All The Poems

The essential edition of one of modern poetry’s most distinctive voices: all Stevie Smith’s flabbergasting poems, now in paperback Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic movie Stevie. This new and updated edition includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. In addition to the poems and illustrations from all her published volumes, the Smith scholar Will May discovered never-before-published verses and provides fascinating details about their provenance. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Stevie Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

Available at last are all the poems by one of the twentieth century's greatest British writers, Dame Muriel Spark: "a true literary artist, acerbic and exhilarating" (London Evening Standard). In the seventy-three poems collected here Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels, epigrams, and even the tour de force of a twenty-one page ballad. She also shows herself a master of unforgettable short poems. Before attaining fame as a novelist (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Muriel Spark was already an acclaimed poet. The "power and control" of her poetry, as Publishers Weekly remarked, "is almost startling." With the vitality and wit typical of all her work, Dame Muriel has never stopped writing poems, which frequently appear in The New Yorker. As with all her creations, the poems show Spark to be "astonishingly talented and truly inimitable" (The San Francisco Chronicle).

An immersive collection of poetry to open your world, curated by the host of Poetry Unbound This inspiring collection, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig’s illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn’t necessarily know how to do so. Poetry Unbound contains expanded reflections on poems as heard on the podcast, as well as exclusive new selections. Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more.

A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert looks back at the passions of a life—the women, and his memories of all the stages of love; the places (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself. We get illuminating glimpses of the poet’s background and childhood, in poems like “Going Home” (his mother the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a family of rich Virginia merchants) and “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” a classic scene of pulling water from the well, sounding the depths. The title of the collection is drawn from the startling “Ovid in Tears,” in which the poet figure has fallen and is carried out, muttering faintly: “White stone in the white sunlight . . . Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.” Gilbert reminds us that there is beauty to be celebrated in the imperfect—“a worth / to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on”—and at the same time there is “the harrowing by mortality.” Yet, without fail, he embraces the state of grief and loss as part of the dance. The culmination of a career spanning more than half a century of American poetry, The Dance Most of All is a book to celebrate and to read again and again.

This prodigiously rich collection suggests that Raymond Carver was not only America’s finest writer of short fiction, but also one of its most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Carver’s stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy. This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.