By Philip Schultz
This superb Pulitzer Prize-winning collection gives voice to failure with a wry, deft touch from one of this country’s most engaging and uncompromising poets. In Failure, Philip Schultz evokes the pleasures of family, marriage, beaches and dogs, New York City in the 1970s, revolutions both interior and exterior, and the terrors of 9/11 with a compassion that demonstrates he is a master of the bittersweet and fierce, the wondrous and direct, and the brilliantly provocative. Filled with poems of “heartbreaking tenderness that [go] beyond mere pity” (Gerald Stern), Failure is a collection to savor from this major American voice.
By Charles Simic
In his eighteenth collection, Charles Simic, the superb poet of the vaguely ominous sound and the disturbing, potentially significant image, moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior. Simic understands the strange interplay between ordinary life and extremes, between reality and imagination, and he writes with absolute purity about those contradictory but simultaneous states of being or feeling: "Everything about you / My life, is both / Make-believe and real."
A profoundly important poet for our time, and a stunning book.
By Galway Kinnell
A serious illness at the age of six left Josephine Dickinson deaf overnight. She nonetheless built an astounding career as a musician, composer, and teacher while also writing poetry filled with sound and rhythm. During a reading tour in England, Galway Kinnell was given two of Dickinson's books. Her poems made such an impression on him that he passed the books on to his publisher. Silence Fell, Dickinson's American debut, draws from her previous collections. The poems are set on a sheep farm in the northern mountains of England and tell the story -- in the form of a modern shepherd's calendar -- of her marriage to a Cumbrian sheep farmer, a man more than twice her age, and their life together, until his death in 2004. As the poet Michael Donaghy wrote, "Hers is a vision edged with mystery and rendered with arresting, occasionally breathtaking craft. She bears, with no small authority, an air of independence reminiscent of Emily Dickinson."
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Poetry
Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965-1975, a volume of selections from Atwood's poetry of that decade.
Brave and compassionate
The Door, Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry since her award-winning Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. These fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood’s unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.
Painstakingly Honest
Donald Hall’s remarkable life in poetry — a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 — comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir. At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes — his first book since being named poet laureate — both revelatory and tremendously poignant.
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