The Poem and the Journey

Author: Ruth Padel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet who has also become renowned as an energetic, generous and thought-provoking guide to reading poetry. Her 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, with its lively overview of contemporary writing and eye-opening readings of individual poems, is indispensable for anyone who writes poetry, teaches it, or simply wants to enjoy it. In her new book, she uses sixty poems by some of our finest poets to look at the idea of the journey, through literature and through life.As Padel makes clear in her fascinating introduction, today's debates about how accessible a poem should be are poetry's older tradition. To rhyme or not to rhyme? The Elizabethans fought over that one, while the Greeks couldn't agree about whether poetry should be dumbed down or remain the preserve of the elite. Combining her training as a Classicist with her insights as a poet, Padel highlights the ways in which the best poets now find a balance between rhymed formal verse and modernism's freer styles, using a traditional, formal craft to convey genuinely felt, up-to-the-minute experience. In an increasingly unstable world, she argues, we need poetry more than ever to help us to see afresh and understand the journeys of our lives.

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

Author: Pádraig Ó. Tuama
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132403548X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

Unbelieve

Author: Marla Taviano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781957687285
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In unbelieve: poems on the journey to becoming a heretic, Marla Taviano welcomes you into a deconstruction space where you can let it all out, let it all go, and start heading in brave new directions.

Word in the Wilderness

Author: Malcolm Guite
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 1848256809
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
For every day from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Day, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive reflections on it. A scholar of poetry and a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Lent.

She Walks in Beauty

Author: Caroline Kennedy
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 1401325955
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
In She Walks in Beauty, Caroline Kennedy has once again marshaled the gifts of our greatest poets to pay a very personal tribute to the human experience, this time to the complex and fascinating subject of womanhood. Inspired by her own reflections on more than fifty years of life as a young girl, a woman, a wife, and a mother, She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry's eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman's life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life's journey. The collection includes works by Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Cisneros, Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, Dorothy Parker, Queen Elizabeth I, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shahib Nye, and W. B. Yeats. Whether it's falling in love, breaking up, friendship, marriage, motherhood, or growing old, She Walks in Beauty is a priceless resource for anyone, male or female, who wants a deeper understanding and appreciation of what it means to be a woman.

All the Flowers Kneeling

Author: Paul Tran
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525508341
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Wild Geese

Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Gardners Books
ISBN: 9781852246280
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.

For All of Us, One Today

Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807033812
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
For All of Us, One Today is a fluid, poetic story anchored by Richard Blanco’s experiences as the inaugural poet in 2013, and beyond. In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges behind the creation of the inaugural poem, “One Today,” as well as two other poems commissioned for the occasion (“Mother Country” and “What We Know of Country”), published here for the first time ever, alongside translations of all three of those poems into his native Spanish. Finally, Blanco reflects on his life-changing role as a public voice since the inauguration, his spiritual embrace of Americans everywhere, and his vision for poetry’s new role in our nation’s consciousness. Like the inaugural poem itself, For All of Us, One Today speaks to what makes this country and its people great, marking a historic moment of hope and promise in our evolving American landscape. In 2017, U2 is featuring “One Today” during their Joshua Tree tour throughout the United States and Europe. The poem will be projected on the stage screens as people enter the stadium to reflect and discuss America and the American experience. 2014 International Latino Awards Winner: Best Biography – Spanish or Bilingual

Unaccompanied

Author: Javier Zamora
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321777
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
New York Times Bestselling Author of Solito "Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."—Jamaal May "Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." —Glappitnova Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." From "Let Me Try Again": He knew we weren't Mexican. He must've remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don't trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra. He knew we would try again. And again—like everyone does. Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Today in the Taxi

Author: Sean Singer
Publisher: Tupelo Press
ISBN: 1946482854
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 75

Book Description
From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck