Grolier Poetry Book Shop

Grolier Poetry Book Shop is located in Harvard Square, and is the oldest continuous poetry book shop in the United States. 

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Poem for the Day May 1st 2019

This poem’s writer is Anonymous. (Fragments from the Norwegian)  translated by James Wright

1 Now it is late winter.

Years ago, I walked through a spring wind Bending green wheat In a field near Trondhjem.

2.

Black Snow,

Like a strange sea creature,  draws back into itself, Restoring grass to earth.

( From World Poetry an anthology of verse from Antiquity to Our Time,  Published in 1988) Clifton Faidman, General Editor

[grolierpoetry]

Ten Poetry Books to Read Now

1. Extracting the Stone of Madness By Alejandra Pizarnik translated from the Spanish by Yvette Sigert

This book  contains the poems of Alejandra Pizarnik from 1962-1972.

The “small prose poems” in the section of uncollected poems have a sadness and a profound sense of aliveness.

“The sun closed,the sense of the sun closed, and the sense of closing lit it up”

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2. evolution by Eileen Myles

There are some pockets of rare beauty in this new book by one of our most irreverent poets. This is a gem of a book perfect for the 21st century.

“Our happiness was when the lights were out

the whole city  in darkness”

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 3. Refuse by Julian Randall Refuse was the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Randall’s poetry is like a breath of fresh air. Part history, part present the book is alive and full of the “truth’ of the strangeness that is America in 2018.

“I am a burden in every mouth  my name a minefield people forget what I am exactly   but I end in blood”

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4. We Fall Like Children by Xhevdet Bajraj Translations from Albanian and Spanish by Ani Gjika and Alice Whitmore

This book is full of flowers that bloom in spite of the conditions that they “the souls and angels” in the book find themselves in. War and exile are the deep concerns of this writer who lives in Mexico He and his family were deported from Kosovo in May of 1999.

“Flowers  when they are born cry  like babies”

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5. Eye Level  by Jenny Xie

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. A lovely book of poems infused with moments of stillness, rain water and aliveness.

“Rainwater mars the tin roofs,  melts a sticky bun left in the alley. it worries down the final tips of daylight.

                            How long will it be like this?

Water growing out of water.”

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6. First Mountain by Zhang Er

An elegant book of poems that bring the reader into many different worlds. The world of rural China, of grief and dreams.

“At the sky’s edge at the lip of the sea the distance between water and water. The Yangtze and the Hudson flow together, together therefore flows all distances”

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7. The January Children by Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo knows how to tell a story in poetic form. This book is a tender and sometimes personal look at the ramifications of displacement.

“& what is a country but the drawing of a line          i draw thick black lines around my eyes& they are a country”...

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8. In the Still of the night By Dara Wier

A beautiful book of longing and loss by an award winning American poet.  There is a surreal tinge to the writing of Dara Wier. 

“Their must be a name somewhere  For what’s not there”

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9. Be With By Forrest Gander To be with, to lose to grieve, to survive moment by moment, to live and  therefore suffer and to allow grace to come.  A new book by an award winning poet.

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10.  Breathturn

by Paul Celan translated by Pierre Joris

A book to read slowly. Celan breathtaking writing comes through in this beautiful translation by Pierre Joris.

Buy Here

[grolierpoetry]

Every poet knows that, when he looks back over what he has written, the poems it is a torment and a shame to recall are not which, for one reason or another, were failures-no poet who writes much can hope to escape writing some poems which are bad, or, at least boring- but those which he knows to be clever forgeries, expressing feelings or attitudes which were not really his, but which vanity, a wish to please an audience, or the wrong kind of conscious deluded him into fancying were genuine. Of these he is rightly ashamed, because, he cannot say “I should have written differently, or it was the best I could do at the time.” he can only say I ought never to have written it, and I needn’t have.“

W.H Auden (via grolierpoetry)

[grolierpoetry]

Dive into Poetry with Hand-picked books from The Grolier

Grolier Poetry Bookshop Visit Our Website

The Scent of Water

By Ivy Dempsey "The Scent of Water maps a pilgrimage from a child's puzzled awakening, through the shock of adult despairs, toward the humbling wisdom of acceptance. How does meaning happen in our immediate experience? And what role must a basic sense of reverence play as we parse our world? Throughout the poems, these questions underlie the vital impact of specific landscapes of trees, skies, and waters in Oklahoma, Kansas, California, and New Mexico. In trees, especially, Dempsey finds a symbol for our belonging both to the heart of earth and body of the heavens in a mysterious universe that welcomes biblical as well as scientific interpretations. Bringing the reader to both root and light, The Scent of Water proposes that the way we live and die can be transformed when we understand that one energy sustains all our minds, bodies, each burning star." 

-La Alameda Press

"Liquid Fire runs through these poems so that, drawn by the energy, we "fall upward" into the brilliant gaze of this woman - poet and seeker- who has compressed a lifetime-balanced precipitously between "a cleansed and shining world" and "the terror"-into a redemptive action, an enchantment resonating with song. Each person who reads, and reads again, these poems will be grateful for their honesty and the notes that "fall-weighted, essential," into the mind and heart."

-Francine Ringold

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Ocean Effects

by Brendan Galvin

"Sharply observed and metaphorically inventive, Ocean Effects is a worthy follow-up to Galvin's National Book Award finalist Habitat. It includes a new vein of Galvin's trademark richly observed lyric poems on the biota, landscapes, and weathers of coastal New England. Seascapes and the natural world bracket sequences spoken by personae as various as the seventeenth-century American colonist Roger Williams, small-town cops, a squatter in the ruins of Chernobyl, a nineteenth-century Russian general in Mongolia, and a Cape Cod carpenter. Galvin's monologues, tensile and energetic free verse, are touched with the speech of the historical periods in which they take place."

-Louisiana State university Press

"Over the past four decades, in an era deeply suspicious of the relationship between language and external reality, Brendan Galvin has been quietly reminding us that the best poetry can deepen our understanding of the natural world and each other."

-National Book Award Statement "Galvin would like us to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel the world that is always there, moment by simple moment, a world replete with epiphanies of the commonplace, various kinds of clarifications and gifts, gifts that too often go unnoticed....Galvin is at the top of his form, still going strong."

-Peter Makuck, Laurel Review      

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Willow Water

by Erika Mumford

"To the work of the imagination-how to move through adversity, how to make of it something to outlast the event- Erika Mumford brings a well-tuned ear, a storytelling gift, a generosity and a atragic sense that does not preclude hilarity. For sheer daft brilliance, her account of a mad navigator's last days aboard the Teignmouth Electron is unlike anything I can think of, and should not be missed."

-Amy Clampitt

"In this collection ardent passion is controlled by virtuoso technique; the reader is confronted with an honesty tempered by compassionate sanity. The poems are concerned with matters of life, death, and the connections - human and spiritual - that guide us through our dark woods. One comes away refreshed by "willow water" and ready to continue the stumbling journey."

-Phyllis Janowitz

"Musical, confident, a whiz at the keyboard of the long, narrative poem, and at probing themes of family, landscape and history, Erika Mumford's work beckons us to share those worlds she so expertly and generously describes. This collection deserves a wide and appreciative audience.

-Colette Inez

Buy Here  _______________________________________________________________

The Same Water

Joan Murray

"Murray's poems are hard, direct, and reliable. They have no excess whatever. I like them a good deal, both for their language and especially for their commitment to intelligence and a clear moral vision"

- Hayden Carruth

"I am amazed by the world that Joan Murray was able to bring to life....I am haunted by her passionate and honest voice, by her relentless courage, by the terrible and beautiful moments. 

-Gerald Stern

"An exceptionally generous and moving book."

-Amy Clampitt

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The Dark Indigo Current

by Thomas R. Smith

"With an eye for the telling image and tongue for the flavor of truth, Thomas R. Smith. In The Dark Indigo Current. unfolds the long pilgrimage of a father's death. In these poems, we feel the harness-eight of both the living and the dead. In these poems, we feel the harness-weight of both the lving and the dead against the author's flesh, as moment of longing, of memory, of simple and clear connection, stand impeccably revealed amid the barns, ice-fishing shacks, and cars in which they take place. The reader of this collection is left a little more awakened, deepened in relationship to this faithfully renewing earth in which people and objects vanish, and do not return again." 

-Jane Hirshfield

"At some point in my private war for beauty, words end up as unwilling draftees in a shivering army of verbs and nouns whom I prod and bully into a ragged troop of paragraphs sent to their deaths in a book. Why is it then, for Thomas Smith, that some of these same words volunteer, standing patiently in long lines to get into his poems, where they naturally flock, wheeling up through clouds of grief and possibility like migrating cranes, their cries lingering in the breeze long after they've been read? All my admiration for The Dark Indigo Currant."    

- Martin Prechtel          

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Furnace Harbor

by Philip D. Church

"In Furnace  Harbor,  Philip Church recreates a derelict, ghost-town iron-works in the back country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to explore generation, identity, history - those human lonelinesses lived within the process of Earth."

-University of Illinois Press

"Furnace Harbor is a book length dance-to-finish poem whose song dazzles and swoops and croons with the life of our northern American Lake Country. Thick with Myth, history, bawdy and bold vignettes, often tender, always intense, it's rhapsody of heartbeats. Nothing could be more welcome to contemporary poetry than an astonishing first work such asFurnace Harbor."

-Dave Smith

"An intricate fabric of song - erotic, celebratory, vast, holy, heart-breaking - where the cyclical and heroic identities of land and man intertwine, where the song is the story."

-David Baker

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________________________________________________________________

Cries of Swimmers

by Maura Stanton

Maura Stanton was born in Evanston, Illinois, and is a  graduate of the university of Minnesota and the university of Iowa. Her first volume of poetry,Snow on Snow, was published by Yale University Press. Her Novel, Molly Companion, was published by Bobbs-Merrill. Ms. Stanton's poetry has appeared in  The American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Crazy Horse, Esquire, The New Yorker, Poetry, and other magazines. She has received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Foundation Prize.

Maura Stanton has been Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Mary Washington College and has taught Fiction writing and poetry writing in New York State, Virginia, California, Arizona and Indiana. She currently teaches at Indiana University.           

Buy Here                                                                                               _______________________________________________________________                                                                                             

How Rain Records Its Alphabet

by John Tritica

"Reverence pervades this engagement "in visual alphabet," replete with the Tao of high desert, discovered, restated ("Primrose can take the whole/ bed's desert over," "Desert can overtake the whole/ bed's primrose"; "To overtake the whole primrose bed/ the desert flees/ a dense scrutiny"). The liberal, beautiful facts for the senses to touch and equate to form splayed punctuation of human intention ("Woke with a car alarm scraping my ears"). Residence means breathing among, thus in context, and sometimes with eyes (closed). John Tritica is fluent in miracles often unnoticed. He watches the smells as the colors are sung (sing themselves). And forms nourishment that punctuates a life. Part of residing is worshiping blends of of the holy and common ("How rain records its alphabet"), aware that they switch roles and places ("birds comma the slight wind"; "mushrooms kiss the rotted trees"). This work finds nourishment by juxtaposing human habit and its sister industry of bees, branches, rain evolving a spirit toward "Stillness, and intense act."

-Sheila E. Murphy

"Recalling at times the densely textured orchestrations of Hart Crane, Robert Duncan, or Clark Coolidge, Tritica's poetry ultimately stakes out its own territory, adding something of high value to the twentieth-century tradition of experimental lyricism.

-Stephen-Paul Martin          

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Coast to Coast

by Bruce Bawer

"This first full-length collection by one of America's leading literary critics contains 35 elegant, meditative lyrics. With challenging emotional honesty, making use of geographic tensions between our two coasts, Bruce Bawer peculates on the terms and significance of religious devotion, the life of art, family, and homosexual love."

-Story Line Press

"Unafraid of sentiment, unabashed in his use of formal prosody, and unadorned in his expression of religious faith, Bruce Bawer Explores a world of longing and attachment....In the arresting final section he writes of the experience of recognizing the love he was convinced would be denied to him. It is the examination of his stunned joy in "sixty-fifth Street Poems" That crowns the book."

-Molly Peacock                        

"What I like most about Bruce Bawer's poetry, beside its being so gracefully written, is its truthfulness. The love poems are especially convincing."

-Louis Simpson         

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                                                                                                          ________________________________________________________________                  

Lake Michigan and Other Poems

by Jared Smith

"There is a gentle kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, and understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda. Whatever his subject matter, whether it is a man adrift in a life raft or an epic vision of lake Michigan, Smith's Poems are journeys worth taking."

-Joseph Bruchac

"The Magnum Opus of Jared Smith's new collection is "Lake Michigan," truly a major poem. Because of its reach and depth, he will inevitably be compared to Sandburg and Whitman, as his lake becomes the "sea of experience" encompassing Chicago and the other cities of its shores. He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts that our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Aesthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. These are bold poems of tempered experience, often as remarkable for their graceful sensitivity as their scope.

-Harry Smith  

"Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality. Years ago, on my author-interview show on NPR, I hailed Jared as "the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman." The comparison is strengthened with Lake Michigan And Other Poems. Here is Whitman reincarnate making poetry out of our most casual, colloquial, idiomatic talk. But we must admit one significant difference. At his best, Jared Smith speaks with an intensity that Walt rarely reached and that only Seamus Heaney can match."

-Walter James Miller                           

Buy Here                                        

                                          ________________________________________________________________

[grolierpoetry]

Take Flight with Poetry

Grolier Poetry Book shop Visit Our Website

The Great Wounded Bird

by David Westheimer

"Westheimer takes you with him to Brazil; across the South Atlantic to the Gold Coast of Africa; to Khartoum, across the Sahara to Palestine; to Haifa, Cairo, Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli; to Beirut and Damascus; and to prison camps in Italy and Germany. And in the prison camps you will meet Padre Brach, the Catholic chaplain who refused repatriation, and Feldwebel Gemnitz, the chief German guard at Stalag Luft III, who after the war was brought, all expenses paid, to a reunion of his former charges."          

  -Texas Review          

"As we might expect from a master novelist, David Westheimer, knows how to tell a gripping story. In The Great Wounded Bird, life as a prisoner of war is rendered vividly real, with all its nightmares, its comradeship, its unexpected laughter. This is plain, straightforward poetry, written in a style that perfectly fits its sense. Most impressively, Westheimer proves that although war may beat a man down, it cannot destroy him, cannot enlist him forever in hatred of his official foes. This book will cut a deep and lasting trench into the reader's memory."

-X.J Kennedy                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

The Peacock Poems

by Sherley Anne Williams

" The Peacock Poems, Sherley Anne Williams' first book of poetry, was nominated for a National Book Award. A former senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana and visiting professor at the University of Southern California and Cornell University, Williams is professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego. She had received an Emmy Award for a television performance of her poetry. She is advisory editor of Callaloo and Langston Hughes Review. Williams was graduated from California State University (B.A. 1966) and Brown University (M.A. 1972). Her home is in San Diego."

-Wesleyan University Press         

"Here is a craftswoman of chiseled strength, of total honesty, an orchestrator; she has the language and idiom command of Bessie Smith, a literate human singer."

-Micheal Harper.                                                                                                                     

Same Bird

by David McCann "Whether capturing an everyday moment at home in Massachusetts or exploring the back streets of Seoul or Florence, David McCann writes with equal reverence and sensitivity to precisely the details that matter most. Spare, inviting, and exquisitely rendered."

- Susan Antolin  

"David McCann's book Same Bird is a pleasure to read -- first page to last. This is a book of nature and travel, of memory, of both love and loss, of a life well-lived. Amid the "remembrance of things past", there's a section of artful haiku and many poems about Korea: a country McCann has studied and a place he's lived. If I tell you that in a poem titled "Metaphor", McCann writes that flowers and gardens are stand-ins for the deep revelation that "she was ink to his darting brush,/their story grew down the white street". you will surely feel, as I do, that you must have this book."

-Susan Terris "A poetic trip through memories, places and the joy of writing."

 -Jean Dany Joachim                                                                                                                                                                                                

Under the Influence of Blackbirds

by Sharon M. Van Sluys

 "A strong new voice, the poetry of Sharon Van Sluys is of heartland America, a pastureland free of pastoral Illusion - her high voltage lines crackle in charged night air, her rich cadences pulled by the dark undertow of desire. These poems move in memory, like her "Big Dogs Running with the Night in their Eyes," half-wiled/half-domesticated, "of hyphenated breeding"; or like the "blackbirds that rested in this  little tree/yesterday, their swarm of voices  violent and dense," they leave the air changed behind them: "this air after blackbirds. And it is not, no, not the same air, not at all the same."

-Eleanor Wilner

"Sharon Van Sluys is obsessed with the "things" of this world, but she also has a way of "breaking free," and it is that breaking free that her poetry consists of. She says it's 'a real small something, almost/nothing almost," but that "nothing" constitutes a serious, concerned, and lovely poetry, which I have had the pleasure of reading, and urge you to read." 

 -Gerald Stern                                                                                                                                                    

Hoodlum Birds

by Eugene Gloria

"In Eugene Gloria's acclaimed first collection of poems, Drivers at a Short Time Motel, ephemeral lives, and souls lost in the tattered fabric of war, displacement, and ruined love, found hope, redemption, and a common voice. Gloria is interested in illustrating the common man's search for connection to the self and to the world, and that is very much apparent in his second collection. The speaker of these poems examines his lapsed Roman Catholic identity and his past; Spain, and its long and varied influence on Filipino culture; and the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. These new poems build on what Gloria began in his first book by continuing this sense of collaboration with literary and cultural influence."

-Penguin Press       

  "With language both sacerdotal and utterly contemporary, Eugene Gloria's compelling new book complicates in important and helpful ways our poetic understanding of nature and self, life and art, faith and transcendence, race and erasure."

-Andrew Hudgins                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The Artist and the Crow

by Dan Stryk

"Set in a variety of landscapes, this collection of poems blends diverse cultural experiences through the poet's unifying eye: the watchful, patient eye of the crow. The poet's sympathetic vision shows his love for the physical world through which he moves and for the humanity he encounters. In the first two sections, Cornlands and London Poems, the collection moves from the cornbelt of rural Illinois to a modern vision of Samuel Johnson's bustling London. Within the third section, Scenes from a Tragicomedy, the poems shift to a variety of locations and are sometimes rooted in conceptual landscapes. Finally in Of Blight and Faith, the poet's tone grows more sober, reserved, and personal as he speaks of human courage and affirmation in a world frequently swirling with chaos."

-Purdue University Press

"Dan Stryk's poems possess a fine power of evocation-of places and objects, or persons and other living things. A reader finds landscapes or settings, and their inhabitants, that come alive in richly textured but unvarying precise language, guided too by a firm, rhythmic and musical sense. These poems always want us to see as clearly, as justly as possible, and their compassionate feelings move in accord with this desire. With his first full collection, Dan Stryk shows himself an accomplished, mature poet-a pleasure to discover."

-Ralph J. Mills, Jr.                                    

                                                                                                                                Black Wings

by Len Roberts

"Len Roberts is a poet of unwavering truthfulness and unwavering mercy-somehow the mercy always equal to the truth. I love Black Wings for its emotional courage, its powerful music, and its deep balance. When I read these poems, I feel as if my heart's being broken and put back together." 

-Sharon Olds  

"A haunting collection....These poems are models of indirect statement, talking tirelessly in run-on lines that do not allow stanza breaks, as if to pause for breath is certain doom."

-Publishers Weekly                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Birds of a Feather

by Ed Lahey

"If ever there could be said to be a wholehearted consensus among the literati of Montana, who otherwise have sometimes been known to be territorial, adversarial, and contentious, it is that Ed Lahey is the state's finest living poet, its unofficially crowned laureate. His work has been variously described as being the melancholy voice of the worker, as the literary, earthly, and otherworldly best, as a celebration of human resiliency, with a universal sense of hope, strength, and humility, and as one of the most passionate voices in the landscape of poetry in Montana. One senses over and over in the work, real responses to real people, places, and events, responses informed by longing and love, produced through practiced craft. A native son of Butte, the most extraordinary and resonant locale in all the west, Lahey not only tells its story, but that of the whole geographical and emotional region, and through this true and authentic subject, converts, as does all great art, specificity to universality, by the application of strength and power, tempered by tenderness and sensitivity. His verse is strong and clear, and his song endures."

-Russell Chatham                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Hours of the Cardinal

Richard Lyons

"In Hours of the Cardinal, a mother's death triggers poems that journey through grief into theunnameable origins of consciousness-before thought, talk, even printed words. These elegies weave stories and anecdotes from literature and the visual arts, literally trying to cheat death by facing it, even facing it down. The ghosts that take flesh in this collection are poets such as Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, and Tu Fu, painters such as Max Ernst and Frida Kahlo, the mystic Henry Vaughan, the singer-dancer Josephine Baker. By reprising these lives of exile and grief, the poems celebrate the body's attempt to endure in the face of historical atrocities, like the holocausts, racism, and the commodification of the human spirit. In the process of memorializing such lives, Richard Lyons fictionalizes his mother as one more member of the "great dead" as he levels the living and the dead by collaging autobiography and history into narrative meditations that carry the dignity of the individual against forces of greed and conformity."

-University of South Carolina Press

"The death of the mother-the one who authors our speech and nurtures our first world-reverberates through all of Richard Lyons's large-bodied, large-spirited meditations and elegies. Here is a splendid book of exorcism, of ravenous and mournful poems-rescue operations!-furiously crafted against our passing."

-Edward Hirsch                                                                                                                                                                                                             

The Feathered Wind

by Deborah Pease

"The Poems of The Feathered Wind, a first collection by Deborah Pease, were written and put into finished form with extraordinary speed, the dates which are individual poem titles corresponding, in most cases, to the days of the few weeks of their composition. Yet the sequence has an air of leisurely meditation on the private realities of a poet's life upon which public actualities impinge. Although the movement of the poems seems as effortless as that of clouds across the surface of a pool, the reader senses the depths of memory which sustain this apparent lightness. The voice of the poems is uniquely confiding, yet different, maintaining a natural discretion in order that the essence of each poem be released, and having an exquisite delicacy of tone which lingers long after the initial reading."

-Puckerbrush publishing                                                                                       

[grolierpoetry]

Every poet knows that, when he looks back over what he has written, the poems it is a torment and a shame to recall are not which, for one reason or another, were failures-no poet who writes much can hope to escape writing some poems which are bad, or, at least boring- but those which he knows to be clever forgeries, expressing feelings or attitudes which were not really his, but which vanity, a wish to please an audience, or the wrong kind of conscious deluded him into fancying were genuine. Of these he is rightly ashamed, because, he cannot say "I should have written differently, or it was the best I could do at the time." he can only say I ought never to have written it, and I needn't have."

W.H Auden

[grolierpoetry]

10 Books to Read by the Fire

1. Don’t call us Dead, Danez Smith, (Graywolf Press, 2017)   poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable… . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy… . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.”—The New Yorker“

Smith activates a spectrum of emotions in material that could justifiably remain tragic, bringing pathos and several senses of humor.”—The Nation 2. Half Life Collected Poems 1965-2016, Frank Bidart, (FSG, 2017) “Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and re framed, restless line by restless line.” _Amazon

3. A Handful of Blue Earth, Venus Khoury-Ghata, (Liverpool Press, 2017) In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as ‘exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread’. Khoury-Ghata’s book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet’s enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God’. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata’s voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker’s concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.   4. Whereas, Layli Long Soldier, (Graywolf Press, 2017) “WHEREAS is an excavation, reorganization and documentation of a structure of language that has talked the United States through its many acts of violence… . She has built a poetics that refuses … boundaries… . Long Soldier’s poems are radical in structure and constraint… . WHEREAS challenges the making and maintenance of an empire by transforming the page to withstand the tension of an occupied body, country and, specifically an occupied language… . Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Using elliptical prose, blank spaces, crossed-out text, and Lakota words, Long Soldier articulates both her identity and her literary undertaking.”—The New Yorker 5. Olio, Tyhembia Jess, (Wave Books, 2016)

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

6. February Poems, Ben Mazer, (ILora Press, 2017)

“What we have noticed in Ben Mazer’s collection is that there is in him a strong feeling that unless we bring our world to a state of wonder once more nothing we do will ever matter.  Of course difficulties do remain in the way of our summoning this sense of wonder.  For instance, there are issues having to do with the overload of our various sensibilities; the tensions arising from misaligned engagements resulting from the various anxieties which feed on doubts.” - Ifeanyi Menkiti

7. Shallcross, C.D. Wright, (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) C.D. Wright characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet. - Cooper Canyon Press 

8. Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz, (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

“Called “the master of the poetic one-liner” by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss—the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother’s failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing—along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, formal surprises, and exuberant sense of humor.” _ University of Chicago Press

9. Reading Across Languages Aibach/Celan, Donald Wellman, (Annex Press, 2016)

“Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. “My desire is to erase boundaries, ’ says Wellman, and in many ways, this book is an exploration of how language can aid that project. Based in consideration of translation, Wellman’s musings pass through the lens of critical theory and continental philosophy, a lens that gathers diverse approaches and focuses them into a single, illuminating beam. At once erudite and intimate, autobiographical and analytical, Wellman effectively erases the distinction between text and translation, between writer and translator-and with a particularly graceful momentum that comes through in both his prose and his poetry.” –Cole Swensen 

10.Fast, Jorie Graham, (Ecco Press, 2017) Graham’s great body of work has more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing… . She is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: she changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.” —New York Times In her first new collection in five years—her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date—Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human. Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives—from bots, to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave—these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves. As it navigates cyber life, 3D-printed “life,” life after death, biologically, chemically, and electronically modified life, Fast lights up the border of our new condition as individuals and as a species on the brink.

[grolierpoetry]

10 Books to Read by the Fire

1. Don’t call us Dead, Danez Smith, (Graywolf Press, 2017)   poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.”—The New Yorker“

Smith activates a spectrum of emotions in material that could justifiably remain tragic, bringing pathos and several senses of humor.”—The Nation 2. Half Life Collected Poems 1965-2016, Frank Bidart, (FSG, 2017) “Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and re framed, restless line by restless line.” _Amazon

3. A Handful of Blue Earth, Venus Khoury-Ghata, (Liverpool Press, 2017) In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as 'exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread'. Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.   4. Whereas, Layli Long Soldier, (Graywolf Press, 2017) “WHEREAS is an excavation, reorganization and documentation of a structure of language that has talked the United States through its many acts of violence. . . . She has built a poetics that refuses . . . boundaries. . . . Long Soldier's poems are radical in structure and constraint. . . . WHEREAS challenges the making and maintenance of an empire by transforming the page to withstand the tension of an occupied body, country and, specifically an occupied language. . . . Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Using elliptical prose, blank spaces, crossed-out text, and Lakota words, Long Soldier articulates both her identity and her literary undertaking.”—The New Yorker 5. Olio, Tyhembia Jess, (Wave Books, 2016)

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

6. February Poems, Ben Mazer, (ILora Press, 2017)

“What we have noticed in Ben Mazer’s collection is that there is in him a strong feeling that unless we bring our world to a state of wonder once more nothing we do will ever matter.  Of course difficulties do remain in the way of our summoning this sense of wonder.  For instance, there are issues having to do with the overload of our various sensibilities; the tensions arising from misaligned engagements resulting from the various anxieties which feed on doubts.” - Ifeanyi Menkiti

7. Shallcross, C.D. Wright, (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) C.D. Wright characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet. - Cooper Canyon Press 

8. Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz, (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

“Called “the master of the poetic one-liner” by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss—the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother’s failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing—along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, formal surprises, and exuberant sense of humor.” _ University of Chicago Press

9. Reading Across Languages Aibach/Celan, Donald Wellman, (Annex Press, 2016)

“Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "My desire is to erase boundaries, ' says Wellman, and in many ways, this book is an exploration of how language can aid that project. Based in consideration of translation, Wellman's musings pass through the lens of critical theory and continental philosophy, a lens that gathers diverse approaches and focuses them into a single, illuminating beam. At once erudite and intimate, autobiographical and analytical, Wellman effectively erases the distinction between text and translation, between writer and translator-and with a particularly graceful momentum that comes through in both his prose and his poetry." --Cole Swensen 

10.Fast, Jorie Graham, (Ecco Press, 2017) Graham’s great body of work has more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing. . . . She is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: she changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.” —New York Times In her first new collection in five years—her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date—Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human. Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives—from bots, to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave—these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves. As it navigates cyber life, 3D-printed “life,” life after death, biologically, chemically, and electronically modified life, Fast lights up the border of our new condition as individuals and as a species on the brink.

[grolierpoetry]

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it

Adrienne Rich

[grolierpoetry]

Book of the Day December 7, 2017

“Whatever happens.  Whatever what it is is what I want. Only that But that.”

From The Collected Poems of Galway Kinnell

http://www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org/~shop/collected-poems-galway-kinnell/397353/

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The Virgin Mountain

Book of the day 

The Virgin Mountain 

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[grolierpoetry]

The book of the day December 6, 2017

http://www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org/~shop/the-virgin-mountain/397245/

[grolierpoetry]

The Virgin Mountain

Book of the day 

The Virgin Mountain 

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Job in Winter Done shedding leaves, The trees are bare. The garden grieves arms in the air

The Well at Morning

Bohuslav Reynek Translated by Justin Quinn University of Chicago Press

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Frank Bidart’s Half Light 

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In my desk Two cigarette butts- left by you the first time you visited my apartment. The next day I found them, they were still there- picking one up, I put my lips where yours had been…

Frank Bidart From Half Light Collected poems 1965-2016                                  (via grolierpoetry)

[grolierpoetry]

In my desk Two cigarette butts- left by you the first time you visited my apartment. The next day I found them, they were still there- picking one up, I put my lips where yours had been...

Frank Bidart From Half Light Collected poems 1965-2016