Bøker i Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction-serien

"-Bobbie Ann Mason"This is fiction of immense beauty, full of wisdom and informed by rare grace."-Steve Yarbrough

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.

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".

The author of "Eelgrassand "The Kentucky Storiesnow offers a collection of "mysterious and beautiful(Lee Smith) stories, "as subtle, syntactically graceful, and beautiful as any I've seen(Toby Olson).

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.

a particular and splendid instance of what Hopkins meant by 'poetry proper, the language of inspiration.' "-Richard Howard

Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.

Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.

Along the way, master poet John Bricuth treats readers to a sly, sarcastic-and sometimes deeply moving-look at storytelling, old-time religion, and the American way.

Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.

Words by the Water is particularly varied and unusually youthful and fresh.

Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."

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.

From the author of "Airs of Providence", "The Very Rich Hours", and "The Courage of Girls", this book brings together a dozen new stories.

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

Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.

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

Emotionally taut and infused with poetic imagery, Cake is a bold debut and a portrait of the crisis of the modern relationship.