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In her sixteenth collection of new poetry from New Directions, Denise Levertov displays what The Village Voice has called all her "virtues of musicality, mystery, and directness." A Door in the Hive addresses paintings, music, landscapes, terror in El Salvador, but the emphasis again--as in her recent Breathing the Water--is on the contemplative. Her dialogue between "the eager inward gaze and the vast enigma" deepens. Meditative, the poems are at the same time informed by a keenly felt urgency: "Extremities, we are in/unacknowledged extremis./We feel only/a chill as the pulse of life/recedes."

It Must Be a Misunderstanding is the acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho's most personal and emotive collection to date, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer's. Remarkably, Bracho, author and daughter, seems to disappear into her own empathic observations as her mother comes clear to us not as a tragic figure, but as a fiery and independent personality. The chemistry between them is vivid, poignant, and unforgettable. As the translator Forrest Gander explains in his introduction, the book's force "builds as the poems cycle through their sequences"- from early to late Alzheimer's-"with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness."

Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble-Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin-are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone.... Through letters N. writes to a figure called Angel of Dust, the ever-mutating story unfolds, leaving no musician or listener untouched.Bass Cathedral is Mackey's fourth volume in his ongoing novel with no beginning or end, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie-much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex-Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."

For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe-taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides-embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

Jon Allman's new collection Lowcountry is a hymn to nature, as experience during his winter stays in the rich and verdant Southern coastal region known as the Low Country, stretching from Charleston to Savannah. These poems celebrate the flora and fauna of that area, involving its art and history, as the poet also explores meanings arising from his own past and present. Lowcountry presents a surging array at once narrative and lyric-meditations on the heraldic great blue heron, a trio of works focused on the Civil War, hymns to married love, poems about his daughter's pregnancy and the birth of her twin girls, as well as poems relating to the events of 9/11. The motifs of journey and return are everywhere in evidence.

Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as "a spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities." In these stories' disparate settings-Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany-the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Through the timeless art of storytelling, Yoko Tawada discloses the virtues of bewilderment, estrangement, and Hilaritas: the goddess of rejoicing.

First published by New Directions in 1940, In the Money is a sequel to White Mule, and the second volume in Dr. Williams's "Stecher Trilogy," but it also stands alone as a novel complete in itself. White Mule is a study of childhood--of the baby Flossie Stecher and her sister Lottie, and their parents, Joe and Gurlie Stecher, of German and Norwegian origin, living in New York before the first World War. In the Money is Joe Stecher's success story--the tale of his fight against graft and injustice to found his own business and get "into the money." Joe is by nature quiet and reserved. But his wife Gurlie is full of ambition and drives him on toward the things she wants--position and a home of her own. It is a simple story, yet a meaningful one--a typical American situation. As a novelist, one of Dr. Williams's strengths is his striking use of detail, an "objectivism," related to the style of his poetry; which achieves great, even symbolic force in its enlargement of the minutiae of American life and character.

An evocative, often mischievous remembrance and reinvention by the poet of his youth in the New York City of the '40s and '50s. In Loew's Triboro, John Allman's fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queensone of the five boroughs of New York Cityand its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of Astoria with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Asphalt Jungle. The book itself becomes a narrative place where real and cinematic lives interact, where movies are the engines of history and myth and the motif of journey is implicit from the first poem to the last.

Under Milk Wood was originally conceived by Dylan Thomas a a radio work--"A Play for Voices"--and was first broadcast on the B.B.C. Third Programme in January 1954, two months after his death. But during the three or four years that he was working on it, he made various revisions for solo performances and stage readings of the incomplete script. As a result, there are no less than eleven versions in which the text differs in greater or lesser degree. But none of them can rank as the definitive text of this world-famous work, which has been translated into well over a dozen languages, including Serbo-Croat, Japanese and even Welsh. Douglas Cleverdon was associated with Under Milk Wood from its beginnings, first produced it for radio, subsequently co-directed the stage production at the Edinburgh Festival and in the West End, and finally directed it on Broadway. Better than any other living man, he is qualified both to analyze the textual variations and to trace the complicated--and occasionally hilarious--development of the script. The first part of the volume describes the outstanding achievements of Dylan Thomas in radio, as actor, poetry-reader and writer; and recounts the history of Under Milk Wood after an amateur dramatic performance in Laugharne in 1939, through the tribulations of his last years, when debts and drinking and recital tours inhibited him from concentration on his writing, to the publication of the 1958 Acting Edition. The second part contains an analysis of all the textual variants in the eleven versions (which comprise published texts, duplicated typescripts for performances, and recordings). The analysis includes punctuation and the line indentations that affect the tempo and the rhythm of dramatic production. It is hoped that the meticulous attention to detail is justified by the interest shown throughout the world in the writings of Dylan Thomas.

The Dark Room presents in a compact bilingual selection the extraordinary poetry of Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), winner of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize and one of Chile's most remarkable writers. Gathered here is Lihn's most representative work from 1963 to 1977, drawn from his major books.

The eighth volume of Tennessee Williams's collected plays - for the first time in paperback. Contains the following four plays: Vieux Carre: " Williams is completely in control here."London Times A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur: "Collections should include this view of a lady who does not despair, in order to have the full picture of his prismatic Southern heroines."Library Journal Clothes for a Summer Hotel: "A masterpiece utterly original, freshly imagined in style and substance."Choice The Red Devil Battery Sign: "It is essential Williams."English Studies The Theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. Now available as a paperback, Volume VIII adds to the series four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life, including original cast listings and production notes. The text used for each play was corrected and revised by the playwright in preparation for publication, or, in the case of the posthumously published Red Devil Battery Sign, makes use of his last known revision.

Three of Denise Levertov's classic volumes, now available in a single edition. Here gathered for the first time in a single edition are three of Denise Levertov's finest books: The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). This new compilationbeginning where Denise Levertov's Poems 1968-1972 left offtestifies not only to Levertov's technical mastery, but also to her spiritual vision, especially in regard to the Vietnam War. Some of Levertov's best war poems, the result of her visit to North Vietnam in 1972, are contained in this marvelous collection. Poems 1972-1982 enables readers to observe a crucial phase in Levertov's poetic development. At the same time, it illuminates Robert Creeley's assessment that she "was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us."

Love in Vain: Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi is the debut short-story collection in English of one of Italy's most distinguished early modern writers. The twenty stories of Love in Vain were selected and translated by Minna Proctor, who received the 1998 PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her then unpublished renderings of Tozzi's fiction. "The investigation of naturalism, of truth," writes Proctor in her biographical introduction, "defined Tozzi's poetics. Impassioned by literature, yet isolated from the mainstream, Tozzi found nothing so fascinating as the unfettered expression of the inner lives of normal people." His work is at once a mixture of subtlety and melodrama, of psychological perception, primitive emotion, and raw physical need, as his plain subjects, yearning for connection and love, forever grasp at the unattainable.

In her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities, Rosmarie Waldrop once again pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. As the author herself says, she "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Instead, her "gap gardening" tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. Yet the overriding point of the dialogues is determinedly human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging," "Depression," "Desire," and even ''The Millennium."

Eelgrass, Joe Ashby Porter's first novel, takes place on an unnamed island somewhere just offshore the Atlantic coast of our imaginations. The ingredients of this wonder-full story blend together as effortlessly as the cocoa and marijuana in the Alice B. Toklas brownies baked (repeatedly) by Daisy, owner of the old farmhouse that serves as a summer commune for herself and her "guests": practical Annabel, guitar-playing Jimbo, puppylike Thuggy, and Carter, the golden boy. Add to the five young people: two beautiful, fay "pushers" who live in the woods and keep the whole island well supplied with a cornucopia of uppers, downers, hallucinogens, coke, and hash; one wiry widow of a sea captain, the oldest resident on the island, who saves inept sailors like Thuggy and Jimbo from themselves; one misanthropic musician who wants to steal Daisy's farmhouse; one frantic capitalist, his wife and two little girls (who have a talent for stumbling in on adult activity); and one carnivorous were-creature who lives on the island, unknown to all the others. The result is a dreamy midsummer madness that is at once wistful and hilarious, suspenseful and touchingly innocent; for here, greed, ambition, violence, the confrontations of real life exist but have lost all power to harm. The narrative is simple, direct, lyrical; it produces a powerful nostalgia for what was hoped for in those days before the "greening of America" withered in the bud. Author Porter comments: "I began the novel in 1970 and very quickly it was clear to me that the book would be in part an envoi to the preceding decade. There are kinds and kinds of dreams. Eelgrass is meant to delight and be accessible, it is meant to be sunny and give comfort and hope to as many people as possible. It is meant to let them smile remembering it, like a vision of innocence."

The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials, establish a dialogue with silence. Breath, its syllables buried in the resonant space between the word and the void, unlocks "the gloriole, the ring of things released." Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems are not more nor less than a search in the redemptive, celebrating the regeneration of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials once again confirms the praise of Robert Duncan, who described Sobin's work as "a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarifies renewed."

In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."

Gathered in The Man with the Heart in the Highlands are sixteen stories from William Saroyan's most celebrated literary period, culled from several long out-of-print collections from the 1930s and '40s, While achieving meteoric success with The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life, the young Saroyan set the pace with characters as fresh and compassionate as himself. His voice here is exhilarating, luminous, and completely distinctive--ready to let go with a lusty brash laugh on every page. These stories amply bear out Elizabeth Bowen's opinion that "probably since O. Henry nobody has done more to endear and stabilize the short story."

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in a matching format the plays of one of the America's most influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

The Infinite Moment is a personal selection made by a poet known for his elegant translations from several languages, Chinese, Japanese, Estonian, Latin, and now ancient Greek. Drawing from the classic Lyra Graeca and The Greek Anthology, Sam Hamill has made new, American translations of poems in the thousand-year tradition that begins with Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anakreon in the 6th century C.E. The love poems, epigrams, and sly invective of over forty poets remind us once again of the deep wellspring of ancient Greece that nourished the roots of so many cultures.The Greek lyric poem was made to be performed with musical accompaniment, but like its modern descendent it seeks to articulate the experience of insight attained in the infinity of the moment. Says Hamill: "The fundamental experiences of humanity remain simultaneously universal and particular. The tears of Lymnos on the banks of the Akeron are the same tears Hitomaro shed a thousand years later on the shores of the Omi Sea."

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. The first five volumes of this ongoing series contain Williams's full-length plays through 1975 and, in addition to the texts themselves, include original cast listings and production notes. Volumes 6 and 7 contain Williams's collected shorter plays. Now available as a paperback, Volume 8 adds to the series four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams's life.

Presented in Eliot Weinberger's excellent new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure" (Sagetrieb). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), Sunstone is a tour de force of momentum. It takes as its structural basis the circular Aztec calendar, which measured the synodic period of the planet Venus (584 days-the number of lines of Sunstone). But, as The New Republic noted, "this esoteric correlative design...does not circumscribe its subject. [It is] a lyrically discursive exploration of time and memory, of erotic love, or art and writing."