The book of questions (1974)

If Not, Winter

Sappho

2002 · 416 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

A bilingual edition of the work of the Greek poet Sappho, in a new translation by Anne Carson.Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos from about 630 b.c. She was a musical genius who devoted her life to composing and performing songs. Of the nine books of lyrics Sappho is said to have composed, none of the music is extant and only one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments. In If Not, Winter Carson presents all of Sappho's fragments in Greek and in English. Brackets and space give the reader a sense of what is absent as well as what is present on the papyrus. Carson's translation illuminates Sappho's reflections on love, desire, marriage, exile, cushions, bees, old age, shame, time, chickpeas and many other aspects of the human situation.From the Hardcover edition.

Idylls

Theocritus

1545 · 143 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

"This is a new annotated translation of the Greek poems of Theocritus of Syracuse (first half of the third century B.C.), the inventor of 'bucolic' or 'pastoral' poetry, the principal model for Virgil in the Eclogues, and hence a major figure in the literary traditions which antiquity bequeathed to Western literature. Although it is the pastoral poems for which he is best known, Theocritus' oeuvre also includes hymns to the gods, brilliant mime depictions of everyday life, and encomia of the great, such as Ptolemy Philadelphus. Theocritus is our best witness to the rich variety of poetic forms which flourished in the Hellenistic age."--BOOK JACKET.

Finding my elegy

Ursula K. Le Guin

2012 · 1 review

Others: Positive

The tower

William Butler Yeats

1928 · 110 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

The first edition of W.B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller. Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon.

How to be drawn

Terrance Hayes

2015 · 99 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

Ariel

Sylvia Plath

1965 · 96 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

"A restored edition of Sylvia Plath's collection of poems that were published after her death that restores the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath left them at the point of her death." Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Sylvia Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as Sylvia Plath left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath's manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem, "Ariel," in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems. In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft.--Book jacket.