The Knew York Times

by T. R. Hummer

Music, race, politics, and conscience. In these eight essays written over the span of a decade and a half, T. R. Hummer explains how, for him, such abiding concerns revolve around the practice of poetry and the evolution of a culturally responsible personal poetics. Hummer writes about the suicide of poet Vachel Lindsay, the culture wars at the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the divided soul of his native American South, and the salving, transcendent practice of musicianship. Inevitably entwined with a personal or cultural component, Hummer's criticism is thus grounded in experience that is always familiar and often straight to the heart in its rightness. In one of those statements of "poetic purpose" that goes hand in hand with a residency, guest editorship, or lecture tour, Hummer once wrote that "poetry inhabits and enunciates an incommensurable zone between individual and collective, between body and body politic, an area very ill-negotiated by most of us most of the time. Our culture, with its emphasis on the individual mind and body, teaches us very little about how even to think about the nature of this problem. . . . E pluribus unum is a smokescreen: what pluribus; what unum? And yet this phrase is an American mantra, as if it explained something." This is a quintessential Hummer moment: a writer has just given himself a good reason to quit. What Hummer knows must happen next is what The Muse in the Machine is all about.

by A. C. Hamilton

The Faerie Queene is a scholarly masterpiece that has influenced, inspired, and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. Hamilton's edition is itself, a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading. It is now the standard edition for all readers of Spenser. The entire work is revised, and the text of The Faerie Queene itself has been freshly edited, the first such edition since the 1930s. This volume also contains additional original material, including a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, chronology of Spenser's life and works and provides a compilation of list of characters and their appearances in The Faerie Queene.

by Marc Woodworth

A poetry collection inspired by and often referencing historical and artistic figures such as Frans Masereel, Lovis Corinth, and Margarethe von Trotta through epistolary, ekphrastic, and pastoral poetry.

by Carolyne Larrington

This collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry contains the greater narratives of the creation of the world and the coming of Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods.

by Bacchylides

Until a century ago, the fifth-century Greek poet Bacchylides was known only by 107 nonsequential lines buried as quotations in the writings of other ancient authors. With the discovery in 1896 of a papyrus containing his work, 1,382 lines were reassembled and the poems of Bacchylides finally began to take shape for the modern reader. Slavitt argues in the Introduction to this collection that, although Bacchylides is often considered a "lesser Pindar," he is a poet who warrants consideration. "He deserves attention not because he is beetling, like Pindar, but because he is not. He relies on craftsmanship and reliably displays an attractive grace and elegance."

by Alice Notley

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a "spoken" text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

by Billy Collins

A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

by Nikolaĭ Ėrdman

A satirical comedy about an unemployed 'little man' who contemplates suicide and is besieged by spokespeople of discontented groups, from butchers to intellectuals, who want him to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf.

by C. S. Lewis

"Spirits in Bondage reveals the earliest published thoughts of C. S. Lewis. However, we find an unfamiliar Lewis--not the mature Christian but the young atheist cynic, who fought in the harrowing Great War. In these poems Lewis dreads the dangerous worls the keeps us from living meaningful lives" --

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Many years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien composed his own version of the great legend of Northern antiquity, recounted here in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. In the Lay of the Völsungs is told the ancestry of the great hero Sigurd, the slayer of Fáfnir, most celebrated of dragons; of his awakening of the Valkyrie Brynhild, who slept surrounded by a wall of fire, and of their betrothal; and of his coming to the court of the great princes who were named the Niflungs (or Nibelungs), with whom he entered into blood-brotherhood. In scenes of dramatic intensity, of confusion of identity, thwarted passion, jealousy, and bitter strife, the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild, of Gunnar the Niflung and Gudrún his sister, mounts to its end in the murder of Sigurd, the suicide of Brynhild, and the despair of Gudrún. The Lay of Gudrún recounts her fate after the death of Sigurd, her marriage against her will to the mighty Atli, ruler of the Huns (the Attila of history), his murder of her brothers, and her hideous revenge.

by Elizabeth Bishop

"Geography III," Bishop's final book of poems, first appaered in 1976. It contains such masterpieces as "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," and "One Art."

by Lawrence Durrell

In this new selection from the poetry of Lawrence Durrell (the first for thirty years), Peter Porter has drawn on the full range of the published work, from A Private Country (1943) to Vega (1973), and has provided a long overdue revaluation of Durrell's poetic career. In his detailed and generous introduction, Porter makes the case for A Private Country as one of the most accomplished debut collections of the twentieth century, and traces Durrell's preoccupations and poetic personality within the wider scene. The selection of poems makes its own strong case for the continuing power and originality of this attractive, metropolitan and wholly individual body of work.

by Scott Masson

This study questions the Romantics' belief that the imaginative poetry of feeling could overcome the alienating effects of Cartesian rationalism, and reform civilisation by wedding the mind to this goodly universe. It begins by surveying modern hermeneutics, which attempted to develop a science of interpretation compatible with Romantic tenets. Underlying these was the belief that human nature itself could be known intimately and developed autonomously. Observing the repeated crises of self-legitimisation that thence ensued, it enquires into the purposes of the humanities. After examining how human nature had been understood in the Western tradition until the Enlightenment, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge's famous definition of the imagination as an attack on Romantic hermeneutics, rooted in the traditional view that man has been created in Imago Dei.

by Jalal al-Din Rumi

'If something else can capture your attention Then it's not love, but just a trivial passion - Love is that flame which, once it blazes up, Burns everything but the Beloved up.' This is the first ever translation of the entirety of Book Five of Rumi's magnum opus, The Masnavi, into English. Prior to this verse translation in heroic couplets, translations were either of selected passages or in lineated prose with passages deemed too salacious rendered into Latin, as was the convention in Britain of the early twentieth century. This fifth book of Rumi's The Masnavi is well-known to contain much sexually explicit content within teaching stories about the path of annihilation of the self in a total and uncompromising way.