Publisher: Ecco
Rodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry" (Southern Review) and one of the nation's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces.
A jealous king, an abandoned daughter, a prince hopelessly in love. Shakespeare's timeless tragicomedy of obsession and redemption is reimagined in a new production co-directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh. It was performed as part of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company's Plays at the Garrick Season in 2015, starring Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh. This official tie-in edition features the version of Shakespeare's text performed in the production, plus exclusive additional content.Show book
Through the poems of Voice Message, Katherine Barrett Swett reflects on her personal tragedy and the fragility of human lives and bodies with a tender care. Her debut collection explores the powers of art and poetry to participate in the processing of catastrophic grief, speaking through both the consolation and devastation these creative works can offer. Swett’s formal verse provides a lens through which sadness, destruction, and loss appear as aberrant and inevitable. In tragic lyric, the poet searches poetry, art, mythology, and her own memory for the fleeting image of her lost daughter “in music, painting, or a carved stone name.” Frequently looking to visual arts for inspiration, she finds that Vermeer’s paintings of distant rooms guide and contextualize pain, offering motivation, comfort, and release. Through villanelles, sonnets, quatrains, and free verse, Swett invokes the voices, narratives, and images, both personal and cultural, that haunt her speakers. Suspended in the aftermath of the unexpected and unspeakable death of her college-age daughter, the poet’s language is held together in a somber and necessary restraint. But this restraint does not signal the peace of closure. Rather, these poems quietly and steadily remind readers it is still “the open wound / not the scar,” that “all we have are words and flesh,” and that we are forever vulnerable. The rhythm of and echoes of sonnets and songs lead us to the sticky intersections of tragedy, recovery, and strange forms of beauty.Show book
Taking Flight is a deeply compelling, humorous and truly moving work that brings to the stage a mystical and poignant tale of friendship tested by a tragedy and of the resilience of the human heart.An L.A. Theatre Works performance featuring Adriana Sevan.Show book
A semi autobiographical collection of poetry by an award winning poet, Machinations of A Feminist is a conversation between a Barbadian woman poet and each listener. It is an offering of communion between poet, reader and listener "These poems share the romance the author has with words and her habit of uplifting the local (Barbadian, Caribbean), the extra-ordinary. In so doing it offers a validation of the poem as personal history, and therefore history. The words themselves are offered as the objective correlative, since what stands behind them may ultimately be un-shareable - an aim to delight God and fellowship with the reader in what may well be simply groans. Nonetheless, let all that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as seek thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified... " Margaret D. Gill taught, variously, literature, written English, Caribbean civilization studies and critical writing for over two decades as adjunct staff at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies. She has been published in several anthologies, including the original BIM Magazine and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). She was First Prize winner of the Inaugural Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award (1998), and in 2008 was one of nine international writers of the IWW (International Writers Workshop) in Hong Kong and China.Show book
Katherine was born on the 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand, the middle child of five. A gifted celloist, at one point she thought she might take it up professionally but writing gradually began to move to the forefront of her interests. Her first writings were published at an early age in school magazines. At 19 Katherine left for England where she met and befriended the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf amongst others. She then travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand. There she began to write the short stories that she would later become so famous for. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. There was another less-heralded side to Katherine’s writings; that of poetry. Her verse certainly reflects much of the themes of her life and interests. Many poems are beautiful, thoughtful, tender and observant works on the human condition. Some though seem out of kilter for so great a talent, almost child-like in form and content. But taken as yet another facet of her work they accomplish much in helping us to understand her. By 1908 she had returned to London and to a rather more bohemian lifestyle. Life was to be lived and enjoyed. A passionate affair resulted in her becoming pregnant and in her being married off to an older man. But she left him the same evening with the marriage unconsummated. She was then to miscarry and be cut out of her mother’s will (allegedly because of her lesbianism). In 1911 she was to start a relationship with John Middleton Murry, a magazine editor, and although it was volatile he supported her work and she wrote some of her best stories. During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the tender age of 34 on 9th January 1923 in Fontainebleau, France.Show book
Irish literary heavyweight Frank O’Connor translates the ribald and raucous Gaelic masterpiece in a work originally banned by the Irish government. As a teacher and translator of Irish verse, Frank O’Connor brought to the world’s attention many fine poems from his native land, few as enduring—and none as controversial—as Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court. An eighteenth-century masterpiece widely recognized as the greatest comic poem in Irish literature, The Midnight Court is a hilarious and insightful take on the battle of the sexes. In the court of a fairy queen, the men and women of Ireland air their grievances with one another. The competing lists of complaints are as long as they are uproarious, and when the queen rules in favor of the women, all young Irish bachelors are doomed to a terrible fate: marriage.The Midnight Court has now taken its rightful place in the Irish literary canon, but when O’Connor’s English translation was first published in 1945, the Irish government banned it as obscene. In a delicious irony that might have been lifted from one of O’Connor’s short stories, the Gaelic original met with no censure. Here, as it first appeared, is Frank O’Connor’s faithful, funny, and eloquent translation of one of the most important works in Irish literature.Show book
