Winner of the 1984 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Originally published in 1983, Miles's Collected Poems received seven awards, including the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize, and was one of three finalists for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A striking consistency -- of tone, of diction, of purpose -- characterizes Miles's life work. It has been a life well spent. --Publisher's Weekly. Miles is a poet of the first rank whose work might well be compared to that of Williams or Moore ... Collected Poems is a treasury of poetic wit and human understanding that belongs in all poetry collections. --Library Journal. Miles's work is one of the finest and most solid bodies of poetry to be found in this country. --A.R. Ammons.

Winner of the 1984 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Originally published in 1983, Miles's Collected Poems received seven awards, including the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize, and was one of three finalists for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A striking consistency -- of tone, of diction, of purpose -- characterizes Miles's life work. It has been a life well spent. --Publisher's Weekly. Miles is a poet of the first rank whose work might well be compared to that of Williams or Moore ... Collected Poems is a treasury of poetic wit and human understanding that belongs in all poetry collections. --Library Journal. Miles's work is one of the finest and most solid bodies of poetry to be found in this country. --A.R. Ammons.

Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Successive chapters introduce key skills and critical or theoretical issues, enabling users to read poetry with enjoyment, insight and an awareness of the implications of what they are doing. This new edition includes a new chapter on ‘Post-colonial Poetry’, a substantial increase in the number of end-of-chapter interactive exercises, and a comprehensive Glossary of poetic terms. Not just an add-on, the Glossary works as a key resource for the structuring of particular topics in any individual teaching or learning programme. Many of the exercises and interactive discussions develop not only the skills of competent close reading but also the necessary confidence and experience in locating historical and other contextual information through library or internet searches. The aim is to enhance readers' literary and scholarly competence – and to make it fun!

In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the clichés of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as “the fight for freedom,” “revenue enhancement,” and “service the target,” designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political clichés obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it. This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo’s analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.

The Astonishment Tapes is the edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser, a founding member of the Berkeley contingent of the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In poems from as varied women poets as Jane Kenyon, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, food emerges as a re-occurring and central metaphor in the way women live, in the pulse of the everyday, and as a vehicle for the exotic. From coffee to caviar, from potatoes to dandelions--even in hunger and anorexia--the metaphors of food have worked like yeast in the imagination of these poets. Preface by Chef Charlotte Turgeon. Phyllis Stowell initiated the Saint Mary's College of California MFA program. She is a former Fellow of the Camargo Foundation and was a Dewitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She was granted a Barbara Deming Money for Women Award and was a winner of the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Poetry Prize. Her publications include Assent to Solitude, Who Is Alice?, and Sequence and Consequence, an Alchemical Journal. She publishes poetry, criticism, and poetry reviews. Jeanne Foster is a Professor in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Saint Mary's College of California. Her critical book, A Music of Grace, explores the vision of the sacred in contemporary American poetry, and her poetry collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Hudson Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and other journals.

This text is the first volume of a comprehensive anthology of Californian literature. It is divided into four parts and contains material ranging from Native American origin myths to Hollywood novels dissecting the American dream.