An exquisite book in which a series of poems about biblical characters -- "Samson", "Saul and David", "Judith", and so on -- provides the backdrop for other reflections on both the beauty and the darkness in contemporary life. We see ourselves in fresh light as Hecht illuminates the simililarites between our own age and the biblical world, and finds postmodern sadness in stories like that of Miriam, who announces in her poem, "I had a nice voice once,...

Pulitzer Prize winner and best selling poet Ted Kooser calls attention to the intimacies of life through commonplace objects and occurrences: an elderly couple sharing a sandwich is a study in transcendent love, while a tattered packet of spinach seeds calls forth innate human potential. This long-awaited collection from the former U.S. Poet Laureate--ten years in the making--is rich with quiet and profound magnificence.

"What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?" Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey's ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel's Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor's Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio's series of severed heads, and James Turrell's experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible...

Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon offers fresh interpretations of the most widely read and loved poet of the 20th century- translated and read by a master of poetic expressiveness. Out of the great profusion of Neruda's poetry, Stephen Mitchell has selected forty-nine poems and brought them to life for a new generation of listeners. These are poems of a happy man, deeply fulfilled in his sexuality, at home in the world, in love with...

"Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate...

"In our time there has been no poet who revived human hearts and spirits more convincingly than William Stafford."--Naomi Shihab NyeSome time when the river is ice ask memistakes I have made. Ask me whetherwhat I have done is my life.-from "Ask Me" In celebration of the poet's centennial, Ask Me collects one hundred of William Stafford's essential poems. As a conscientious objector during World War II, while assigned to Civilian Public Service camps...

More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of America: its rail yards, rivers, cities, and once vast natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for society's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature. Selected Poems fills a significant...