Other books that might interest you

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  Punks - New & Selected Poems

  John Keene

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  A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks  
  weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems—from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms—form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression,  
  AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, Punks reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

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  Postmodern Gypsy

  Jordan Poole

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  When millennial artist, Jordan Poole, realized that there would be no retirement and travel in his future there was only one thing to do.   Live life before it was too late.   He decided to take a risk.   He took off on a year of adventure on the open road.   The way he saw it, instead of being broke working a job that was drab and pointless he could rather be dead broke traveling.   This is the story of adventure on the open road as one artist goes through four campers named Priscilla, Queen of Backroads.  Travel with him and Priscilla and find hope paved with the open road.

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  Poetry Book Society Autumn 2023...

  Alice Kate Mullen

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  The quarterly poetry magazine of the Poetry Book Society, founded by T.S. Eliot, featuring poems, reviews and exclusive interviews from Choice Poet Daljit Nagra and Recommended poets Mary Jean Chan, Jen Campbell, Terrance Hayes, Jacqueline Saphra, Mary Oliver, Lutz Seiler, and Stefan Tobler.

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  Tintern Abbey - Glorious poem...

  William Wordsworth

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  William Wordsworth was born on 7 April, 1770 in Cockermouth, in Cumbria, northwest England.  
  Wordsworth spent his early years in his beloved Lake District often with his sister, Dorothy. The English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, and as Wordsworth would write “I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” 
  After being schooled at Hawkshead he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge but not liking the competitive nature of the place idled his way through saying he “was not for that hour, nor for that place.”  
  Whilst still at Cambridge he travelled to France.  He was immediately taken by the Revolutionary fervor and the confluence of a set of great ideals and rallying calls for the people of France. 
  In his early twenties he ventured again to France and fathered an illegitimate child. He would not see that daughter till she was 9 owing to the tensions and hostilities between England and France. 
  There now followed a period of three to four years that plagued Wordsworth with doubt.  He was now in his early thirties but had no profession, was rootless and virtually penniless.  
  Although his career was not on track he did manage to publish two volumes, both in 1793;  An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. 
  This dark period ended in 1795. A legacy of £900 received from Raisley Calvert enabled Wordsworth to pursue a literary career in earnest.  
  In 1797 he became great friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both their lives and the course of English poetry. 
  Their aim was for a decisive break with the strictures of Neoclassical verse. In 1798 the ground breaking Lyrical Ballads was published. Wordsworth wrote in the preface “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Most of the poems were dramatic in form, designed to reveal the character of the speaker. Thus the poems set forth a new style, a new vocabulary, and new subjects for poetry. 
  Coleridge had also conceived of an enormous poem to be called “The Brook,” in which he proposed to treat all science, philosophy, and religion, but soon laid the burden of writing it to Wordsworth.  To test his powers for that endeavour, Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published as The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind.  
  By the 1820s, the critical acclaim for Wordsworth was growing, but perhaps his best years of work were behind him. Nonetheless he continued to write and to revise previous works.  
  With the death is 1843 of his friend and Poet Laureate Robert Southey, Wordsworth was offered the position. He accepted despite saying he wouldn’t write any poetry as Poet Laureate. And indeed he didn’t. 
  Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He was buried in St Oswald’s church Grasmere.

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  Amounting to Nothing - Poems

  Paul Quenon

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  After 60 years at Gethsemani Abbey, Br. Paul follows up his recent memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, with a poetic collection that shows how to do just that – by writing poetry. 
  
  
   
  
  Amounting to Nothing is both practical and metaphysical, a puzzling over the ultimate things of life, and a descending on the Benedictine ladder of humility to the earthly creatures surrounding a Kentucky monastery. This is less an exploration in self-knowledge than a forgetting of self in the wonders of everything. Quenon treads bare footed on the margins of mortality and immortality, with wit, thought, and hope.

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  Stumblings

  Keith Ravenscroft

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  ‘Better to have questions you can’t answer than answers you can’t question.’
   
  The author describes these poems as ‘stumblings’ because they are stumbling attempts to understand what can seem beyond understanding. In his writing he confronts the issues that are inescapably a part of being human, as he sees them playing out in the maelstrom of his own life. He takes us into areas of desperation, confusion, even despair, but also of acceptance, fulfilment, ecstasy, obstinate faith, and above all of tender love.
   
  The poems range widely through philosophical musings, urgent questioning about what it is to be human, irony, self-mockery, overwhelming passion – and always with an intensity that acknowledges that everything matters, everything has meaning if only we could decode it. And throughout this volume the writer attempts to comprehend and reach the elusive God who 
  he believes in but fails so comprehensively to connect with as deeply as he longs to. 
   
  Any readers who are prepared to stumble with the writer on this poetic journey through life may find themselves in a place where they can at least begin to understand, accept, and even glory in their imperfect humanity as the writer does. And maybe hope to stumble into Grace, 
  enlightened and affirmed.

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