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  Prufrock and Other Oberservations

  T. S. Eliot

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  Prufrock and Other Observations is the title of a pamphlet of twelve poems by T. S. Eliot published in 1917 by The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, an English suffragette and philosopher of language. Most of the poems had been published earlier in literary magazines, most notably the “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which was Eliot’s first published poem and appeared in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Modern Verse at the urging of Ezra Pound, overseas editor for the magazine. Prufrock is a dramatic interior monologue of a modern urban man trapped in an inertia of isolation and indecision that has been described as a “drama of literary anguish”. The poem was influenced by The Divine Comedy and is peppered with references to the Bible, Shakespeare plays, and the works of metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell and the French symbolist poets.  It was considered outlandish when it first appeared.  One anonymous London reviewer commented that "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry." As it happens, Prufrock and the companion poems in this volume helped effect a paradigm shift away from Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to what came to be called Modernism and introduced one of the most distinctive voices and recognized voices in modern literature.

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  Beastly Chronicles of Saki

  H. M. Munro

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  The Beastly Chronicles Of Saki.  The stories of HH Munro – better known by his pen name of Saki – have scarcely been out of print since they were first published nearly a century ago.  Yet it often seems that their particular delights are reserved for the private pleasure of his coterie of admirers.  It has to be admitted that a taste for Saki is something of an addiction.  And, like all addictions, once acquired, it is hard to shake off.  In the years since his tragically early death in the trenches at the hands of a German sniper, fellow addicts have included Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Tom Sharpe. All of us take a slightly wicked satisfaction from his biting wit and the subversive way in which he undermines the staid Edwardian Society he purports to observe.  But to a much greater extent than his near-contemporaries, Wilde and Kipling, there is something dark and menacing at the heart of Saki’s writing.  Behind the refined twinkle of tea cups on an Edwardian lawn can be heard the distant howling of a wolf.  Hidden among the shrubbery in a carefully manicured garden lurk all kinds of Beasts and Superbeasts, ready to wreak Nature’s revenge on an uncaring mankind with its arrogant belief in materialism, progress and the innate respectability of middle class values.  Where Kipling’s menagerie tends to simple analogues of human types, Saki’s animals can rise up with the full power of Pan himself.  This is not to ignore Saki’s ability to turn an aphorism with all the facility and wit of the divine Oscar at his best.  Nor does it forget his ability to prick the inflated egos of louche young men with too much time and money on their hands or deliciously dotty aunts and duchesses with their minds firmly fixed on Empire and Imperial responsibilities.  It would be easy to forget that Munro foresaw the imminent collapse of this society into the cataclysm of the Great War.  With his experience as a political journalist in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, he was probably more aware than most of the storm that was brewing.  But, essentially, he was an observer of his fellow-man.  And it is for the humour of his observations, for the dazzling twists and turns his tales take and for the fact that he makes us laugh inordinately that he is to be treasured and shared with those who have not yet acquired the addiction.

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  Solve for Desire - Poems

  Caitlin Bailey

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  A debut poetry collection exploring the real lives of siblings Georg and Grete Trakl while addressing themes of desire, addiction, loss, and absence. Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost.” Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned, and where does that leave the physical? How do we solve for desire when the object we adore disappears—and how does the poet solve and resolve the past, its wounds and its absences? “Each time I write your name,” Bailey writes, “a key / turns somewhere in a lock.” Like the “perfect red burst” of poppies and of blood, these poems are a blooming, keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead.Praise for Solve for Desire “The work of a poet who sings, boldly, across the distances between us.” —Srikanth Reddy “A sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. . . . She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed” —Publishers Weekly “This precarious, satisfyingly disjointed debut collection of poetry captures the spirit of the [Trakl] siblings. . . . Bailey’s brilliantine lyrics shine brightest when the siblings’ characters are wrought in full relief.” —Booklist

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  Don Juan Canto 5

  Lord Byron

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  Juan, captured by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery is bought by a beautiful Princess as her toy-boy. Dressed as an odalisque, he is smuggled into the Sultan's harem for a steamy assignation. Unbelievably, Byron's publisher almost baulked at this feast of allusive irony, blasphemy (mild), calumny, scorn, lesse-majeste, cross-dressing, bestiality, assassination, circumcision and dwarf-tossing. This was the last Canto published by the stuffy John Murray (who had, however, made a tidy fortune on the earlier parts of the Epic). Although Byron's mood starts, after this, to grow darker and his bitterness at English hypocrisy to grow sharper, his discursive comedy and precise and intriguing rhyme is rarely better than in Canto V. (Summary by Peter Gallagher)

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  One Poem at a Time

  Samuel Hazo

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  Edwin Arlington Robinson's Richard CoryEdwin Arlington Robinson's Miniver CheevyA.E. Housman's I to My PerilsGerard Manley Hopkins' As Kingfishers Catch FireA.E. Housman's Here Dead Lie WeArchibald MacLeish's You, Andrew MarvellJohn Ciardi's In Place of a Cursee.e. cummings' i am a little churchWilliam Butler Yeats' The Deep-Sworn VowRudyard Kipling's When Earth's Last Picture Is PaintedRobert Frost's The Road Not TakenRobert Frost's Take Something Like a StarGeorge Seferis' Mathios Pascalis Among the RosesPablo Neruda's Sonetos de AmorT.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (one passage)P. Vidal's ProvenceSamual Hazo's The Best Place in America to be on SaturdaysAdonis' A Woman and a ManWilliam Shakespeare's "They that have power to hurt..."Hart Crane's The HurricaneWilfred Owen's The Next WarEzra Pound's The Ballad of the Mulberry RoadWalter De La Mare's Miss Tea and Peacock PieConstantine Cavafy's IthacaConstantine Cavafy's Waiting for the BarbariansJohn Donne's A Lecture Upon the ShadowAnonymous/Robert Desnos' An Irish Curse/Dove in the ArchMiller Williams' Folding His U.S.A. Today, He Makes His Point in the Blue Star CafeWillis Barnstone's Greek Anthology selectionsMarianne Moore's What Are Years?Robert Herrick's Upon Julia's ClothesSamuel Hazo's StingersJohn Balaban's Viewing the New World OrderRandall Jarrell's The X-Ray Waiting Room in the HospitalAbraham Lincoln's The Gettysburg AddressBertolt Brecht's HistoryCarlos Drummond de Andrade's Two PoemsCzeslaw Milosz's Rivers Grow Smalle.e. cummings' next to of course god America ISamuel Hazo's Lost SwimmerArchibald MacLeish's Ars PoeticaA Japanese Child's On Wetting the BedWilliam Shakespeare's My Love is StrengthenedSamual Hazo's My Roosevelt CoupeEmily Dickinson's Tell All the TruthWilliam Matthews' Translation from MartialA.E. Housman's When I Was One and TwentySamuel Hazo's Jack O'LanternWilliam Stafford's Traveling Through the DarkWalt Whitman's Preface to Leaves of GrassJames Joyce's I Hear an Army ChargingJose Marti's VersesRandall Jarrell's The Death of the Ball Turret GunnerEdgar Lee Masters' The Poems from Spoon RiverEdgar Lee Masters' One Poem from New Spoon RiverNaomi Shihab Nye's The Art of DisappearingYannis Ritsos' WomenAntonio Machado's Proverbs and Short VersesAlbert Camus' The Sea Close ByLight Verse, Robert Frost, Robert Herrick, etc.Gerard Manley Hopkins' Pied BeautyRobinson Jeffers' SkunksLinda Pastan's Emily DickinsonSamuel Hazo's The Most You Least Expect

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  You Kiss by th' Book - New Poems...

  Gary Soto

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  Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates “smart, surprising and affecting [poetry] . . . Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget” (David Scott Kastan, Yale University).   In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto’s fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of “thee” and “thine,” kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard’s time and language and our own here and now.   “I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him.” —Gerald Stern, National Book Award–winning poet   “Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world.” —Publishers Weekly   “Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults.” —Martin Espada, National Book Award–winning poet   “Shakespeare’s words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased.” —The Norton Shakespeare

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