poems

author: Clive Watkins ASIN or ISBN-10: 1904130100 binding: Paperback list price: $18.95 USD amazon price: $18.95 USD

Watkins is a poet's poet, a masterful writer of metrical verse-rhymed and blank-but one whose free verse is as good as his formal, a rare achievement""-Timothy Murphy. The poems and few translations (Hugo, Heine, Rilke) included in this collection were written over a period of more than twenty years, and are set in a variety of landscapes, including the poet's native Yorkshire, and locations across Europe.

author: Yvor Winters ASIN or ISBN-10: 0804010137 binding: Paperback list price: $14.95 USD amazon price: $14.95 USD

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. This retrospective of one hundred poems, edited by the poet and publisher R. L. Barth, is compiled from Winters's published and unpublished work and features an introductory overview of his life and career by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, a former student of Winters's and a distinguished scholar of American literature.

author: Suzanne J. Doyle ASIN or ISBN-10: 0974114316 binding: Paperback list price: $8.50 USD amazon price: $8.50 USD

Suzanne Doyle, in her first volume of poems in more than a decade, grapples with despair and loss, with a fierce formality whose only antecedents may be Baudelaire and Cunningham. Lucid and rich with meaning, these poems will leave you knowing you have been somewhere.

author: Turner Cassity ASIN or ISBN-10: 080401051X binding: Paperback list price: $14.95 USD amazon price: $22.46 USD

IF you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun. Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state.

author: Turner Cassity ASIN or ISBN-10: 0226096157 binding: Paperback list price: $13.00 USD amazon price: $13.00 USD

"With my eyes closed, I might have guessed a collaboration between William Empson and Noel Coward. But of course no one could have made up Turner Cassity but himself. The man is a wizard. In these new poems, each as clear and mysterious as crystal, he has conjured all sorts of miniature wonders and nasty home truths. It is the devil's own sorcery—and pure enchantment."—J. D. McClatchy

author: Turner Cassity ASIN or ISBN-10: 0226096173 binding: Paperback list price: $14.00 USD amazon price: $14.00 USD

"With my eyes closed, I might have guessed a collaboration between William Empson and Noel Coward," J. D. McClatchy has said of Turner Cassity's poems. Cassity's new collection turns an icy needle-spray on topics as diverse as a Polynesian firedance, Johannes Brahms, and the Banque de l'Indo-Chine. Breaking a pact with himself, Cassity has written two poems about the South, which, the poet claims, are unlikely "to cause professional Southerners anything except discomfort." "Turner Cassity's excellent work is like no one else's.

author: Turner Cassity ASIN or ISBN-10: 0821412221 binding: Paperback list price: $15.95 USD amazon price: $15.95 USD

Just when you think you are in the midst of a traditional, formal poem, Turner Cassity turns satin into sting. A native of Jackson, Mississippi--like writers Eudora Welty and Richard Wright--Cassity ranges the world in subject matter, from "Berlin to Baghdad" to "Texarkana," always exposing elements that are risky to divulge and often hilarious to contemplate. In "Why Fortune Is the Empress of the World," humanity is depicted "in overcrowded lifeboats" drawing lots. In "Domestic Symphony" Cassity resolves, "Say Heaven is this treehouse we have sinned in. / Our wine is ready.

author: Turner Cassity ASIN or ISBN-10: 0804011036 binding: Paperback list price: $12.95 USD amazon price: $11.01 USD

As he approaches eighty, Turner Cassity may finally be out of control. His hatchet has never fallen more lethally, meaning if you have the stomach for him he is more enjoyable than ever. Under the blade come Martha Graham, Johann Sebastian Bach, musicologists, tree huggers, Frank Gehry, folk music, folk art of all times and all places, folk. . . . There are, however, his unpredictable sympathies: Edith Wilson, skyscrapers, Pontius Pilate, Pilate’s legionnaires. He obviously has a soft spot for Pop Culture, although he cannot avoid seeing it de haut en bas.