A renowned poet's artful collection is a striking body of work.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the general editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions,...

Since Heather McHugh first began publishing her poems in 1968, poetry readers have marveled at the immensity and range of her gift. There seems to be nothing that McHugh can’t do with words and do with high wit and sonic brilliance. In her chapbook Feeler, McHugh takes on the fraught subject of empathy—how much we feel, and do, for the afflicted. It also addresses the relation between thought and feeling: “Nowadays I cannot tell/ the two apart: can’t feel things thoughtlessly/or t...

The twentieth edition of The Best American poetry series celebrates the rich and fertile landscape of American poetry. Renowned poet Heather McHugh loves words and the unexpected places they take you; her own poetry elevates wordplay to a species of metaphysical wit. For this year's anthology McHugh has culled a spectacular group of poems reflecting her passion for language, her acumen, and her vivacious humor.From the thousands of poems published or poste...

"If McHugh is serious, she's anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering, and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics."-The New York Times Book Review"Her poems are open, resilient, invisibly twisted: part safety net, part trampoline."-Voice Literary SupplementThis fast-paced, verbally dexterous book-honored as a "Book of the Year" by Publishers Weekly-"boils up and boils over" ...

HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. She regularly teaches at the low residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan 1999). In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. She has translated the work of Jean Follain, and with her husband Nikolai Popov...

This generous selection of Mona Van Duyn’s distinguished, award-winning work spans four decades. Beginning with her classic Valentines to the Wide World (1959), encompassing the intimate voice of Bedtime Stories (1972) and the moving Letters from a Father (1982), crowned by the life-spanning Firefall (1993), Selected Poems reacquaints us with a poet whose ear is keenly tuned to the music of nature and human conversation. In lively and varied for...

"Glare is a high-energy, relentlessly self-aware collision with the whole of life."—Albert Mobilio, SalonA superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise—and always unmistakably his own.

Deer Crossing is a book of short and serial poetry mainly concerned with bucolic or pastoral themes. This new pastoralism is more than a bit ironic, as it examines the interface among the urban ethos, the almost-lost art of meditating on nature, and the virtues of working outdoors. The poems are autobiographical and they were written between 1978 and 2013. Today, when such a diagnosis of Nature Deprivation Syndrome (NDS) is possible, this book is apt reading. 

Fourteen years after his last book of poems, we have a glorious new volume from Richard Kenney, who has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as “one of the most gifted and multifaceted and original of American poets.”In The One-Strand River, Kenney has tales to tell—of loves, births, and confounding politics—in lively, quicksilver language that surprises at every turn. We meet the poet as a middle-aged husband walking the dog, confiding, “Churlish / thought...

Delight in the nectar of the gods. Feed your mind with Ambrosia LessWhispers to the gods are like honey from a poet's lips. When several poets raise their voices together, it's a sacred feast of memories and dreams. Poetry is divine food for the soul, full of emotion and celestial feeling. Join us in our longing, our pain and passion, heartache, logic and insanity, fear, faith, confusion, hope, unity, solitude, daily life, political strife, and more.From the creative minds ...

Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins.With his distinct voice and accessible language, America’s two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.Like the present book’s title, Collins’s poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”–but also with quiet observation, int...