, O'Brien insists that the restless, unsatisfied motion of thought must hold the place for an ever-decaying freedom within the state.

Yet it is not idea alone that flares "passionately in our lives," but the smell of rain, the behavior of clouds, repetitions of waves: these are the subjects of a meditative ecstasy that advances The Guns and Flags Project as an inheritor of the Stevensian tradition, charged with a sense that history's never-ending storm of restoration and ruin cannot be outmaneuvered but might be withstood, and even revised, by song.

Cover image for The Guns and Flags Project, isbn: 9780520936140

The Face of Poetry

$39.95

From the explosion in creative writing programs and workshops to the poetry slams and open mikes in every city to the reading groups venturing beyond prose for the first time, poetry is suddenly everywhere. This vibrant anthology showcases unforgettable poems and photographic portraits of leading writers in the United States, together with a CD that features many of the poets reading from their work. From Aleida Rodriguez to Ishmael Reed to Maxine Hong Kingston to John Ashbery, the poets gathered here represent a cross section of poetic styles, geographic regions, and ethnic identities. Together they express the amazing exuberance and diversity of contemporary poetry.

Margaretta K. Mitchell conceived the volume after attending the celebrated Lunch Poems Reading Series at the University of California, Berkeley. Her desire to capture the faces of all of the poets who participated in the series led to the creation of this book. Her essay explores the importance of portraiture and describes her studio sessions with these poets.

Cover image for The Face of Poetry, isbn: 9780520939110

A Carnage in the Lovetrees

$26.95

"Surely, all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end," said Rilke. A Carnage in the Lovetrees begins at the moment the speaker reaches this realization. He resolves then to rebuild a world caught in the crosshairs of repeated annihilation, regrounding love as the only viable stratagem for survival. Richard Greenfield’s sequence of poems searches for a way to live in the aftermath of private trauma and public disaster. It represents a struggle to reconcile the historical with the present and to find a language that allows the speaker to endure past calamities. These relentless, acrobatic, and self-aware poems resist settling for easy solutions, or even closure, but instead push toward the difficult compromise of the livable.

Cover image for A Carnage in the Lovetrees, isbn: 9780520937093

All Poets Welcome

$36.95

This landmark book, together with its accompanying CD, captures the heady excitement of the vibrant, irreverent poetry scene of New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s. Drawing from personal interviews with many of the participants, from unpublished letters, and from rare sound recordings, Daniel Kane brings together for the first time the people, political events, and poetic roots that coalesced into a highly influential community. From the poetry-reading venues of the early sixties, such as those at the Les Deux Mégots and Le Metro coffeehouses to The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, a vital forum for poets to this day, Kane traces the history of this literary renaissance, showing how it was born from a culture of publicly performed poetry. The Lower East Side in the sixties proved foundational in American verse culture, a defining era for the artistic and political avant-garde.

The voices and works of John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, and many others enliven these pages, and the thirty five-track CD includes recordings of several of the poets reading from their work in the sixties and seventies. The Lower East Side's cafes, coffeehouses, and salons brought together poets of various aesthetic sensibilities, including writers associated with the so-called New York School, Beats, Black Mountain, Deep Image, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra, and others. Kane shows that the significance for literary history of this loosely defined community of poets and artists lies in part in its reclaiming an orally centered poetic tradition, adapted specifically to open up the possibilities for an aesthetically daring, playful poetics and a politics of joy and resistance.

Cover image for All Poets Welcome, isbn: 9780520936430

Sappho's Lyre

$29.95

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time.

Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers.

Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

Sappho's Lyre

$29.95

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time.

Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers.

Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda

$24.95

The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of Neruda's odes. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden's selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet's vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her translations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems. To write simply of simple things was a task the poet undertook consciously, following his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the "social conversion" that resulted from a visit to Macchu Picchu, and the writing of his epic Canto general (California, forthcoming). The odes are arranged in brief, sinuous lines that flow down the page and connect the poet to the animal, mineral, and vegetable world, to people and objects, and to the landscape of history. "Chile," Neruda once said in reference to the work of sixteenth-century poet Alonso de Ercilla, "was invented by a poet." In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, he declared that "We [writers from the vast expanse of America] are called upon to fill with words the confines of a mute continent, and we become drunk with the task of telling and naming." The odes reflect what Neruda saw as both an obligation and a privilege—the naming and defining of his world.

Cover image for Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, isbn: 9780520949553

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

$75.00

Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.

Cover image for The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, isbn: 9780520934887

French Symbolist Poetry, 50th Anniversary Edition, Bilingual Edition

$24.95

Whether viewed as an influence or in and for themselves, the Symbolists are a tantalizing group. Paralleling similar movements in art and music, their intensely personal poetry leans more heavily on oblique suggestions and evocation than on overt statement. It sets its perceptions, intuitive and nonrational, squarely against intellectual and scientific thinking—and this with a music that is flexible, intrepid, and subtle, sometimes even dissonant and jazzy. But the poetry itself is the movement's best definition. Here with bilingual text en face, an introduction, and illuminating notes, are some forty carefully selected poems of that movement. They range from the remote beginnings in Nerval and Baudelaire, through the humor and irony of Corbière and Laforgue, to the technical brilliance of Valéry, who died as recently as 1945. For those who wish an overall view of the movement, this is a generous sampling.

Cover image for French Symbolist Poetry, 50th Anniversary Edition, Bilingual Edition, isbn: 9780520934542

Calligrammes

$31.95

A fully annotated, bilingual edition, Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.

Cover image for Calligrammes, isbn: 9780520931190

Selected Poems of Rilke, Bilingual Edition

$17.95

These poems, selected from Das Buch der Bilder and the two parts of Neue Gedichte, show Rilke's deep concern with sculpture and painting. Written in his less mystical period (1900-1908), the poems exhibit Rilke's particular artistic and poetic power. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.

Cover image for Selected Poems of Rilke, Bilingual Edition, isbn: 9780520927155

Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda

$18.00

The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of Neruda's odes. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden's selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet's vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her trans-lations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems.

Cover image for Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, isbn: 9780520926325

Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine, Bilingual edition

$21.95

The influential French poet, Symbolist leader, and Decadent Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) was recognized as a groundbreaking writer even in his own lifetime—his stylistic innovations brought a new musicality to French poetry and paved the way for free verse and other twentieth-century techniques and experiments. This selection of poems, with the French text en face, provides a comprehensive selection of Verlaine’s verse together with a lucid introduction illuminating his life and works.

Cover image for Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine, Bilingual edition, isbn: 9780520933903

Canto General

$24.95

The Canto General, thought by many of Neruda’s most prominent critics to be the poet’s masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people.

Cover image for Canto General, isbn: 9780520949546

Sonnets to Orpheus, Bilingual Edition

$16.95

Written with astonishing rapidity in two weeks of February 1922, when Rilke was finally completing the Duino Elegies that had occupied him intermittently for a decade, Sonnets to Orpheus is a series of fifty-five brilliant and affirmative songs. It is in a sense a spontaneous creative dividend generated by a larger work. Because the sonnets were written only four years before Rilke's death, they belong properly to his final and philosophic period, and offer a sharp and striking contrast to the less mystical Das Buch der Bilder and Neue Gedichte. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.

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The Aeneid of Virgil, 35th Anniversary Edition

$27.95

This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.

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Canto General, 50th Anniversary Edition

$18.00

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Neruda was a kind of King Midas. Everything he touched turned to poetry, says Gabriel García Márquez, who also considers the Chilean Nobel laureate "the greatest poet of the twentieth century, in any language." [The Fragrance of Guava, 1983]. The Canto General, thought by many of Neruda's most prominent critics to be the poet's masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people. The Canto speaks of the destiny of Latin American peoples and the life of the poet himself. Without question, this is one of the most important and powerful long poems written in the modern period.

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Duino Elegies

$16.95

Begun in 1912 at the castle of Duino near Trieste, these ten Elegies were finally completed, after a decade of sporadic and protracted creation, at the Château Muzot in the Swiss Valais. Rilke considered them his greatest achievement, and, as MacIntyre suggests, they are "among the great and unforgettable poetry of the world." Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.

Cover image for Duino Elegies, isbn: 9780520927148

Selected Poems of Mallarme, Bilingual edition

$21.95

The leading poet of French symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé has exercised an enormous influence both on French and on English and American avant-garde writers. In this volume C. F. MacIntyre has translated forty-three of his poems, including the "Ouverture" and "Scène" from Hérodiade, which was to have been a drama in verse, and the well-known L'Après-midi d'un faune, for which Debussy composed his orchestral prelude. The French text faces the English translations, which are both true to the original and poetic. Indeed, as MacIntyre suggests, Debussy is probably "one of the best guides into the mysterious realm of Mallarmé." The poet was more concerned with the music of words, their sounds and vague associations, than with their conventional meanings; one of the elements in his credo was that suggestion and evocation are of greater significance than statement. His syntax is fractious, his meaning frequently enigmatic; but the reader will find MacIntyre's notes helpful in savoring the translations and the original French verses.

Cover image for Selected Poems of Mallarme, Bilingual edition, isbn: 9780520929098

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

$31.95

Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

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Veiled Sentiments

$29.95

Updated Edition With a New Preface Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.

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Shadow of Paradise

$28.95

Begun in 1939, barely four months after the close of the Spanish Civil War, these poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Vicente Aleixandre were written during a period of hardship and despair. In spite of his surroundings Aleixandre created the splendor of the shadow of a lost paradise that consisted of memory, nostalgia, yearning and illusion. This is the first full English version. The original Spanish text is included.

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For

$21.95

When Carol Snow published her first volume of poetry, Artist and Model, in 1989, poet Michael Palmer praised the "complex music [Snow] forms from our simplest words" and noted that she "reflects on the struggle toward--and limits of--representation itself. . . . Artist and Model is a first book of singular poetic intelligence and attention." In For, the first volume in the New California Poetry series, Snow continues her vast and original poetic project of defining the relationship among art, life, and the acts of perception that define and limit those terms. If there is "subject matter" --an elusive term when one is talking about Snow's writing--it is the play between memory and moment. Here is work that makes innovative use of autobiographical material, in finely wrought and highly sculpted poetry of great integrity, power, and subtlety. The kinship For has with Eastern thought and poetic forms extends to the fact that, like the poetry of Tu Fu, it has a depth charge of spare style. Among American writers, Snow's antecedents include Elizabeth Bishop and George Oppen. For synthesizes something classical and ancient--the need to observe cleanly and to represent a thing simply and with force. Snow forges new and remarkable poetry by combining traditions that once seemed incompatible--the materials of life and a purely aesthetic, experimental style.

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The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet

$36.95

This edition presents, for the first time, the entire oeuvre of the Pearl poet with both the original Middle English works and complete verse translations. Poet and scholar Casey Finch uses anapestic tetrameters (and iambic tetrameter for Pearl) in his translations rather than the accented tetrameters of the originals, thus achieving the rhythmic regularity the poems would have displayed when performed to music, as they surely were meant to be. Finch's translations are printed facing the best modern editions of the poems, those of Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron and of Clifford Peterson.

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Complete Poems

$31.95

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now. Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe. With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

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Selected Poems of Robert Creeley

$27.95

Here, in a new selection of 200 poems from five decades, is the distinctive voice of Robert Creeley, reminding us of what has made him one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

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The Maximus Poems

$45.00

Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975) in an authoritative version.

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The Collected Poetry

$33.95

This edition, containing an extensive introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Césaire's poetry—the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook—will remain the definitive Césaire in English.

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Contemporary Chicana Poetry

$26.95

In this first book-length study of the works of Chicano women writers, Marta Ester Sanchez introduces the reader to a group of Chicanas who in the 1970s began to reexamine and reevaluate their gender and cultural identity through poetic language. The term 'Chicana' refers here to women of Mexican heritage who live and write in the United States. The works of four contemporary Chicana poets---Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, and Bernice Zamora---are the focus of this volume.

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Postwar Polish Poetry

$27.95

This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland. The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry.

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Exilée and Temps Morts

$26.95

In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, published in 1982, is considered a classic work of autobiography and is widely read by students internationally. This stunning selection of her uncollected and hitherto unpublished work at last brings together Cha's writings and text-based pieces with images spanning the period between 1976 and 1980. The volume includes two related poem sequences, Exilée and Temps Morts, major texts incorporating autobiographical elements as well as themes of language, memory, displacement, and alienation--issues that continue to resonate with artists decades after Cha explored them. These moving works give a fuller view of the creative nexus out of which Dictee emerged and attest to the singular literary achievement of a major figure in late-twentieth century art. Copub: Berkeley Art Museum

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Ian Hamilton Finlay

$26.95

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

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An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry

$23.95

This bilingual anthology is the first attempt to present a substantial collection of contemporary Arabic poetry in the English language. It acquaints the English-speaking reader with the modern development of one of the world's major poetic traditions, and affords insight into the contemporary cultural situation of the Arab peoples. English translations of Arabic poetry have suffered from aspirations to geographic completeness of representation and excessive concern with the Neo-Classicist school. The present anthology regards poetic quality as the primary criterion of selection and displays an emphatic interest in the poets of free verse. It presents three successive generations--the Syro-Americans, the Egyptian modernist, and the poets of free-verse movement--linked together by a progressive shift from emphasis on form to emphasis on content and form a relatively detached portrayal of the outside world to a concern with the expression of individual experience. Numerous contemporary poets make their first appearance in English, some of them having written pieces specially for this anthology. It is hoped that the bilingual character of the anthology will suit it for use by students of Arabic literature. At the same time, the book is intended for a wider readership with general poetic and literary interests. An important criterion in composing the anthology was the viability of a poem, in its English translation, as a piece of literature as well as the excellence of its Arabic original; if the translators have been successful in applying this criterion, the anthology should afford much aesthetic pleasure. The work should be of considerable interest also to students of comparative literature, as it demonstrates the influence on modern Arab letters of several Western poets, notably Eliot, Yeats, and Pound. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

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Medea

$12.95

Renowned poet and acclaimed translator Charles Martin faithfully captures Euripides’s dramatic tone and style in this searing tale of revenge and sacrifice.

The Medea of Euripides is one of the greatest of all Greek tragedies and arguably the one with the most significance today. A barbarian woman brought to Corinth and there abandoned by her Greek husband, Medea seeks vengeance on Jason and is willing to strike out against his new wife and family—even slaughtering the sons she has born him. At its center is Medea herself, a character who refuses definition: Is she a hero, a witch, a psychopath, a goddess? All that can be said for certain is that she is a woman who has loved, has suffered, and will stop at nothing for vengeance.

In this stunning translation, poet Charles Martin captures the rhythms of Euripides’ original text through contemporary rhyme and meter that speak directly to modern readers. An introduction by classicist and poet A.E. Stallings examines the complex and multifaceted Medea in patriarchal ancient Greece. Perfect in and out of the classroom as well as for theatrical performance, this faithful translation succeeds like no other.

Cover image for Medea, isbn: 9780520973756

Contemporary Chicana Poetry

$28.95

In this first book-length study of the works of Chicano women writers, Marta Ester Sanchez introduces the reader to a group of Chicanas who in the 1970s began to reexamine and reevaluate their gender and cultural identity through poetic language. The term 'Chicana' refers here to women of Mexican heritage who live and write in the United States. The works of four contemporary Chicana poets---Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, and Bernice Zamora---are the focus of this volume.

In this first book-length study of the works of Chicano women writers, Marta Ester Sanchez introduces the reader to a group of Chicanas who in the 1970s began to reexamine and reevaluate their gender and cultural identity through poetic language. The term

Cover image for Contemporary Chicana Poetry, isbn: 9780520340886

Gone

$26.95

This collection of new poems by one of the most respected poets in the United States uses motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction—in an emotional relation to the known world. Heralded as "one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers" by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets.

The poems in Gone describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "The Passion," consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. The New York Times Book Review said, "Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvelously free of sentimental piety." With Gone, readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe’s continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

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Paul Celan

$34.95

The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to René Char and Jean-Paul Sartre—all appearing here for the first time in English.

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Subject

$14.95

Calvin Bedient calls the poetry in this volume "solid and brave and relentlessly inventive." Forrest Gander says, "The obsessive force of this poetry, ruptured by caesura and stanza, is remarkable. Despite the considerable intellectual torque, the poems, concerned always with identity, the borders of the I and the Here, are quite funny in passages. The drama of this work is gripping, convulsive, and intense."

Subject holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists, but the surface is rough, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself: the voice is ragged, syntax is torn, words have been broken into syllable and sound, images dissolve, the page holds out alternate visions and versions (in double or triple columns), leaving any would-be univocal truth always in doubt.

Cover image for Subject, isbn: 9780520938267

Expanding Verse

$12.99

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

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The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present

$32.95

Postwar Italian poetry carries on the legacy of one of the world's richest literary traditions, a tradition in which conflict and diversity are important parts. It is a poetry that reflects, with extraordinary intensity, the social, psychological, and moral turmoil of the modern world. Substantial selections fromt ehw orks of twenty-one of Italy's most influential contemporary poets make up this anthology, which will make this largely unknown poetic territory more familiar to the English-speaking world. The introductory essay discusses the unique Italian talent for fusing cultural and political struggle into literary form and Italian poetry's important impact on developments in European poetry throughout the twentieth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

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Purgatory

$29.95

Raúl Zurita’s Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile’s violent recent history.

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Lorine Niedecker

$34.95

"The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.

Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech.

This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.