Complete Poems

At last in print, the complete poems of the great Northumbrian poet--admired by Pound, Yeats, and Zukofsky--containing his masterwork Briggflatts.

Starred Review from Booklist: "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet's work... [a] landmark collection." From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones—an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. 'Such a powerful wounded poet—wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,' said Jorie Graham." Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weeklycalled him, “an untrammeled renegade genius... a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.” NOTE:Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. Print run limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. The box set retails for $85 and ISBN is 9781556596414.

Keats’s first volume of poems, published in 1817, demonstrated both his belief in the consummate power of poetry and his liberal views. While he was criticized by many for his politics, his immediate circle of friends and family immediately recognized his genius. In his short life he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers of the second generation of Romantic poets, with such poems as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. While his writing is illuminated by his exaltation of the imagination and abounds with sensuous descriptions of nature’s beauty, it also explores profound philosophical questions. John Barnard’s acclaimed volume contains all the poems known to have been written by Keats, arranged by date of composition. The texts are lightly modernized and are complemented by extensive notes, a comprehensive introduction, an index of classical names, selected extracts from Keats’s letters and a number of pieces not widely available, including his annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Discovered in an Egyptian papyrus in 1896, the lyrics of Bacchylides are one of the great treasures of Greek poetry. These exquisite choral odes celebrate victories in the Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean, and Olympic games and chronicle the classical gods and heroes, eloquently revealing to us the spirit and world of Golden Age Greece. The poems are brilliantly translated by Robert Fagles, recently hailed by Garry Wills in the New Yorker as "the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English." First published in 1961, the book now includes a new translator's note by Fagles. " Fagles] has produced a work which is at once a faithful translation of Bacchylides in the fullest sense and something which stands and lives in its own right as a work of art."--Sir Maurice Bowra, from the Foreword "Fagles has created . . . a musical and craftsmanly series of verses. As a translator, Fagles has the merits of . . . keeping the lilting rhythms of Bacchylides alive in one's ear . . . and unearthing metaphors behind faded Greek words, of splitting the strings of compound adjectives into pungent clauses which lose nothing in color but make coordinated English."--Emily Vermeule, American Journal of Philology "The beauty, richness, and classic quality of Mr. Fagles's unrhymed verse make this translation a creative work and a valuable contribution to English letters."--Rae Dalven, Poetry

An eminent Canadian man of letters, scholar, naval officer and secret intelligence agent, CBC scriptwriter, musician, biographer, and translator, George Whalley (1915-1983) was also a gifted poet whose work spans five decades. Along with his major critical work, Poetic Process, and his superb biography, The Legend of John Hornby, Whalley’s poetry is an important contribution to the emergence and development of twentieth-century modernism. The Complete Poems of George Whalley is the first collection of Whalley’s entire poetic oeuvre. It contains the previously published work from his two books of poetry, Poems 1939-1944 and No Man An Island, as well as pieces that appeared in periodicals and edited collections. It gathers all his unpublished poems found in public archives and his personal papers, letters, and journals. This collection reinforces Whalley’s place as the foremost Canadian poet of the Second World War, during and immediately after which the majority of these works were written. It also emphasizes the humour and playfulness of his early and late poems. Michael DiSanto’s introduction provides an overview of Whalley’s life and career, and examines the relationship between his poetics and criticism by consulting his essays, letters, and unpublished papers. Restoring Whalley’s poetry and literary contributions to their rightful place in the Canadian canon, this comprehensive collection opens new chapters on mid-twentieth-century modernism and war poetry.