Collected poetry of a lifetime can be so easily lost in drawers unopened and piles thrown out subsequent to the trauma of a family members passing. This book represents my effort to arrest that likelihood. Although some of this collection has been published in journals and anthologies, those vehicles fade into the dustbins of time. My hope is that The Second Dance will be kept and read at least by my family members for a generation or two.Anytime we drove past a cemetery my father ...

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and f...

Of Hearts and Souls is a collection of free verse poetry written over the past 15 years. It is about the journey of life and the different roads we walk down on that journey. The book includes both short micro-poems for those who prefer their poetry in bite-size snacks and longer more prosaic poetry for the avid poetry reader. Topics range the spectrum of life and form a vivid mosaic of images by the end of the book. The book culminates with a poem written as a wedding present for Robin's ...

A poetry collection roughly grouped around the motif of lines, much of this collection was written in 2006 and some was performed live as a part of the Creative Quill Bangkok Tour in 2006-7.Poems range from the opening long piece, that takes an in-depth look at "lines" throughout time, to poems drenched in love, both good love and bad. Existentialist themes are featured in some works, and some poems reveal aspects of the natural world.

Jerry celebrates his 50 years together with Dani in Poetry. A true love story for all ages.

Diane Ackerman's poems reveal her intense response to the several worlds of nature, science, and society. Her lyricism fuses wit and sobriety, meditation and activism, and she confronts us with figures both real and fantastic.As always, her strong connection with the natural world, the realms of language and literature, myth and imagination, combines with her deep understanding of the sciences to offer her readers a singular American voice. This is not a voice crying in the wildern...

Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro’s twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. How did we get here? Why is there something rather than noth...

For those who have discovered life, in illness, difficulty and despair, I wish that on your wings you'll fly, to diamonds, stars and dizzying flare. -- Ekaterina D. Bojilova.

Incandescent poems about living and aging—about being awake in this young century—by one of our most moving and eloquent poets.These poems chart the journeys of sleepless nights when whole lifetimes seem to pass with their stories: loves lost and gained; children and seasons in their phases; and the world beyond, both threatening and enriching life. The time before sleep acts as an invitation to reflect on the world's quieter movements—from gardens heavy after a fi...

"These poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce." — PUBLISHERS WEEKLYSelected for the National Poetry Series by Martha Collins, Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse.Here violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow ex...

In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman revealed herself as a naturalist who writes with the sensuous immediately of a great poet. Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist.Ackermans's Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw reade...

Gloria Ausubel (1948- ) is a baby boomer who has tasted the palatable and unpalatable fare served up in the culture of the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's. Her poetry becomes a way of identification with the generation of alienation. In terms of skittish dabbling, vicarious participation, and prophetic yearning she takes a poetic stance to that generation. Her poems emanate from a specific time and place but have levels of meaning that can strike listeners from different generations. Her poems ...