Category: Contemporary Poetry

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning former poet laureate, a set of elegiac, irreverent new poems—an American grasp on the top of his talent

The most recent quantity of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen. Scribbled within the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic humorousness, piercing social perception, and haunting lyricism to different and richly imagined landscapes. Peopled via policemen, presidents, teenagers in Halloween mask, a fortune-teller, and a fly at the wall of the poet’s kitchen; set on crowded ny streets, on park benches, and below darkened skies; the pages inside of toy with the tip of the realm and its infinity. Simic remains to be an inimitable voice in smooth American poetry and certainly one of its most interesting chroniclers of the human condition.

A strong new quantity from the nationwide e-book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is basically elegiac.

Whether addressing the deaths of buddies and different poets or celebrating the remaining of the day and the fall of the seasons, Against Sunset finds Stanley Plumly at his so much own and intimate. As a lot an homage to the wealthy culture of the Romantics because it is a meditation on reminiscence itself, those poems stay on the edges of disappearances.

From “Against Sunset”

The horizon, midway disappeared among above and below—

night falls too or does it additionally upward thrust out of the death-glitter of water?

And if evening is the lengthy directly direction of the entire moon pouring down

on the face of the deep, what makes us want lets stroll there,

like a flat skipped stone?

D’acord amb el títol, Gota a gota gira al voltant de l’aigua, que tant esdevé metonímia del món sencer com símbol de l’existència. L’aigua hello aporta també diverses comparacions in line with a l. a. crítica irònica de l. a. condició humana.

“Beasley makes use of humor and shock like a scythe, slicing to the foundation of a matter.”—Washington Post

In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic mind's eye to the heart's targets. a guy and a girl sit down on the comparable dinner desk, an ocean of fear isolating them. An iceberg units out to bounce. A sword swallower ponders his courting customers. "The vessel is easy, a rowboat between yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."

Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invitations comparability to either Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. in a single of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must never use a home to construct a house, / and not search for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting series that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of words to be used by means of mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."

Assembled over ten years and hundreds of thousands of miles, those poems light up how intimacy is misplaced and received in the course of our travels. Decisive, humorous, and as compassionate as she is cruel, Beasley is a reckoning strength at the page.