Drifting With Clouds Living By Poetry

How did poets from the "Rivers and Lakes," a realm defined by its remoteness from the central government, navigate and transform the field of classical poetry, a "high" genre of the scholar-officials class? What did it mean for them to "make a living" out of poetry? Zhang Hongsheng answers those questions in this comprehensive study of the Rivers and Lakes Poetry Movement (Jianghu shipai).

Poetry. This anthology gathers together over 1500 years of Chinese Zen (Ch'an) poetry from the earliest writing, including the Hsin Hsin Ming written by the 3rd Patriarch, to the poetry of monks in this century. Poets include Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Yuan Mei, the crazy hermits Han-shan and Shih-te, as well as many anonymous monks and hermits.

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

"Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud" is the latest offering from enigmatic prose-poet Killarney Clary. Like her earlier book, "Potential Stranger," this is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems. "Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud," in poem after poem, evokes crystal-clear moments in time in fraught domestic relationships. One can almost hear the speakers inhaling and exhaling worry or gratitude in the spaces between speech, emulating or reflecting the sparkling or bleak landscapes around them. In a poem that begins We watched ravens, ostensibly about two people in a car at a truck-stop on a desert highway, the speaker muses: As long as we were not speaking, I wouldn t hear what I was afraid you d say. I wouldn t say the words I d be sorry for. Doesn t the wind need to rest? A motley sparrow turned his working, calico eye to the sun, heated the mites then dusted them. Tending to himself, he looked bad. In another poem that begins There went my chance to say: "I never said that." We are on the phone. I am wondering, "Could I have said that?" as you speak forward into other news, what might be. I run behind, see what you have missed. I am missing too. Oh but what I let you say. This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary s strongest, most engaging book to date, and amply shows her to be the master of this most difficult of lyric genres."

"The world is touched and stands forth," writes Mary Kinzie in this book of seductive poetic experiment. In lines by turns fragmented and reflective, she shatters and reassembles such curiosities as an engraving by Albrecht Durer and the portrait of a notorious suicide whose children develop a secret telepathy. In one of her many powerful longer pieces, she collects glittering shards from myriad versions of the Cinderella story: "Was the young girl running out of it because --recall the blood within the shoe?-- it hurt her? Kinzie's verse moves mysteriously between folk-lore and urban devastation, between white magic and the concoction of mood drugs in the modern laboratory. In each poem, she draws our attention to the chinks of light in the dark narratives that surround us, in a language animated by her sympathy and deep moral intelligence.

A fresh translation--and new envisioning--of the most accessible and beloved of all classic Chinese poetry. Welcome to the magical, windswept world of Cold Mountain. These poems from the literary riches of China have long been celebrated by cultures of both East and West—and continue to be revered as among the most inspiring and enduring works of poetry worldwide. This groundbreaking new translation presents the full corpus of poetry traditionally associated with Hanshan (“Cold Mountain”) and sheds light on its origins and authorship like never before. Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt honor the contemplative Buddhist elements of this classic collection of poems while revealing Hanshan’s famously jubilant humor, deep love of solitude in nature, and overwhelming warmth of heart. In addition, this translation features the full Chinese text of the original poems and a wealth of fascinating supplements, including traditional historical records, an in-depth study of the Cold Mountain poets (here presented as three distinct authors), and more.

Poems by Ken Norris.