Bøker i Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction-serien

a particular and splendid instance of what Hopkins meant by 'poetry proper, the language of inspiration.' "-Richard Howard

Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."

"-Bobbie Ann Mason"This is fiction of immense beauty, full of wisdom and informed by rare grace."-Steve Yarbrough

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.

Originally published in 2003. The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.Elegantly written, deeply informed, and intellectually playful, Melodies Unheard confirms Anthony Hecht's reputation as one of our most original and imaginative thinkers on the literary arts.

Reminded that there are moments when everything works as it is supposed to, a harmony beyond applause or appreciation from others."

Magnolias, water, mescal, stars, and fire return again and again in these seven sparse-yet tightly written-vignettes.

" With Catch, Release, Harun upends the world once more.

"With humor and verve, Subcortical's dynamic stories delve into the mysteries of the human mind as these haunted characters struggle with economic disparity, educational divides, and the often-contested spaces in which they live.

This wise and clever book is rounded out with adept translations of work by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and others.

The characters who inhabit Blake's haunting landscape-awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives-struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.

Together, the nine stories in Don't Think illuminate the astonishing fact of existence itself while justifying the Philadelphia Inquirer's assessment that Burgin is one of America's most distinctive storytellers.

Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.

A collection of stories that features: "Memorial Day", "Memo and Oblivion" and "The Interview". In "Memorial Day", an aging man at a public swimming pool recalls a brief but momentous affair he had with a young British woman in London thirty years ago and the paradoxical role his recently deceased father played in it.

" Funny, raw, and colorfully musical, "Nod" plays what teeters, like a tuning fork.

Words by the Water is particularly varied and unusually youthful and fresh.

Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.

Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.

From the author of "Airs of Providence", "The Very Rich Hours", and "The Courage of Girls", this book brings together a dozen new stories.

Now in paperback, In the Crevice of Time brings together 176 new and previously published poems by one of the most accomplished and most widely acclaimed poets of our time.

Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snowin Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.

His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

The third section, "nipples rise to spirit", traces a child's growth to middle age, with particular reference to sex and family, while "the presence of Presenceredefines the religious experience.

Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it(The Commercial Appeal).

But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.