Brocade River Poems

Brocade River Poems
Author: Xue Tao
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400884012

Xue Tao (A.D. 768-831) was well known as a poet in an age when all men of learning were poets--and almost all women were illiterate. As an entertainer and official government hostess, she met, and impressed, many of the most talented and powerful figures of her day. As a maker of beautiful paper and a Taoist churchwoman, she maintained a life of independence and aesthetic sensibility. As a writer, she crrated a body of work that is by turns deeply moving, amusing, and thought-provoking. Drawing knowledgeably on a rich literary tradition, she created images that here live again for the contemporary reader of English. This bilingual edition contains about two-thirds of Xue Tao's extant poems. The translations are based on accurate readings of the originals and extensive research in both Chinese and Japanese materials. The notes at the end of the book explain allusions and place the poems in the context of medieval Chinese culture and its great literary heritage, while the opening essay introduces Xue Tao's work and describes her unusual life history.

Brocade River Poems

Brocade River Poems
Author: 薛濤
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 1987-03-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0691014345

Xue Tao (A.D. 768-831) was well known as a poet in an age when all men of learning were poets--and almost all women were illiterate. As an entertainer and official government hostess, she met, and impressed, many of the most talented and powerful figures of her day. As a maker of beautiful paper and a Taoist churchwoman, she maintained a life of independence and aesthetic sensibility. As a writer, she crrated a body of work that is by turns deeply moving, amusing, and thought-provoking. Drawing knowledgeably on a rich literary tradition, she created images that here live again for the contemporary reader of English. This bilingual edition contains about two-thirds of Xue Tao's extant poems. The translations are based on accurate readings of the originals and extensive research in both Chinese and Japanese materials. The notes at the end of the book explain allusions and place the poems in the context of medieval Chinese culture and its great literary heritage, while the opening essay introduces Xue Tao's work and describes her unusual life history.

Sight Lines

Sight Lines
Author: Arthur Sze
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619321971

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award “The sight lines in Sze’s 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity.” ―The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices—from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent—and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. “These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests.” ―Lit Hub “The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines.” ―Library Journal

Poems Under Saturn

Poems Under Saturn
Author: Paul Verlaine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2011-02-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400838207

The first complete English edition of Verlaine's important first book of poems Poems Under Saturn is the first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet of promise and originality, one who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection's heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. Restoring frequently anthologized poems to the context in which they originally appeared, Poems Under Saturn testifies to the blazing talents for which Verlaine is celebrated. The poems display precocious virtuosity, mingling the attractions of the flesh with the longings of the spirit. Greek and Hindu myth give way to intimate erotic meditations and wickedly satirical society portraits, mythological landscapes alternate with gritty narratives of mid-nineteenth century Paris, visions of happiness yield to nightmarish glimpses of deep alienation, and real and imaginary characters—including Achilles, Valmiki, Charlemagne, and Spain's baleful King Philip II—all figure as the subject matter of a supremely ambitious young poet. Poems Under Saturn presents the extraordinary devotion and intense musicality of an artist for whom poetry remained the one true passion.

Vagabond's House

Vagabond's House
Author: Don Blanding
Publisher:
Total Pages: 126
Release: 1928
Genre: American poetry
ISBN:

Works of a poet from Oklahoma who loved the life of the Hawaiian Islands.

Felicity

Felicity
Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0143128760

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems "If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger," Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.

Knowing the East

Knowing the East
Author: Paul Claudel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2004-09-19
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780691119021

These prose poems were written by Claudel over ten years in his travels through China and Japan in the 19th century. In his translation, James Lawler presents Claudel as a poet who discovered himself in his experience of the East. He gives a detailed introduction, notes on the poet and the poems.

The Owl and the Nightingale

The Owl and the Nightingale
Author: Simon Armitage
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2022-05-24
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0691202168

From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complete verse translation of a spirited and humorous medieval English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original. In an agile iambic tetrameter that skillfully amplifies the prosody and rhythm of the original, Armitage’s translation moves entertainingly from the eloquent and philosophical to the ribald and ridiculous. Sounding at times like antagonists in a Twitter feud, the owl and the nightingale quarrel about a host of subjects that still resonate today—including love, marriage, identity, cultural background, class distinctions, and the right to be heard. Adding to the playful, raucous mood of the barb-trading birds is Armitage, who at one point inserts himself into the poem as a “magistrate . . . to adjudicate”—one who is “skilled with words & worldly wise / & frowns on every form of vice.” Featuring the Middle English text on facing pages and an introduction by Armitage, this volume will delight readers of all ages.

Through Naked Branches

Through Naked Branches
Author: Tarjei Vesaas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2000
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780691008974

Tarjei Vesaas, one of Scandinavia's greatest fiction writers, has been less well known as a poet. Now Roger Greenwald, an award-winning translator of Scandinavian poetry, presents forty-six poems drawn from Vesaas's six volumes of poetry. This selection is intended to reveal the distinctive sensibility and voice of Vesaas the poet. The Norwegian texts appear facing the English versions, which won the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize. The translator's groundbreaking introduction explores why Vesaas's poetry has often resisted critical analysis and how it challenges received notions of modernism. Excerpts from Vesaas's writings about himself and his work supply helpful background and give some sense of the man behind the work. Vesaas emerges as a lyric and meditative poet of uncommon depth, who renders states of being beyond the reach not only of discourse, but of most poetry as well. From "The Boat on Land": Your still boat hasn't got a name. Your still boat hasn't got a port. Your secret boat on land. From "Shadows on the Point" We stand here in your deep night, Night, and wait for something new from beyond the point. The current runs black and silent. And what we feel through it we don't tell each other.

The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out

The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out
Author: Ana Enriqueta Terán
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2009-02-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400825202

Ana Enriqueta Terán is arguably Venezuela's finest poet. Celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, she is almost unknown among anglophones. Until now only a handful of her poems have been translated into English, giving at best a diluted impression of a uniquely intense imagination. This bilingual edition reveals the power and beauty of this poet's Spanish poems through English versions of corresponding force. It invites readers to enter Terán's world--a world at once strongly Venezuelan and universally human, imbued with great beauty, sardonic humor, pitiless compassion, lucid wisdom, and joyful affirmation. Selected from several volumes of Terán's work, these poems span half a century of composition and show an extraordinary range in both form and substance. Some are written in closed forms, some in free verse. Some are carefully evocative representations of the landscapes and cityscapes that have nourished the poet's intelligence and imagination. Others are dramatic character studies. All are infused with Terán's rare sensibility and realized through language that manages to be at once graceful, urgent, and explosive. This volume is a treasure for all lovers of poetry. Deal Struck with Happiness ? How much sweetness to make right the night and this clutch of anemones near thin smooth consoling stones, stones havens of southern weather. Of a woman who watches Cepheids quaver among lightbursting mangroves. Of a woman who offers cats-eyes and clematis only, Islands, for the sake of setting right her deal struck with happiness.