These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman’s passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as “Boat” to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own “brilliant, trivial unmooring.” As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in ...

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Su...

This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House.This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, ...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music o...

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...

Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's ...

For poet Mary Oliver, nature is full of mystery and miracle. From the excitation of birds in the sky to the flowers and plants that are "the simple garments" of the earth, the natural world is her text of both the earth's changes and its permanence.In Blue Iris, Mary Oliver collects ten new poems, two dozen of her poems written over the last two decades, and two previously unpublished essays on the beauty and wonder of plants. The poet considers roses, of course, as well a...

Wendy Videlock’s The Dark Gnu and Other Poems plays, jokes, teaches, admonishes, yields to the ecstatic, and strays into the shadowy where “If not for the dark, / no / spark.” All of this is heightened by striking full-color illustrations from the author herself. There are stories that come and go in a couple of blinks, and stories that linger and juggle their way from hut to the market, to the fair, on a “swaying dappled mare,” to get to all the good to be had or done. Mother Goose, myth,...

An inventive and observant collection of lyric poems from the Princeton Series of Contemporary PoetsWith skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead's lyrics root around in the earth searching for sustenance, cluck rather than crow, and possess a humble majesty.Confronting subject...

Earl Silver’s poems open doors of nostalgia to scenes, people, family places and feelings-some long forgotten. His writing takes me back to what I have seen and felt, so that memories, half buried, are reborn. I am sure he will do the same for any reader. Faith in God is alive in these poems and becomes a beckoning invitation to peace and quiet of heart. At times his words are few, but dramatic and succinct so that they bring powerful images to mind. Some of his poems will delight with hu...

The lyrical poems of award-winning author Nancy Willard celebrate the magic of lifeNancy Willard, who was the first recipient of a Newbery Medal for a volume of poetry, displays her versatility in these companion collections.Divided into five sections, Water Walker blends the mundane with the mystical. From sleeping fish to Marco Polo to a tortoise who dispenses unique advice to a bride on her wedding day, these poems integrate fables, nursery rhym...