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Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Oscar Wilde
from Dover Publications
Epigrams, aphorisms, and other bon mots gathered from the celebrated wit's plays, essays, and conversation offer an entertaining selection of observations both comic and profound. Organized by category, the nearly 400 quotes range in subject from human nature, morals, and society to art, politics, history, and more.
The Best American Poetry 2008: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Charles Wright (Best American Poetry)
Littlefoot: A Poem
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country’s most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator’s search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on “the other side of my own death.” Following the course of one year, the poet’s seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, “it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind.” Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, “all things come from splendor,” and the urgent question that the poet can’t help but ask: “Will you miss me when I’m gone?
Scar Tissue: Poems
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In Scar Tissue, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Wright not only investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality—”A thing is not an image”—but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject—language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”
Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who “illuminates and exalts in the entire astonishing spectrum of existence” (Booklist).
Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who “illuminates and exalts in the entire astonishing spectrum of existence” (Booklist).
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).
Black Zodiac: Poems
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"Time and light are the same thing somewhere behind our backs," Charles Wright supposes in "Meditation on Form and Measure." That's just one line from one poem in this fine collection, but it goes a long way toward capturing the flavor of the project. These poems are investigations into the Big Truths, but they're carried out with a subtle sense of mischief as well as reverence. Poetry refers to the "sheer wisdom" in Wright's work, and Helen Vendler writes that he "never ceases to astonish."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle AwardTime will append us like suit coats left out overnightOn a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,Silk handkerchief limp with dew, sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.And love will kill us--Love, and the winds from under the earth that grind us to grain-out.--from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the Boston Review, "Charles Wright's trilogy of trilogies--call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead'--is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century."The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.
The Importance of Being Earnest (Classic Drama)
by Oscar Wilde
from Naxos Audiobooks
Selected Poems
by Eugenio Montale
from Oberlin College Press
By the time that Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) received the Nobel Prize in 1976, the world was beginning to acknowledge that he was among the greatest of the modernist poets, author of a poetic canon that spanned much of the twentieth century, including the advent of Fascism, two world wars, and the Cold War. A quiet man, profoundly rooted in the Italian landscape and culture and with enormous sensitivity to his language and its heritage, Montale shaped poems throughout his life that were mysterious, resonant, and layered with meanings. His poems range from daily life through history and myth, and on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim, he has few equals.
This volume, which draws on the entire corpus of Montale's work, brings together three of his most experienced and effective translators.
A Short History of the Shadow: Poems
by Charles Wright
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Luminous new poems from one who “has long been a poet of gorgeous description” —William Logan, The New Criterion
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.
—from “Body and Soul II”
This is Charles Wright’s first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” a trilogy of trilogies hailed “among the great long poems of the century” (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright’s return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.
—from “Body and Soul II”
This is Charles Wright’s first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” a trilogy of trilogies hailed “among the great long poems of the century” (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright’s return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.
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