Bücher der Reihe Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.

" With Catch, Release, Harun upends the world once more.

Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.

Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it(The Commercial Appeal).

This unique geographic location, with its unpredictable waters, its sinking swamps, its bayous and sloughs, provides a haunting landscape for Glenn Blake's characters.

They blend imaginistic detail and reflection and bring to contemporary subjects what Steele calls "the preservative virtues of formal care".

His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

The third section, "nipples rise to spirit", traces a child's growth to middle age, with particular reference to sex and family, while "the presence of Presenceredefines the religious experience.

They attain an assurance and stability rare in contemporary poetry, while their careful balance of sadness and joy reminds the reader of the difficult negotiations we make in life.

Now in paperback, In the Crevice of Time brings together 176 new and previously published poems by one of the most accomplished and most widely acclaimed poets of our time.

Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snowin Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.

But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough-and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.

They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation-or perhaps just a poor relation-to the air of "Danny Boy."

From the author of "Frog", these short stories are about loss: culture, allurement, reliability, continuity, potency, companions, skill, child, parent, footing, prize, collection; as well as the flip-side of loss: imaginative recreation, creative refutation and self-destructive creation.

Originally published in 2003. The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.Elegantly written, deeply informed, and intellectually playful, Melodies Unheard confirms Anthony Hecht's reputation as one of our most original and imaginative thinkers on the literary arts.

As much as they ponder, they celebrate in exact, careful, and loving terms the haunting and bracing stimuli from which they originate.

His sharp, bright imagery affirms the unique beauty of our world and explores its invisible mysteries.