Hollow Palaces

Hollow Palaces
Author: Kevin Gardner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2021-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1800856741

As a genre of poetry, the country house poem was born in the seventeenth century. As English country house society itself grew in prominence, the poem of commemoration diminished in popularity; not until the Edwardian era, when the country house as an institution began to wane, was there a renewed interest in country house poetry. As the power and influence of landed society dwindled, the country house began to haunt the English literary imagination, and our poets found in its dereliction a frequent subject and theme. This is the first book to gather modern and contemporary country house poems into one collection. Poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer a wide variety of perspectives: stately exteriors and interiors, crumbling ruins, gardens both wild and cultivated, and the voices of noble owners, servants, and curious visitors. The dominant note sounded is perhaps unsurprisingly elegiac, yet comic, satiric, and gothic tones appear frequently as well. The common thread is that, in response to the rapid sociological changes of the twentieth century, poets reflect on the country house as an architecturally, politically, socially, and economically potent symbol and institution, both in its heyday and in its eclipse.

How to Love a Country

How to Love a Country
Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0807025917

A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive. The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

The Country House Poem

The Country House Poem
Author: Alastair Fowler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1994
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"This major new collection of almost all the known estate poems of the seventeenth century draws on the literary, historical and artistic traditions of the period to clarify this much debated genre. The poems are mostly reproduced in their entirety and include ten from the Mildmay Fane manuscripts - an important, but so far unpublished source of such material. Full notes accompany the text, explaining difficult passages and relating them to their biographical, social and political contexts. There is a substantial introduction, a comprehensive bibliography, and a listing of visual sources complementing the contemporary illustrations. Containing much new evidence for architectural- and art-historians as well as for literary scholars, The Country House Poem is set to become the definitive work in this field."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems

Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems
Author: Jimmy Carter
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Total Pages: 146
Release: 1995
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0812924347

A collection of poetry by the former president shares Carter's private meditations and memories about his youth, family, friends, and politics. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. Tour.

The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry

The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry
Author: William Alexander McClung
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2022-09-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0520373561

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse

The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse
Author: H. Woudhuysen
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 1418
Release: 2005-05-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 014191386X

The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a broad selection of its poetry, and includes a wide range of works by the great poets of the age - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Sepnser, John Donne, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Poems by less well-known writers also feature prominently - among them significant female poets such as Lady Mary Wroth and Katherine Philips. Compelling and exhilarating, this landmark collection illuminates a time of astonishing innovation, imagination and diversity.

Nine Horses

Nine Horses
Author: Billy Collins
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2011-08-10
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1588362787

Nine Horses, Billy Collins’s first book of new poems since Picnic, Lightning in 1998, is the latest curve in the phenomenal trajectory of this poet’s career. Already in his forties when he debuted with a full-length book, The Apple That Astonished Paris, Collins has become the first poet since Robert Frost to combine high critical acclaim with broad popular appeal. And, as if to crown this success, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001–2002, and reappointed for 2002–2003. What accounts for this remarkable achievement is the poems themselves, quiet meditations grounded in everyday life that ascend effortlessly into eye-opening imaginative realms. These new poems, in which Collins continues his delicate negotiations between the clear and the mysterious, the comic and the elegiac, are sure to sustain and increase his audience of avid readers.

A Country of Strangers

A Country of Strangers
Author: D. Nurkse
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0593321405

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.