National Poetry Month: Home

A flowing collection of poetry that is also a guide for life.

The first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Spanning thousands of years and including some of the most influential critical essays ever written, this is a collection of influential writings on poetry ranging from Aristotle to Laura (Riding) Jackson.

In Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations.

The book engages with the full vitality of the contemporary poetry scene. Wide topic range - from performance to politics, from lyric expression to ecopoetics and from multilingual poetries to electronic writing - enables provocative thematic links to be made It relates poetry to reporting on global conflict, including the impact of the Iraq War* Student resources include a chronology, web resources, a glossary, questions for discussion and a guide to further reading

Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers.

Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis. Provides a clear, lively introduction to Romantic Poetry, backed by academic research and marked by its accessibility to students with little prior experience of poetry Introduces many of the major topics of the age, from politics to publishing, from slavery to sociability, from Milton to the mind of man .

This bilingual anthology brings together a representative selection from more than a half century of this distinguished Brazilian poet's lifetime work. Along with previously translated poems are many others in English for the first time. The remarkable group of poets and translators includes Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and W. S. Merwin.

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art.

The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects.

The first ever English-language collection of poetry from the Kabbalistic tradition, masterfully translated by MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry that emerges directly from the sublime and often startling world of Jewish mysticism.

Most readers of contemporary poetry would agree with literary critic Helen Vendler that "there is no significant poet whose work does not mirror, both formally and in its preoccupations, the absence of the transcendent"--that no major modern poet writes religious poetry. David Impastato has done an invaluable service in showing that the transcendent is indeed alive and well in the hands of contemporary poets, despite reports to the contrary, and in gathering a dazzling array of poems that will appeal in equal measure to religious and literary readers alike.

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts.

After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field's ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets.

"Among Friends" presents a richly theorized evocation of friendship as a fluid, critical social space, one that offers a vantage point from which to explore the gendering of poetic institutions and practices from the postwar period to the present.

Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poetOCOs relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation."

In Fleas, Flies, and Friars, Nicholas Orme has gathered a wide variety of children's verse that circulated in England beginning in the 1400s, providing a way for modern readers of all ages to experience the medieval world through the eyes of its children.

This collection of linked poems takes us on a journey where angels ride bicycles, wounds both grieve and heal, and "our will / diving through the shuddering / wet world, carries us." Resonant with "a longing so ardent and spacious," these are poems of place and displacement, sickness and health.

Rhyme's Challenge offers a concise, pithy primer to hip-hop poetics while presenting a spirited defense of rhyme in contemporary American poetry. Ranging from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Eminem and Jay-Z, David Caplan's study demonstrates the continuing relevance of rhyme to poetry -- and everyday life.

Concise and accessible, this guide to teaching the art of poetry from Shakespeare to contemporary poets enables anyone to learn about how poets approach their art. Any reader can use it as an entryway into the art of poetry. Teaching the Art of Poetry shows poetry as a multi-faceted artistic process rather than a mystery on a pedestal.

The New Anthology of American Poetry's contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah.

Celebrated throughout antiquity as the supreme Greek poet of love and of the personal lyric, noted especially for her limpid fusion of formal poise, lucid insight, and incandescent passion, today her poetry is also prized for its uniquely vivid participation in a living paganism.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Daisy Fried's third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. There is nothing like this book, because there is nothing in it but America. No comfort, no consolation, no life-affirming pats on the back, no despair about God, no fear or acceptance of death, no irrational exuberance, no guilt or weariness, no misery even in the middle of personal and political crisis. Plenty of humor and plenty of seriousness. Joy. And a new kind of poetry: not nice, but rich and real.

This collection comes from an alternate world of poetry running close beside our own, one which is always chugging away at shaping meaning and adding substance to our feelings. These poems are usually a study in near-solitude: domestic scenes, Michelangelo's Last Judgement, the myths of Egypt, skaters on the Rideau Canal.

Heather Simeney MacLeod explores masterpieces, biblical stories, scientific theories, notions of reincarnation, and engages them with the plain, the lucid, and yet vibrant characters that resound with significance and vigor.

In In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap, bestselling author and scholar Alexs Pate argues for a fresh understanding of rap as an example of powerful and effective poetry, rather than a negative cultural phenomenon. Pate articulates a way of "reading" rap that makes visible both its contemporary and historical literary values.

The poems included in this comprehensive anthology run the gamut of styles and themes, but all are by Latinos writing from the mid- twentieth century to the present. Some deal with issues specific to the Hispanic experience, such as displacement, identity and language. Others ponder universal concerns, such as love, family and humanity.

Poetry in America offers extravagantly formed lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources. Where, in such times, can poetry emerge, the book asks--and answers--again and again.

Combining poetry with divination, this collection resurrects the ancient Greek art of Rhapsodomancy, or divining one's fortune or destiny through the use of poetry or verse. Harkening back to antiquity, when Polyhymnia--the muse of sacred poetry--and Calliope--the muse of epic poetry--were invoked for guidance, each page of this anthology contains three poetic excerpts, chosen for their oracular wisdom.

Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved--and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. Baker takes joy in reading individual poems--from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.

In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter’s own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings.

An indispensable collection of the work of one of the 19th century's most compelling and original poets, this comprehensive edition contains all of Edgar Allan's poetry and three most important essays. Reissued to coincide with the release of a major Hollywood film of the same title, it exposes diversity and genius, from breathtakingly seductive beauty of Helen to the claustrophobic horror of The Raven.

A brief, passionate book about the nature of poetry and its use in the world Poetry doesn't matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.