Poetry

W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins.

New York: Random House, 1947. 1st printing. Dust jacket in protective mylar cover; 1/2" at top of spine missing; 1" tear at top left cover; corners chipped; front cover has some soiling in spots; dark green cloth with gilt lettering over maroon on spine; first 8 pages creased at top left; binding tight. G/G-

St.-John Perse's great poem "Anabasis" was first published in France in 1924. It was translated six years later by T. S. Eliot for a British limited edition. After a leisurely fourteen-year percolation, it was brought out in America in 1938.

This first U.S. edition has a dust jacket in protective cover; 1" tear on rear cover; ink notes on rear cover; black cloth; endpapers tanned. G+/G

Lord John Press, Northridge, California, 1981. First edition limited to 300 numbered copies and 50 deluxe copies, all signed by each poet. This book is a presentation copy and is not numbered. Blue cloth spine lettered in glit, boards blue with overall gilt decorations.  VG+

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf--and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world--there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history--Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

Laura Grace Weldon was the Ohio Poet of the Year in 2019 for this collection of nature filled poems. This collection casts an uncommonly bright glow. In clear language, these poems explore themes of connection and healing through subjects as unusual as cow pastures, dictionaries, to-do lists, and astrophysics. Beauty is revealed in what one reviewer calls "sacraments of the ordinary." Perfect for poetry lovers and those who haven't read a poem in years. 

"Sara Holbrook continually works miracles by giving substance to steam -- in these keepsake poems she is matriarch, mojo and mind-bender, guiding us toward insight with an unerring hindsight. It is not important whether you discover Sara through her electrifying performance work or through these gems of humor, heart and lyricism. What's important is that you discover her, this wondrous wordsmith, one of the reasons poetry has a pulse again." --Patricia Smith, Boston Globe Columnist, Four Time National Poetry Slam Champion

Rita Dove's Collected Poems 1974-2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove's fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America's kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove's mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the "precise, singing lines" for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove "has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental" (Poetry magazine).

Finalist for the National Book Award - Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award - Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award - Winner of the National Jewish Book Award - Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award - Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize - Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic

The Associated Publishers Inc, 1941, nod. Blue boards, library markings.  Good-

New York: Random House, 1944. 1st printing.

One Volume contains two of Auden's long poems: "For the Time Being - A Christmas Oratorio" and "The Sea and the Mirror - A Commentary of Shakespeare's The Tempest." Previous owner has laid in "Christmas 1958" poem by Auden.

Dust jacket in protective cover; small tears at head and heel of spine; corners chipped; navy blue paper over white cloth; gilt lettering on spine; endpapers tanned; signature of former owner in ink on pastedown; bleed-through of glue from repair between pages 3-6;  G/G-

In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous.

Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders--birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees--all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.

Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It's all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity."--James Baldwin

Privately published by The Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 1967; softcover with original glassine wrapper; inscribed by author on ffep. VG

Mary Quade, our lady of broken birds with still beating hearts, of the haunts within a covered bridge, is in love with things (empty dresses, sticks and branches, county fair food), with animals (a sick raccoon, moles, the last passenger pigeon), and because she is in love, she is both fiercely curious and deeply wary. These poems of great, imaginative empathy are sharpened with the understanding that, really, we are so greedy, "all unclean, all appetite." -- Katie Northrop

One of Mary Quade's poems, making an analogy with photographic depth of field, begins by observing that "The smaller the window / the more you will see / clearly." The whole of Local Extinctions, from the birthday party magician in the first poem to the American Legion pancakes at the county fair in the last, embraces that principle as an ideal. The infinite care Mary Quade takes in framing and focus results every time in perfect clarity, each poem revealing something that only Quade could show us, as only she could show it. -- H. L. Hix

With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Thomas Sayers Ellis's debut becomes a powerful argument against monotony

A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
and yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.
--from "Groovallegiance"

In one poem, Thomas Sayers Ellis prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant- gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call-and-response becomes Steinian echo becomes Post-Soul percussive pleasure becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out of a D.C. go-go club.

1st printing; with woodcuts by J.J. Lankes; dust jacket in protective cover; top and bottom of spine torn; rear top edge has jagged tear; front top corner missing; forest green cloth over dark gray paper boards; title in gilt box on front cover; gilt lettering on spine; bookplate of former owner on pastedown; binding tight; deckled edges; text clean. G/G-

Nightwalker introduces poems by the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. He was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1928, but didn't publish his work until 1956.

1st printing; signed; dust jacket in protective cover; spine edges lightly chipped; tan cloth; former owner's signature in ink on pastedown; pencil marks throughout. G/G

Iowa City: The Stone Wall Press, 1963. Limited edition, no. 105 of 220 copies; inscribed by author on ffep; no dj; brown paper with title/author on cream label on spine; top of covers and spine lightly faded; binding good; text clean and bright. VG

Dermot Healy’s poetry distills the essence of a gift he exercises more often and elaborately in other forms — for narrative, dialogue, characterization, and acute insight and observation. In The Reed Bed — set in and around his home on the ocean’s edge of Sligo, in London and further afield — he captures the everyday’s ordinary dramas and ‘small habits’, noting at the same time the hallway ‘where something is after happening’.

Moynagh Sullivan in the Irish Literary Supplement enthused about his poems’ ‘vigorous movement and the feel of dance and joyful noises’. Rough-edged and refreshing, The Reed Bed displays further instances of idiosyncratic comedy and convinces us of a singular capacity to be at once visionary, quirky and moving.

Gallery Books, 2001; 1st edition; signed by author. Dust jacket near fine; book like new. VG+/VG+

Spring will marry you. A promise!

Cuckoo brings the message: May.

O new clothes! O get your house ready!

Expectation keeps you starry.

But at which church and on what day?

In these poems Ted Hughes invites the reader to try and catch the spring (but she's elusive); to take a closer look at the March calf; to listen to the happiness of the summer grass; and to notice the 'weak-neck snowdrops' in winter. Earth is revealed in all its surprising richness and rawness, and so is humankind's own constantly changing relationship with the seasons.

Iillustrated with gorgeous paintings by Leonard Baskin; 1st edition; dust jacket in protective cover; two small tears along top of front cover; green cloth over olive boards; title embossed on front; gilt lettering on spine; evidence of tape at top of front pastedown; binding tight; text clean and bright. G+/G+

San Francisco: Paul Elder & Co., 1910. Sixteen hundred copies printed on Van Gelder hand-made paper, of which fifteen hundred for sale; this copy is no. 587. Decorative tan and gray with decorative paper label on front; spine chipped and starting to detach at bottom; top corner of front cover has small white stains; covers lightly soiled; gray endpapers unmarked; frontispiece portrait of poet with tissue guard; text clean and bright; some pages uncut. G+

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation: sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.

University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Inscribed by author on title page; top edge of text slightly crimped. G+

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

"100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review

"By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" for NPR

"A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019)

"Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah Magazine

Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"

One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On"

The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner"

One of BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019"

Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar's Club and Lit.

Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs.

In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The squalor of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power--illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States

Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

--from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical, and wry--turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

"WE WANT OUR BODIES BACK URGES BLACK WOMEN TO DEMAND BETTER FROM MEN." -ESSENCE

"MASTER POET JESSICA CARE MOORE GIFTS US THIS LATEST COLLECTION OF SHARP, SMART AND DEFIANT PIECES." -MS. MAGAZINE

BOOKS BY BLACK WOMEN WE CAN'T WAIT TO READ IN 2020 -REFINERY29

A dazzling full-length collection of verse from one of the leading poets of our time.

Over the past two decades, jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women's creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Fierce and passionate, Jessica Care moore argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats.

We Want Our Bodies Back is an exploration--and defiant stance against--these many attacks.

This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

Irving Feldman is a master chronicler of our collective experience and an overlooked treasure of American poetry. Feldman’s rich body of work exhibits his mastery of language from the biblical to the conversational, his Yiddish flair for the comic, his profound social insight and lucidity. He writes about everything from the Coney Island days of his childhood and his bohemian years in postwar New York to the art of Picasso and George Segal, from the Holocaust to its aftermath—in narrative and dramatic poems and personal lyrics that are by turns ardent, witty, biting, ecstatic, and heartbreaking.

Little, Brown and Company, 1961. 1st edition. Inscribed by author. Dust jacket in protective cover; spine tanned; some soiling on covers; black cloth with gilt lettering on spine; endpapers tanned from flap; text clean. G/G