Editors Donald Justice and Robert Mezey bring back into print two nearly lost collections of Coulette's (1927-1988) poetry and introduce the last writings of this diamond-hard and brilliant formalist. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This important collection of poems, which spans a career of nearly fifty years, demonstrates Robert Mezey's development as a notable stylist, thinker, and poet. Moving from adaptations of Latin and Spanish poems to prayers and lamentations, from elegies and plaints of lost love to flights of comic and ribald fancy, his poetry reaches to the extremes of human experience. The death of friends and family, one's self-betrayals and self-infatuations, the comical confusion of a worried mother, the art of a doomed Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp--all these human dramas play out bravely against the backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent path. Mezey can portray aging and death or sing of love and nature with an accuracy of perception and an intensity of feeling heightened by formal clarity and restraint. With his razor-sharp eye for the singular detail, he describes missed opportunities and moments of human weakness and loss in gestures so real the reader will ache. In capturing the pain of religious doubt, the pangs of tenderness and elation, and the vagaries of fate so honestly, Mezey has wrought a high finish to each poem so that, in the words of Donald Justice, they become "absolute classics of calm and beauty."

In this provocative and thoughtful anthology, many voices join in illuminating the remarkably vast and varied American West. The verse collected here ranges from American Indian tribal poems to old folk songs like “The Streets of Laredo,” from country-western lyrics to the work of such foreign poets as Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert. Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers. From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.

"At its center, Heresy and the Ideal is based on Baker's sense of Romantic poetics, especially on how contemporary poets have applied, altered, or rejected certain Romantic principles. He uses the Romantic trope to measure the tension between passion and reason and between the problems of literary transcendence and the obligations of social engagement."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection of twenty-nine original essays, surveys satire fromits emergence in Western literature to the present. Tracks satire from its first appearances in the prophetic booksof the Old Testament through the Renaissance and the Englishtradition in satire to Michael Moore’s satirical movieFahrenheit 9/11. Highlights the important influence of the Bible in the literaryand cultural development of Western satire. Focused mainly on major classical and European influences onand works of English satire, but also explores the complex andfertile cultural cross-semination within the tradition of literarysatire.

A chance meeting in the University of North Carolina campus library in 1944 began a decades-long friendship and sixty-year correspondence. Donald Justice (1925-2004) and Richard Stern (1928-2013) would go on to become, respectively, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the acclaimed novelist. A Critical Friendship showcases a selection of their letters and postcards from the first fifteen years of their correspondence, representing the formative period in both writers' careers. It includes some of Justice's unpublished poetry and early drafts of later published poems as well as some early, never-before-published poetry by Stern. A Critical Friendship is the story of two writers inventing themselves, beginning with the earliest extant letters and ending with those just following their first major publications, Justice's poetry collection The Summer Anniversaries and Stern's novel Golk. These letters highlight their willingness to give and take criticism and document the birth of two distinct and important American literary lives. The letters similarly document the influence of teachers, friends, and contemporaries, including Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Edgar Bowers, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Allen Tate, Peter Hillsman Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Yvor Winters, all of whom feature in the pair's conversations. In a broader context, their correspondence sheds light on the development of the mid-twentieth-century American literary scene.

A look at the poetry of one of America’s most populous and fascinating cities, with poems spanning from 1942 to 2012