Random House New Releases - Poetry

Earth, My Likeness by Howard Nelson

2010-07-20T00:30:00-05:00

Earth, My Likeness Nature Poetry of Walt Whitman
Written by Walt Whitman
Edited by Howard Nelson
Introduction by Howard Nelson

Trade Paperback, 200 pages | North Atlantic Books | Poetry - Single Author - American; Nature | $18.95 | 978-1-55643-910-0 (1-55643-910-5)

While Walt Whitman is best known as America’s first great urban poet, he was also a gifted nature poet, as the selections in this book show. Here his celebration of the “body electric” from Leaves of Grass expands into a celebration of an equally electrifying nature as he memorializes the seashore, the night sky, animals, even daydreaming in the grass. Whitman considered humans and animals “an interesting continuum,” in the words of editor Howard Nelson, and felt that “wilderness—the true, essential wilderness of the universe—is still with us as long as we can see a river or an ocean or the night sky.”

Whitman was unsurpassed at describing people as natural creatures—including not only experiences of animal calm but also the instinctual life and the sensations and yearnings of the body. Earth, My Likeness, which includes numerous prose selections taken from the author’s Specimen Days, showcases his entwining of outer nature and inner nature, the unique way he made his nature poetry and his love poetry inseparable. Howard Nelson’s introduction includes biographical information, analysis, and a fascinating comparison of Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman. Roderick MacIver’s shimmering watercolors perfectly complement Whitman’s immortal words.

The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert

2010-07-06T00:30:00-05:00

The Dance Most of All Poems
Written by Jack Gilbert

Trade Paperback, 80 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American | $15.00 | 978-0-375-71179-4 (0-375-71179-1)

In this “pithy and poignant” (Booklist) late-in-life collection, the award-winning Jack Gilbert gives us characteristically bold and nuanced poems as he revisits the passions of a lifetime—the women, the places, and the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself.

Dear Darkness by Kevin Young

2010-07-06T00:30:00-05:00

Dear Darkness Poems
Written by Kevin Young

Trade Paperback, 216 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author | $17.00 | 978-0-307-26442-8 (0-307-26442-4)

Delivered in Young’s classic bluesy tone, this powerful collection of poems about the American family, smoky Southern food, and the losses that time inevitably brings “bristles with life, nerve and, best of all, wit” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Swimming Swimmers Swimming by Percival Everett

2010-05-11T00:30:00-05:00

Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Written by Percival Everett

Trade Paperback | Melville House | Poetry - Single Author - American | $14.95 | 978-1-935554-02-8 (1-935554-02-6)

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart by Deborah Digges

2010-05-11T00:30:00-05:00

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart Poems
Written by Deborah Digges

Hardcover, 72 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author | $25.00 | 978-0-307-26846-4 (0-307-26846-2)

The final, posthumous collection of poems by Deborah Digges: rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.

When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that captures a stunning gift that prevailed to the end. Here are poems that touch on her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); the moods of nature that schooled her (“A tree will take you in so you see maze, / riot of needles star burst, the white pine grown through sycamore”); and throughout, touching all subjects, the call to poetry itself.

We are pulled forward by our hair
to be anointed in the barren garden.
I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,
my face before the fire,
or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way
to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.

From “Write a Book a Year”

Love's Ripening by Ahmad Rezwani

2010-04-13T00:30:00-05:00

Love's Ripening Rumi on the Heart's Journey
Written by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani

Trade Paperback, 208 pages | Shambhala | Poetry | $14.00 | 978-1-59030-759-5 (1-59030-759-3)

Here is more of the thrilling verse of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint, in translations that combine unsurpassed beauty with rigorous accuracy. Helminski and Rezwani’s translations stand out not only for their poetic eloquence, but for their faithfulness to the Persian originals (a rare thing among English versions of Rumi), and for the theme around which they are focused: the ripening, or spiritual maturing, of the soul as it grows in love toward God and others.

Poets in a Landscape by Michael Putnam

2010-03-23T00:30:00-05:00

Poets in a Landscape
Written by Gilbert Highet
Introduction by Michael Putnam

Trade Paperback, 296 pages | NYRB Classics | Literary Criticism & Collections - Poetry; Poetry - Ancient, Classical & Medieval | $17.95 | 978-1-59017-338-1 (1-59017-338-4)

Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of both Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places were they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet sketches the stories of the poets’ lives and fills in the historical background, while offering crisp modern translations of their finest work and memorably vivid descriptions of the natural world. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

Zoland Poetry by Roland Pease

2010-03-23T00:30:00-05:00

Zoland Poetry An Annual of Poems, Translations and Interviews-No. 4
Edited by Roland Pease

Trade Paperback, 264 pages | Zoland Books | Poetry - Anthologies (multiple authors) | $17.99 | 978-1-58195-233-9 (1-58195-233-3)

Songs of Love and War by Sayd Majrouh

2010-03-16T00:30:00-05:00

Songs of Love and War Afghan Women's Poetry
Written by Sayd Majrouh
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager

Trade Paperback, 128 pages | Other Press | Poetry - Middle Eastern | $14.95 | 978-1-59051-398-9 (1-59051-398-3)

The Living Fire by Edward Hirsch

2010-03-09T00:30:00-05:00

The Living Fire New and Selected Poems
Written by Edward Hirsch

Hardcover, 256 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author | $27.00 | 978-0-375-41522-7 (0-375-41522-X)

A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of “wild gratitude” in poetry.

In poems chronicling insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work, Edward Hirsch displays stunning range and quality. Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”

Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.

Lookout by John Steffler

2010-03-09T00:30:00-05:00

Lookout
Written by John Steffler

Trade Paperback, 128 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry; Poetry - Single Author | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-8267-2 (0-7710-8267-3)

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada's most respected poets and the recent Poet Laureate of Canada.

The wide-ranging poems in Lookout — John Steffler's first book of new poems since his award-winning That Night We Were Ravenous (1998) — celebrate the landscape and history of western Newfoundland, which is inseparable from an exploration of the poet's own life. The poems embrace the limestone barrens on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula and the poet's personal life, the end of a marriage, the beginnings of new love. There is also a series of poems about his parents' struggle to deal with his mother's Alzheimer's during the last year of her life.

Lookout by John Steffler

2010-03-09T00:30:00-05:00

Lookout
Written by John Steffler

eBook, 128 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry; Poetry - Single Author | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-8268-9 (0-7710-8268-1)

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Book of Mercy
Written by Leonard Cohen

eBook, 112 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry - Single Author; Poetry | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-2162-6 (0-7710-2162-3)

Popular since its original publication more than 25 years ago, Leonard Cohen's classic book of contemporary psalms is now beautifully repackaged.

Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now beautifully repackaged, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Book of Mercy
Written by Leonard Cohen

Trade Paperback, 112 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry - Single Author; Poetry | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-2187-9 (0-7710-2187-9)

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 by Brian Trehearne

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960
Selected by Brian Trehearne

Hardcover, 460 pages | New Canadian Library | Poetry - Anthologies (multiple authors); Poetry - Canadian | $31.95 | 978-0-7710-8631-1 (0-7710-8631-8)

The best in four decades of exceptional Canadian poetry, now in a limited hardcover edition.

The poets in this anthology, all of whom matured creatively between 1920 and 1960, considered it one of their primary obligations to modernize Canadian writing, to bring the country's poetry out of late Romantic stasis after the Great War into a fertile and combative response to the cultural, political, technological, philosophical, religious, and economic conditions of the modern era. In their common reaction against Romanticism, and in their commitments to modern poetry's possibilities of profound newness, the poets in this volume make up one great movement in Canada's cultural history. The anthology includes:

• 250 poems by 44 poets
• Regionally diverse voices from Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, and B.C.
• Extensive selections of the work of major poets
• An afterword and biographical headnotes provide important historical and literary context

The poets included in Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 are:
Frank Oliver Call; Louise Morey Bowman; Raymond Knister; Joe Wallace; E.J. Pratt; W.W. E. Ross; F.R. Scott; A.J.M. Smith; Charles Bruce; Earle Birney; A.M. Klein; Dorothy Livesay; Leo Kennedy; Audrey Alexandra Brown; Kenneth Leslie; Robert Finch; Floris Clark McLaren; L.A. Mackay; Anne Marriott; Bertram Warr; Patrick Anderson; P.K. Page; Kay Smith; Miriam Waddington; Margaret Avison; A.G. Bailey; Louis Dudek; John Glassco; Ralph Gustafson; Raymond Souster; Irving Layton; Roy Daniells; Douglas LePan; George Whalley; James Reaney; Elizabeth Brewster; George Johnston; Goodridge MacDonald; Jay MacPherson; Anne Wilkinson; Phyllis Webb; Wilfred Watson; R.A.D. Ford; Eldon Grier.

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 by Brian Trehearne

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960
Selected by Brian Trehearne

Trade Paperback, 460 pages | New Canadian Library | Poetry - Anthologies (multiple authors); Poetry - Canadian | $24.95 | 978-0-7710-8634-2 (0-7710-8634-2)

Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Deepwater Vee
Written by Melanie Siebert

Trade Paperback, 112 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry; Poetry - Single Author | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-8033-3 (0-7710-8033-6)

A stunning poetic debut that explores some of Canada's most threatened waterways — places both altered and untamed — and tracks their currents of history and myth.

Melanie Siebert's first collection travels many remote northern rivers, but also through two of Canada's most damaged waterways — the Athabasca, which runs through the heart of the Alberta tar sands, and the North Saskatchewan, the river Siebert grew up alongside, one stressed by dams and upgraders, sewage and pesticides. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander MacKenzie's dreams, a busker's broken-down street riffs, and the dream-world wanderings of a grandmother who returns to inhabit the earth. Here boundaries blur — between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild — and loss carries with it both music and silence.

Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Deepwater Vee
Written by Melanie Siebert

eBook, 112 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry; Poetry - Single Author | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-8034-0 (0-7710-8034-4)

Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Poems
Written by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hardcover, 224 pages | Everyman's Library | Poetry - Single Author - American | $13.50 | 978-0-307-59266-8 (0-307-59266-9)

One of America’s most beloved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay’s refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.

This volume includes the early poems that many consider her best— “Renascence” and “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver” among them—as well as such often-memorized favorites as “What lips my lips have kissed” and “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends . . .”). The poet’s most famous verse drama, the one-act antiwar fable Aria da Capo, is included here as well.

Ossuaries by Dionne Brand

2010-03-02T00:30:00-05:00

Ossuaries
Written by Dionne Brand

Trade Paperback, 112 pages | McClelland & Stewart | Poetry; Poetry - Single Author | $15.50 | 978-0-7710-1734-6 (0-7710-1734-0)

A new collection from one of Canada's most renowned, honoured, and bestselling poets.

Dionne Brand's mesmerizing new collection of poems is about human zoos in the contemporary world, about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about putting these bones away even as Brand examines their textures of powder and stone, their resilience. There are multiple strands in Ossuaries — the narrative of a woman fleeing, the sorting of the bones, the museums of spectacle that the poet visits collecting them, and the search for their final place — and always the political urgency and incantatory lyric intensity for which Brand is justly celebrated.

Random House New Releases - Poetry

Earth, My Likeness by Howard Nelson

Earth, My Likeness Nature Poetry of Walt WhitmanWritten by Walt Whitman Edited by Howard Nelson Introduction by Howard Nelson

The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert

The Dance Most of All PoemsWritten by Jack Gilbert

Dear Darkness by Kevin Young

Dear Darkness PoemsWritten by Kevin Young

Swimming Swimmers Swimming by Percival Everett

Swimming Swimmers Swimming Written by Percival Everett

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart by Deborah Digges

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart PoemsWritten by Deborah Digges

Love's Ripening by Ahmad Rezwani

Love's Ripening Rumi on the Heart's JourneyWritten by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi Translated by Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani

Poets in a Landscape by Michael Putnam

Poets in a Landscape Written by Gilbert Highet Introduction by Michael Putnam

Zoland Poetry by Roland Pease

Zoland Poetry An Annual of Poems, Translations and Interviews-No. 4Edited by Roland Pease

Songs of Love and War by Sayd Majrouh

Songs of Love and War Afghan Women's PoetryWritten by Sayd Majrouh Translated by Marjolijn de Jager

The Living Fire by Edward Hirsch

The Living Fire New and Selected PoemsWritten by Edward Hirsch

Lookout by John Steffler

Lookout Written by John Steffler

Lookout by John Steffler

Lookout Written by John Steffler

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

Book of Mercy Written by Leonard Cohen

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

Book of Mercy Written by Leonard Cohen

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 by Brian Trehearne

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 Selected by Brian Trehearne

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 by Brian Trehearne

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960 Selected by Brian Trehearne

Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert

Deepwater Vee Written by Melanie Siebert

Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert

Deepwater Vee Written by Melanie Siebert

Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poems Written by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ossuaries by Dionne Brand

Ossuaries Written by Dionne Brand

Earth, My Likeness Nature Poetry of Walt Whitman
Written by Walt Whitman
Edited by Howard Nelson
Introduction by Howard Nelson

The Dance Most of All Poems
Written by Jack Gilbert

Dear Darkness Poems
Written by Kevin Young

Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Written by Percival Everett

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart Poems
Written by Deborah Digges

Love's Ripening Rumi on the Heart's Journey
Written by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani

Poets in a Landscape
Written by Gilbert Highet
Introduction by Michael Putnam

Zoland Poetry An Annual of Poems, Translations and Interviews-No. 4
Edited by Roland Pease

Songs of Love and War Afghan Women's Poetry
Written by Sayd Majrouh
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager

The Living Fire New and Selected Poems
Written by Edward Hirsch

Lookout
Written by John Steffler

Lookout
Written by John Steffler

Book of Mercy
Written by Leonard Cohen

Book of Mercy
Written by Leonard Cohen

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960
Selected by Brian Trehearne

Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960
Selected by Brian Trehearne

Deepwater Vee
Written by Melanie Siebert

Deepwater Vee
Written by Melanie Siebert

Poems
Written by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ossuaries
Written by Dionne Brand