Grennan's new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poe...

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts.In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and...

"Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey." --Billy Collins. . . there goes the sudden shriekof the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhumanbreath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leafand blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebblesonto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inchof the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known puresense-st...

These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets.By c...

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." — Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book ReviewA profound book about the natura...

The acclaimed poet and Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale contemplates age, duty, and our shared world in this collection of 50 new poems.Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry since Morning in the Burned House, this collection presents fifty poems that range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative to prophetic. Its range of subjects is equally far-reaching, from intimate personal confessions to global political concerns.

In The Spirit Level, as ever with Seamus Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

Here is the definitive collection of poetry from one of America’s best-loved writers-now available in paperback. With the publication of this book, eight volumes of poetry were brought back into print, including the early nature-based lyrics of Plain Song, the explosive Outlyer & Ghazals, and the startling "correspondence" with a dead Russian poet in Letters to Yesenin. Also included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, and "Geo-B...

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).These beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, tender, and intensely moving—come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, “setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word.” Some draw on history, and on myth, both classic...

The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called the narrative sequence in Seamus Heaney's Station Island "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."

This book is an ode to the fragrant, yet rough-hewn Australian bush. By delving into its pages, you will be transported to a parallel realm where flannel flowers sing, cockatoos choreograph and paperbark trees seduce. A memoir of sorts, this poignant and ethereal collection of poems celebrates the beauty, the harshness and the resilience of this ancient land and its unforgettable inhabitants.In addition, you’ll be serenaded by harps and fairies, meander through time in a yellow din...

A startling and gorgeous work by Denmark's most admired poet finally available in English translation.Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence ...