From A Woman Under the Surface: MOON AND EARTH Of one substance, of one Matter, they have cruelly Broken apart. They never will touch Each other again. The shining Lovelier and younger Turns away, a pitiful girl. She is completely naked And it hurts. The larger Motherly one, breathlessly luminous Emerald, and blue, and white Traveling mists, suffers Birth and death, birth and death, and the shock Of internal heat killed by external cold. They are dancing through that blackness. They press as if To come closer.

Ben Belitt writes, "This volume—my fifth—extends and deepens a preoccupation I have had with the visible and invisible manifestations of people, places, and things. It offers a variety of poems of formal and textural density and, in addition, a system of 'doublings' and 'solitudes' whose oppositions express the drama of reality and appearance." Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"For the sake of contraption (like Frost) and of character (like Robinson), John Burt will do a great deal, and his scope and scansion require a great deal, for his theme is nothing less than the reinvention of heroism (King Mark, Mary of Nazareth, St. Francis, Paolo and Francesca, Ariadne) and the invention of a new heroics (Woodrow Wilson, Willard Gibbs). As attentive to ekphrasis as to the sonnet's narrow room, Burt feels what he knows, and he knows that we can learn from the past only by repeating it. A grand achievement!"—Richard Howard. Almost all these poems are narrative, telling stories that turn on some small but crucial shift of sensibility. One hears in them a speaking rather than a singing voice, a voice which, for all its formality and gravity, remains oral and sociable, a voice which tells things rather than spins charms. Their predominant mood is lucid asperity, sometimes breaking out into the angry Calvinism they always barely keep down, sometimes striving to achieve a humane skepticism that always just eludes them. The book consists of two sections, one concerned with the cruxes and contradictions of private feeling, the other with the unraveling of the public world. Each section centers on a long narrative poem that culminates the building tensions of the poems that precede it and makes possible the resolutions that follow them. Sonnet I from "St. Francis and the Wolf" Saved at last, not at the last of me, I knelt two-legged, made of guttural air A little yelp to sound like human prayer. The saints were cautious, understandably. I took the cup, and managed not to drool, But dreamed the wine was blood, as I'd been taught, And vainly curbed the vain bent of my thought. I knew myself an angel, felt a fool. Could God have erred in making teeth and maw? Then for his glory I will bite the lamb Whose terror he transmogrifies to awe That I may do his service as I am, Till as I am I leap the mortal gulf To rage in heaven, a perfected wolf. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The description for this book will be forthcoming. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Describing this collection of his poems, John Allman writes, "It is a book about the inner and outer worlds, a collection of multiple voices and relationships. In one sense it is about suffering, family, and survival. However, it is also about a world beyond such things, where identity burns by itself, where the self-changes but never dies. The book says that only change happens, but that survival without will and compassion is meaningless. The title, taken from a line in one of the book's ritual lyrics, suggests the four dimensions of human consciousness and effort, and the book strives to name or embody as many landscapes as possible—though it is the 'vertical' one given to religion and death that remains an abiding puzzle." Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Every poet has one or two compulsive themes," writes Leonard Nathan. "One of mine is how to make things fit together that don't but should; the other is getting down far enough below a surface to see if something is still worth praising. Over the years and without self-consciously trying. I have moved closer and closer to the human voice in my verse. But I have also tried to keep a quality in it―for lack of a better word, I call it eloquence―that makes it more than conversation. My hope is to be clear, true, and good listening." Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The poems in Rachel Hadas' new book are united by a common preoccupation with passage—passage variously construed. In Section I, the four seasons are glimpsed in turn through the lenses of several types of personal associations, especially parenthood. As spring gives way to fall and winter, separation looms; diverse kinds of temporary and permanent renewal come with spring, and the fifth poem in this section steps outside this cycle. In Section II, the phrase "pass it on" recalls the game "telephone," in which a word is whispered by one speaker to another. Here the poems focus on tradition, primarily as it is transmitted through teaching, but also through art and again parenthood. Thoughts on teaching specific texts (the Iliad, Dickinson's poems, Sophocles' Philoctetes) alternate with more personal moments of contemplation. Finally, in Section III "pass it on" comes to signify transition—whether between spring and summer, city and country, youth and age, presence and absence, or life and death. From "Three Silences": Of all the times when not to speak is best, mother's and infant's is the easiest, the milky mouth still warm against her breast. Before a single year has passed, he's well along the language has cast its spell. Each thing he sees now has a tale to tell. A wide expanse of water-cean. Look! Next time, it seems that water is a brook. The world's loose leaves, bound up into a book. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Between the discovery that there is a design which only his poetry enables him to find as he confronts the world and the discovery that such a design is a snare, merely a means of keeping him from further discernment, Michael Rosen is wedged, is productively pinioned, \[ should say, for it is just this pressure—of meaning discerned on one hand and of meaning distrusted on the other—which makes the tension of these poems, a new version of the old wars between mind and body, memory and hope, self and surround. How tender and inclusive are Rosen's preoccupations, and how disabused his conclusions! One reads these playful, stricken poems with wonder—how will such ventures conclude, or even persist? What will happen next? Here is a poet who persuades us, as the saying goes, to stay tuned."—Richard Howard Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

While seeming to affirm the Western poetic and cultural tradition, Greger attacks its rational heart. The subjects of her poems—Mozart operas, Botticelli's Three Graces, narcissus flowers—are the vestments of aristocratic Europe, but her poetic issue is stream-of-consciousness. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This work concerns questions of loss and restitution, decline and recovery—questions best explored through the shifting revelations of narrative that are possible in a longer poem. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Most of these poems first appeared in Poetry magazine in the decade from 1967-76 and quickly became underground classics. Brought together here—with more recent work—they reveal their coherence and their urgency. From Blake's Seasons: To Spring My God! The morning buttonholed me and you, Young Spring, slid down the facets from its crystal-Linity; can you see us here, this earth mote, Now it unites millions' faces turned for you? The earth budges and peopled calls to itself, And swells with us and our echoes towards your Lucent enshrining; withdraw that consent just Once, come smooth and sharp to stand within our voice! Try rising with the sun as I have seen you So our breath may catch at your warmth, lapped and tamed In daily humbling; in dew and jewels embrace The wintered soil still wincing from its last loss. With your cherishing, deft hands, yourself, garnish Her naked force, with your tongue luster her skin; Then leave her flare with your bewildering flame, Whose clear flesh was bounded to abound in you. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Set four hundred years in the future, Frederick Turner's epic poem, The New World, celebrates American culture in A.D. 2376. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Writing about poetry Diana O'Hehir says, "I think of poetry as harnessed energy—as a marvelous way of taking the chaotic emotion, the turbulent perception, and recreating them as images that are specific, definite, directed. Miraculously, when this process works, it's one of expansion rather than diminution; the fortunate poet can reach out beyond the walls of separate personality into a general air that everyone breathes. I think of my own poetry as intense, imagistic, surreal, and personal, and try to write about perceptions which have pushed me toward change or renewal." For the last six years Diana O'Hehir has been writing poetry and has had poems published in Antaeus, Kayak, Poetry Northwest, and Southern Poetry Review. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This volume of Alvin Feinman's poems presents a highly praised earlier work, Preambles and Other Poems, combined with more recent poems. Of Preambles Allen Tate wrote, "This is a remarkable first book... There is an acute and subtle sensibility at work. 'Pilgrim Heights' is one of the best poems by an American that I have seen in many years.' " From "Pilgrim Heights" Something, something, the heart here Misses, something it knows it needs Unable to bless—the wind passes; A swifter shadow sweeps the reeds, The heart a colder contrast brushes. So this fool, face-forward, belly Pressed among the rushes, plays out His pulse to the dune's long slant Down from blue to bluer element, The bold encompassing drink of air And namelessness, a length compound Of want and oneness the shore's mumbling Distantly tells—something a wing's Dry pivot stresses, carved Through barrens of stillness and glare. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"The poems are elegies for everything, including myself," writes James Richardson. "Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its surroundings, threatened by their (and its own) continuous vanishing. The poems respond with a helplessness, fitful control, and not a little tenderness. Like the protagonists of The Encyclopedia of A Pastoral, I am very slow, both unsettled and inspired by the vertiginous strangeness and speed of events. I suspect these melancholy and disembodied poems are attempts to arrest the moment long enough to say farewell, to let things go rather than be subject to their disappearance." Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry The Scottish poet Niall Campbell's first book, Moontide, won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, the largest such prize in the United Kingdom, was named the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for both the Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward prizes for best first collection. First Nights ―which includes all the poems in Moontide and sixteen new ones―marks the North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry. First Nights offers vivid descriptions of the natural world, and the joy found in moments of quiet, alongside intimate depictions of new parenthood. Campbell grew up on the remote, sparsely populated islands of South Uist and Eriskay in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, and First Nights is filled with images of the islands’ seascapes, myths, wildlife, and long, dark winters. But the poems widen beyond their immediate locations to include thoughts on sculpture and mythology, Zola and Dostoevsky, and life in English cities and French villages. In the poems on early fatherhood, the geography shifts from coastal stretches to bare, dimly lit rooms. Stripped back, honest, and immediate, these poems capture moments of vulnerability, when the only answer is to love. Combining skilled storytelling, precise language, an allegiance to meter and form, and a quiet musicality, these poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love, and the stillness of solitude. The result is a collection that promises to be a classic.

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York CityScaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, El�na Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air―a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

From an “uncommonly fluent” and “rewarding” poet ( The Observer ), a collection of miniature epics that can grace be found amid disarray? The New World, Anthony Carelli’s new collection of poems, is an American travelogue that unfolds in a series of darkly comic episodes, with allusions to Dante as a thread throughout. In these epics in miniature, we meet a pilgrim-poet as he awaits the arrival of his child, a would-be Columbus, on the shores of a land “disenstoried” by explorers present and past. It’s a land and a people largely lost in mindscapes and mythscapes, haunted by sketchy aspirational visions, misbegotten misremembering, and emptiness. Nonetheless, the poet steps out to the shore to sing for the child―and reader―to do what Columbus never “land gently. / And listen and / listen and listen / and stay.” Constantly unsettling the rhetoric of inherited forms, the poet shaping these poems is always bound to the pilgrim, who cannot pretend to dissolve our purgatories but can only invite us―as a latter-day Virgil would―deeper into the uncanny encounters that encircle us. From an Arizona nursing home and a grandmother's memory of a stolen golden Schwinn in the occupied Philippines, to a tale of road-tripping west through Pennsylvania as sunrise transpires in the wrong sky, The New World opens strange spaces for us to re-see, lament, and re-sing the stories we tell.