Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

Contains poems by A.R. Ammons, Alan Ansen, John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Michael Benedikt, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Philip Booth, Edgar Bowers, Tom Clark, Gregory Corso, Henri Coulette, Robert Greeley, J.V. Cunningham, James Dickey, William Dickey, Alan Dugan, Alvin Feinman, Edward Field, Donald Finkel, Isabella Gardner, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Paul Goodman, John Haines, Donald Hall, Kenneth O. Hanson, Anthony Hecht, Daryl Hine, Daniel Hoffman, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Barbara Howes, Robert Huff, Richard Hugo, David Ignatow, Randall Jarrell, LeRoi Jones, Donald Justice, Weldon Kees, X.J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Al Lee, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Laurence Lieberman, John Logan, Robert Lowell, William H. Matchett, E.L. Mayo, William Meredith, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Howard Moss, Stanley Moss, Lisel Mueller, Howard Nemerov, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Robert Pack, Donald Petersen, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, James Schuyler, Winfield Townley Scott, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, L.E. Sissman, William Jay Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Robert Sward, May Swenson, James Tate, Constance Urdang, Peter Viereck, David Wagoner, Ds.

This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin Chile--Pablo Neruda China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting El Salvador--Claribel Alegria France--Yves Bonnefoy Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos India--A.K. Ramanujan Israel--Yehuda Amichai Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa Mexico--Octavio Paz Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal Nigeria--Wole Soyinka Norway--Tomas Transtromer Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott

An essential introduction to the most significant poems and their works since 1900 Reproduced within this collection are some of the greatest poems of the 20th century, featuring works from major writers such as T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Langston Hughes and W.B. Yeats. For each, Michael Schmidt provides an insight into their themes and the background to their work, opening for the reader a deeper understanding and enjoyment of these extraordinary poems. Poets include: W.B. Yeats Robert Frost Edward Thomas Philip Larkin T.S. Eliot Ted Hughes Langston Hughes Sylvia Plath C.S Sisson Derek Walcott Ezra Pound & many more!

A major new anthology of recent American poetry, featuring generous selections of the work of 25 extraordinary poets born since World War II, with thoughtful introductions and annotations. In language of striking originality and beauty, these poets illuminate the complexities of contemporary life and chart the contours of the American landscape.

Included in this audio-enhanced edition are recordings of the U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey reading Native Guard in its entirety, as well as an interview with the poet from the HMH podcast The Poetic Voice, in which she recounts what it was like to grow up in the South as the daughter of a white father and a black mother and describes other influences that inspired the work. Experience this Pulitzer Prize–winning collection in an engaging new way. Growing up in the Deep South, Natasha Trethewey was never told that in her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units. Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the soldiers who served and whose voices have echoed through her own life. The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, so Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

-Culled from Dia Art Foundation's -Readings in Contemporary Poetry- series, this anthology includes ninety-four poets who have participated in the reading series from 2010 to 2016. Edited by poet and author Vincent Katz, the book stresses the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice, highlighting commonalities among poets and placing their diverse voices in conversation with one another---