Pity the Plumeria TreePity the poor plumeria tree:no white petals again this year;and again its green, oblong leavesfall before their prime, exposeits skeletal frame like a desert fossil.We hadn’t asked all that muchof the plumeria---neither the shadenor the elegance the others give---only that it be a privacy screenbetween our patio and the passersby.Perhaps it thinks itself the orphanw...

This book provides detailed histories of colonial water systems in four localities in the Mexican Baja-o-Celaya, Salvatierra, Valle de Santiago, and Queretaro. It includes studies of irrigated agriculture, hydraulic technology, and water law in the region. The local histories richly illustrate, through the patterns of irrigation, the interactions b

Most of us wish that our parents and grandparents had left more about themselves and what moved them for us to read and talk about today.In Songs of Crocus Hill, author Michael E. Murphy presents a poetry collection that focuses on memory poemscandle-lit vignettes related to the memoir genre. The people, places, and experiences he imagines are drawn from his years growing up in the Crocus Hill district of St. Paul, from his experiences as a parent, and from his travels abroad as an...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal**Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings to...

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants w...

“Tom Thumb. Three bears.” is a collection of the two most famous folktales and fairy tales, which was retold and illustrated by W.W. Denslow in 1903. The “Tom Thumb” is about Tom, who is no bigger than his father’s thumb, and his adventures with a big crow and a huge fish, and becoming a favourite of King Arthur. The “Three bears” retold by W.W. Denslow has a very nice and kind ending, which will be appreciated by kids: “The good natured bears were always anxiou...

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters a...

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a...

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.The opening sequence, “Endpoint,”is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" ( The Times Literary Supplement).Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, wher...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995Writtenin a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

This collection includes the full text and drawings from Opposites and More Opposites, plus seven additional poems and drawings about differences. Readers of all ages will delight in this volume of witty wordplay and clever illustrations from two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and National Book Award winner Richard Wilbur.A perfect introduction to the joy of language, this collection explores:Books About Opposites: Discover the surprising, clever, and ...