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n the annals of modern American letters, William Everson holds prime place as a poet of conscience and consciousness of self, his richly textured verse mapping his extraordinary inner journey as social activist, Dominican brother, and preeminent religious and philosophical poet. In William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus, Lee Bartlett charts the outer journey, drawing on the reminiscences of the poetry, his friends, and a wealth of archival material.

Among the tantalizingly unfinished works of the great French writer Stendhal (1783-1842) are the opening chapters of The Pink & the Green (Le Rose et le Vert), which tell of the obsessions of Mina Wanghen, a young, intelligent Prussian heiress from Königsberg. Enamoured of everything French and determined not to be forced into marriage with any of her countless German suitors, she decamps to Paris, where her illusions meet with Gaelic realities. Stendhal abandoned the novel in 1837; however, its seeds are found in the finished story "Mina de Vanghel," completed in 1830 and published posthumously in 1853. Both works appear here side-by-side in English.

The memoirs and essays collected in The Third Kind of Knowledge encompass the many lives of a remarkable man. Poet, translator, critic, journalist, memoirist, scholar-the late Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985) had an unusual range of gifts and lived a strikingly varied life in the literary and academic world. While growing up, his scholarly promise earned the attention of his mentor in classical studies, Dudley Fitts, and his poetic gifts the admiration first of Vachel Lindsay and later of T. S. Eliot (who took some of his college poems for publication in the Criterion). A reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in the thirties, Fitzgerald also spent time before and after the Second World War as a part of Henry Luce's literary stable at Time, where he forged his close friendship with James Agee and edited the Books Department for the magazine. His friendship with Agee, and also with Flannery O'Connor (whose literary executor he became) as well as with other literary figures such as John Berryman, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon flourished during this period. In the early fifties he moved with his family to Italy, where he worked for six years on his celebrated translation of the Odyssey. His other classical translations-the Illiad, the Aeneid, and his translations of Euripides and Sophocles, several done in collaboration with Dudley Fitts-have become the the signal translations of our time. A renowned teacher as well as poet and scholar, Fitzgerald taught, over the years, at such institutions as Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, The New School, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Washington. His career culminated at Harvard where, in 1965, he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. For fifteen years his course in Versification influenced a generation of younger poets, and his seminar in "Homer, Virgil, and Dante" a generation of young scholars. The Third Kind of Knowledge displays the unusual breadth of Fitzgerald's achievement and includes personal memoirs, reminiscences of literary friends, literary criticism of classical literature, and an interview on the art of translation. This volume has been prepared by his widow, Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald, following a plan begun by the author before his death.

If we set H. E. Bates's best tales against the best of Chekhov's, Graham Greene declared, I do not believe it would be possible, with any conviction, to argue that the Russian was the finer artist. The sampler of H. E. Bates stories presented here shows the merit of that praise and displays the range and aspects of Bates's work from his first published story, "The Flame," to one of his very last, "The Song of the Wren." In his long and prolific literary career, Bates (1905-1974) produced twenty-five novels, a three-volume autobiography, nine books of essays, several plays and children's books, as well as his important and perhaps most enduring achievement, twenty-three collections of short stories. A Month by the Lake & Other Stories displays Bates's extraordinary talent for concisely getting at the heart of the matter. Whether he is dealing with romance in middle age (the title story), or the most painful clarity of a child's world (The Cowslip Field), or encapsulating the disintegration and tragedy of a man and a house and the era and class they represent (The Flag)--Bates's compassion for humanity remains constant. As Anthony Burgess remarks in his introduction, Bates achieved such sovereignty of what literary land he inherited that he deserves the homage of our uncomplicated enjoyment... Bates's affection for ordinary people is one of his shining virtues. But he himself, as I knew, and as this compilation should make clear, was, is, far from ordinary.

World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth brings together twenty-seven essays written over a period of more than forty years by the man one of his publishers called "an American cultural monument." A brilliant self-taught scholar in fields as diverse as Buddhism and modern French poetry, Rexroth was a poet, philosopher, translator, promoter of poets, conscientious objector, political activist, cultural critic, professional curmudgeon, and teacher. More than one critic has suggested that an individual could pursue a complete curriculum in the humanities simply by reading Rexroth's essays and the works to which they refer. Clear-eyed and clear-headed, Rexroth championed "moral judgment" in the poet and artist from the very first (see "The Function of the Poet in Society," 1936). And while he dismissed many of his essays as "journalism," he remains our sanest guide to the cultural upheaval in American society since World War II. Was it because of his trenchant perspicacity that Rexroth's death in 1982 was widely ignored by the press and cultural establishment, bearing out his own assessment that "When a prophet refuses to go crazy, he becomes quite a problem, crucifixion being as complicated as it is in humanitarian America"? Recently he has been called our "intellectual conscience." It is time to read Rexroth again. This collection has been compiled and edited by Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions magazine and Rexroth's literary executor.

An authority on Hinduism and renowned for his directorship of the Institute of Comparative Music Studies in Berlin and Venice, Alain Daniélou is also an accomplished pianist, dancer, player of the Indian vînâ, painter, linguist and translator, photographer, and world traveler. To these attainments he has added The Way to the Labyrinth--as vivid, uninhibited, and wide-ranging a memoir as one is ever likely to encounter, now translated and published in English for the first time. Born of a haute-bourgeoise French family--his mother an ardent Catholic, his father an anticlerical leftwing politician, his older brother a cardinal--Daniélou spent a solitary childhood. Escaping from his family milieu, he went to Paris, where he fell in with avant-garde, bohemian, sexually liberated circles, among whose luminaries were Cocteau, Diaghilev, Max Jacob, and Maurice Sachs. But however fervently he plunged into various activities, he felt some other destiny awaited him. After a number of journeys, some of them highly adventurous, he found his real home in India. He spent twenty years there, fifteen of them in Benares on the banks of the Ganges. There he immersed himself in the study of Sanskrit, Hindu philosophy, music, and the art of the ancient temples of Northern India, and converted to the Hindu religion. But times changed, and soon after India gained its independence, he returned to live again in Europe and devoted much of his great energy to the encouragement of traditional musics from around the world.

Like Montaigne before him, Mandel examines the antic mind of his fellowmen, vain, various, and ever-changing, and its peculiar manifestations in an age that embraces ugliness and irrationality. The sixteen pieces in the collection are, literally, 'elaborations'-discursive, associative, meditative-of the author's earlier lyric poems and epigrams, arranged by him to move in an easy way from the autobiographical to matters more general and abstract.

During the past several years, Eliot Weinberger's inventive prose has earned him a reputation as a candid social observer and penetrating essayist. Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people. "Inventions of Asia," the first section, deals primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China; Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat's address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the "tyger"; looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea Under Pol Pot. "Extensions of Poetry" explores the ways in which the world affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman) and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism among American Modernists, bourgeois poets--present-day wards of the academy and the state--confronting the issues of peace, American foreign policy, and The Bomb.

Denise Levertov's Poems 1968-1972 gathers together all the poems from Relearning the Alphabet (1970), To Stay Alive (1971), and Footprints (1972). Testifying to Levertov's growing strength and technical mastery as a poet, Poems 1968-1972 also affirms the clarity of her vision in its resistance to the Vietnam War and its "opposition to the whole system of insane greed of which war is only the inevitable expression."The third retrospective volume of her poetry to be published to date by New Directions, Poems 1968-1972 carries forward the record of Denise Levertov's remarkable poetic development from Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 and Poems 1960-1967.

Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot Weinberger's chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001-and an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraq-and picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan, where Weinberger lives, on the "day after." With wit and anger, and sometimes startling prescience, What Happened Here takes us through the first term of the "Bush junta": the deep history of the neoconservative "sleeper cell," the invention of the War on Terror, the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the often bizarre behavior of the Republican Party. For twenty-five years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay form into unexplored territory. In What Happened Here, truth proves stranger than poetry.

Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape, John Allman's third collection of poems, is a book as remarkable for its lyricism as it is for its capaciousness, for there seems to be no area of thought, no branch of learning, no dark region of the mind into which the poet is unwilling to delve. His recent Clio's Children: Dostoevsky at Semyonov Square and Other Poems is a reminder, as the title implies, that history is a narrative art. In his newest book, Allman reflects on art and nature, love and death-the dualities that animate our common humanity. The poems in Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape look back, at one level, to the mutable, mythic cosmos of Ovid as well as Lucretius' universe of benign random change. But to these ancient considerations Allman brings the insights, indeed the language of modern science and evolution, creating a speculative aesthetic appropriate to the awesome possibilities of the atomic age."I would say," Allman observes, "that Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape is about nature; that the poems speak in the complementary idioms of art and science in an attempt to comprehend nature; that love recapitulates all life forms; and that love, finally, is the only ground we stand on, the only steadiness beneath us, earned by us, yet strangely given, as we sing of glory and grief."John Allman's previous books of poems are Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton University Press, 1979) and Clio's Children (New Directions, 1985). He is a professor of English at Rockland Community College, State University of New York.

Acclaimed poet and translator, editor of such ground-breaking journals and anthologies as Alcheringa and Technicians of the Sacred, pioneer in the fields of performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg is a literary radical and a major force in American poetry. Gathered here in his New Selected Poems 1970-1985 are pivotal poems from four previous New Directions collections, Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca Journal (1978), Vienna Blood (1980), and That Dada Strain (1983). Rothenberg describes his new selection as "an attempt to isolate in the work of the last fifteen years (and a little more) the thread of a single long poem or sequence [in which] figures and voice's without context in the earlier books...find a location and a shape." Open-ended, explorative, and exuberantly and irreverently epic, the sequence ends with two new and previously uncollected poems, "15 Flower World Variations" and "Visions of Jesus."

Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets collects all of Williams' known writings-reviews, essays, introductions, and letters to the editor-on the two generations of poets that followed him, from Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky to Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. What might have been a random collection of occasional pieces achieves remarkable coherence from the singleness of Williams' poetic vision: his belief that the secret spirit of ritual, of poetry, was trapped in restrictive molds, and, if these could be broken, the spirit would be able to live again in a new, contemporary form. Only a revived clarity and accuracy in sight and expression would enable the modern world to reform social order which Williams saw in complete disarray. To resuscitate American Poetry, Williams concentrated his efforts on the purification of poetic speech-his American idiom-and on remaking the poetic line in a new measure-his variable foot. And while his battles with his contemporaries on these issues could be heated, he was always a nurturing father to the young, "a useful presence," "a model and a liberator." He told Ginsberg to pare down and economize, Roethke to open up, and encouraged Lowell and Levertov to shake off poetic conventions. But in all his emphasis on the poem as a made object of concrete physicality or as a field of action, he would return again and again to this basic advice to young writers: "The only thing necessary is to have something to say when at last the opportunity comes to say it."

Spanning fifty-four years, this collection record the creative growth of one of the twentieth century's most influential and versatile writers.

As the title The Bones of the Earth implies, Carol Jane Bangs' concerns are basic, archetypal: birth, death, ancestry, child-bearing, love, work. In contradistinction to a poetry of urban alienation, The Bones of the Earth evokes a poignant, yet no less uneasy awareness of nature's influence. The book opens with poems describing the Pacific Northwest, where the poet's family has lived for four generations: oyster strings dangling in icy rows, their scaffolding propped by booms of thick fir and western cedar, a meadow shimmering and unearthly in the winter solstice. Part II charts an inner geography of human intimacy--"I give my body to the compass of your hands/reveal in a voice cracked as the raven's/that wilderness under my skin"--and the third section moves more deeply inward, exploring the distinctly feminine experience, its cycles, myths, initiations. Included here is "Neahkahnie, '82," a compelling six-part journal about a woman stricken with cancer. "No one told me/the body, too, gets out of bounds like/children or lovers/who don't understand." Haunting all these poems is a sense of limits--the delicate, sculptural limiting of utterance that is the poet's art, the limits of the individual self never entirely erased in human love or language, and, most strongly in the last section of the book, the ultimately "lonely duet with the earth/each body dances toward death."

Thank a Bored Angel: Selected Poems by Samuel Hazo brings together the poetry of twenty-two years, drawn from eight previous volumes. Assembled here are selections from Discovery (1959), The Quiet Wars (1962), Listen with the Eye (1964), My Sons in God (1965), Blood Rights (1968), Once for the Last Bandit (1972), Quartered (1974), and To Paris (New Directions, 1981). In his preface, Hazo affirms that "each of these poems touches on themes that are still alive in me--alive in that they seem inexhaustible"; all are rendered in the poet's own voice, not "in what is irritatingly called a 'persona,'" and none, he says, either when originally composed or now, could be expressed differently. Casting back to the adventures and attachments of half a century, Thank a Bored Angel presents varied, colorful portraits from the poet's life--as father, son, brother, husband, traveler, army lieutenant, university professor, writer. It is emotion, fancy, speculation--the reflections cast in his mind by events and "accidents of place"--that give them weight. Likewise, Hazo's considerable passion and stylistic range are not flaunted but, measured by conscience and intent, constitute the poems' inimitable, penetrating lyricism.

The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues, and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years immediately following World War I. "In my own world," he explains in his pre-face to That Dada Strain, "the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on." For Rothenberg, the Dada connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as it does a "strain" that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work, whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling of innovative anthologies.Following the title section is "Imaginal Geographies," a group of poems that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded associations between images for which no key was readily available. In the third and final section, "Altar Pieces," Rothenberg attempts, as he says, "to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the loss of bread & words."Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces & Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.

Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned "father of the Symbolists." Mallarmé's major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue "Hériodiade," are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem "Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance" and the drama "Igitur," as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these "Mardis," and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, "The Afternoon of a Faun," inspired Claude Debussy's famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé's oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

This book (originally published in 1972 by The Seabury Press as The Orchid Boat) is the first representative collection of the poetry of Chinese women to appear in English. Unlike Japan with its long tradition of women writers, poetry by women did not become fashionable in China until the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), although poems from earlier centuries that do in fact survive will quickly dispel any stereotyped views. Included here are samplings from the legendary earliest poetry of courtesans, palace women, and Tao priestesses to works by contemporary Chinese women living in both the East and West. Appendixes include notes on the poems, an introductory essay on Chinese women and literature, a table of historical periods, and a bibliography.

This book is the only major collection of the great Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro's poetry to appear in English. Drawn from his works published from 1917 to 1948 and presented bilingually, the translations are principally by David Guss supplemented with renderings by Stephen Fredman, Carlos Hagen, W. S. Merwi,. Geoffrey O'Brien, David Ossman, Michael Palmer, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, and Geoffrey Young. Huidobro's masterpiece Alrazor appears almost entire.Huidobro (1893-1948) left Santiago for Paris in 1916. There he co-founded the influential Cubist magazine Nord-Su with Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy. He then launched his own poetic movement, Creationism, and wrote as well for a score of avant-garde journals. Author of over forty books-plays. political tracts, novels, manifestos, poetry-he worked with Edgard Varése, Hans Arp, Robert Delauney, Jorge Luis Borges, and other important writers.Besides his translations, editor Guss has provided a biographical essay, "Poetry ls a Heavenly Crime," a lucid and helpful introductory overview of Huidobro and his work.

In 1944, New Directions brought out Thomas Merton's first book of verse. By the time of his tragic, untimely death in 1968, Father Louis (as he was known at the Trappist monastery where he lived for twenty-seven years) had published upwards of fifty books and pamphlets, including several more collections of poetry. All of these poems have been assembled in a single, definitive volume (first published by New Directions in 1977) which includes much additional unpublished or uncollected material drawn from the archive of the Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, or supplied by the poet's friends and associates. Brought together in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton are: Early Poems (1940-42, published posthumously in 1971), Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), The Tear of the Blind Lions (1949), The Strange Islands (1957), Original Child Bomb (1962), Emblems of a Season of Fun (1963), Cables to Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (completed in 1968 and published posthumously). These are followed by Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems, a book which Merton completed shortly before his death. There are also sections of uncollected poems, humorous verse, poems written in French, with some English translations, Merton's translations of poetry from various languages, drafts and fragments, and a selection of concrete poems. With the availability of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton as a New Directions paperbook, an ever wider audience may more fully appreciate the impressive range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.