Poetry And Pearls

A true romantic at heart, N.R.Hart expresses feelings of love, hope, passion, despair, vulnerability and romance in her poetry. Trapping time forever and a keeper of memories is what she loves most about the enduring power of poetry. Her poetry has been so eloquently described as "words delicately placed inside a storm." Poetry is here to make us feel instead of think; as thinking is for the mind and poetry is for the heart and soul. N.R.Hart hopes to open up your heart and touch your soul with her poetry.

"Finch's translations will add much to the pleasure and value of teaching and learning late medieval English history."—Robert Brentano, author of Two Churches "Casey Finch has found an idiom in which these poems can speak Modern English, and in doing so can convey the most elusive and complex effects of the originals. . . . He has conveyed the vitality of these poems in a verse that is as assured, gracious, blunt, urgent, plangent, rich, and perpetually surprising as that of the unknown poet or poets who made them. These brilliant poems have at last found a craftsman who understands the secrets of their intricate luminosity, a faithful steward of a distinctive verbal treasure of the language. In this translation these poems shine as brightly and clearly as they did when newly made, pearls without peer in English."—Anne Middleton, University of California, Berkeley

N.R.Hart's whimsical romantic flair captures the true essence of love in her poetry. She expresses so authentically her insight on love as she believes love to be many things, least of all predictable. Love will surprise you when you least expect it. Beauty and Her Beast is a book of poems about love and romance, passion and longing, loss and heartbreak. Understanding that all these things... are in the name of love. You won't always recognize the heroes of your story while you are living it, but you will understand much later how you were saved by them.

This is a book of poems about love, romance, loss, heartbreak, and survival. A voice for the lost loves, the found loves, the silent loves, the unrequited loves. To those who have loved and lost and keep on loving, despite it all. These love poems are to no one.

"City of Pearls is one continuous gift-giver. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem lusciously, unselfishly and most certainly, unapologetically shares with us the magic and glory of story. Stories made from lived lives...full with words and images that speak of...place, purpose, father, family, fragility, strength, beauty, suffering, celebration. Stories to hold us tight...and inspire us to continue dreaming through it all." --Ursula Rucker, author of Supa Sista "I was brought back to the landscapes of my childhood by these sensitive poems. So quietly but firmly do they evoke not only the shattered rocks of Hyderabad but also the ways in which some of us live perpetually between, belong neither to one place nor the other, always in transit, always hoping for news from 'home.'" --Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition "This book is a hamlet, a jewel box, a compass. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem strings the tender odds and ends of memory into a dazzling odyssey across the continents of daughterhood and motherhood. We are born from places as much as people, these poems remind us. City of Pearls soars with the dignity mined from a life lit with leavings." --Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro "There is nothing more important to love than memory, and Sham-e-Ali's stunning debut collection is full of love. Awash in the fragrance of mourning and yearning, these poems stretch out, split into tributaries, condense into coral clouds - above all, they nourish. Both affectionate and merciless, this book is a "place where it all worked out." It is a gift to breathe with it."--Bao Phi, author of Thousand Star Hotel

In Blood Flower, passionate imagery married to music bursts from each line pushing out the boundaries of Uschuk's earlier poems. It continues themes in Uschuk's American Book Award winner, Crazy Love. The poems braid the startling, sometimes brutal stories of her Russian/Czech immigrant family during the McCarthy Era in a conservative Michigan farming community with stories of veterans with stories of courageous individuals, especially women, who persevere to love, despite it all. Uschuk's step-grandfather, father, brother, nephews and first husband suffered severe PTSD as combat veterans who returned home from wars that ravished not only their lives but the lives of the women and children closest to them. This is the history not just of one family but the history of immigrants in this nation. These poems, although set in landscapes across the globe, commonly draw their imagery and healing from the natural world, the wild world, and the integrity of the human heart.

This is the first comprehensive and comparative study of compositional and stylistic techniques in medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry. Ranging over some seven countries, it deals with works by over thirty poets in the Islamic world from Spain to present-day Afghanistan, and examines how this rich poetic traditions exhibits both continuity and development in the use of a wide variety of compositional strategies. Discussing such topics as principles of structural organisation, the use of rhetorical figures, metaphor and images, and providing detailed analyses of a large number of poetic texts, it shows how structural and semantic features interacted to bring coherence and meaning to the individual poem. It also examines works by the indigenous critics of poetry in both Arabic and Persian, and demonstrates the critics' awareness of, and interest in, the techniques which poets employed to construct poems which were both eloquent and meaningful. Comparisons are also made with classical and medieval poetics in the west. The book will be of interest not merely to specialists in the relevant fields, but also to all those interested in pre-modern poetry and poetics.