Poetry Anthology

A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.

An anthology of the best poetry ever written contains more than sixteen hundred poems, spanning more than four millennia, from ancient Sumer and Egypt to the late twentieth century

An anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, featuring Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and many others.

Among the poets new to this edition are such leading names as Americans Robert Pinsky, Louise Erdrich and Louise Glück; Britons James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy; and Canadians Anne Carson, Robert Bringhurst, and Christian Bök. A number of names who may be new to many readers of poetry are also included among them: Ohioan Debra Allbery, Vancouverite Elise Partridge, and the Cree poet Connie Fife; as with the first edition, the editors have endeavored to include much that is fresh as well as much that is familiar. There are many additions to the selections from poets who appeared in the first edition including selections from the recent work of Leonard Cohen, Les Murray, and Margaret Atwood. As before, the anthology includes work from English-language poets throughout the world from India, Africa, and the Caribbean as well as from Britain, North America, and Australia. Although the selections from the work of poets of earlier eras are largely unchanged from the first edition, there have been some changes; among poems added for this edition are Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Bradstreet’s “Employment,” Dickinson’s “I cannot live without You,” Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” and Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” As before, the text emphasizes work of the past century; poems from 1900 or later take up more than half of the anthology’s pages. In its first edition The Broadview Anthology of Poetry included biographical information about the poets at the back of the anthology; for the new edition, biographical material appears in a headnote to each poet. Two other features are also new to this edition: the date of first publication is appended after each poem, and line numbering is used throughout. The numbers have been kept unobtrusive, however; as with the first edition, the designers have endeavored to give a clean look to the pages of the anthology. A substantial section on prosody, figures of speech, and so on is included as an appendix.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the shortlist of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections. Featuring works from shortlisted poets Victoria Chang, Changtai Bi, Joseph Dandurand, Canisia Lubrin, Valzhyna Mort, Srikanth Reddy, Yusuf Saadi, Tracy K. Smith, and Yi Lei.

R.M. Liuzza’s Broadview edition of Beowulf was published at almost exactly the same time as Seamus Heaney’s; in reviewing the two together in July 2000 for The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode concluded that both translations were superior to their predecessors, and that it was impossible to choose between the two: “the less celebrated translator can be matched with the famous one,” he wrote, and “Liuzza’s book is in some respects more useful than Heaney’s.” Ever since, the Liuzza Beowulf has remained among the top sellers on the Broadview list. With this volume readers will now be able to enjoy a much broader selection of Old English poetry in translations by Liuzza. As the collection demonstrates, the range and diversity of the works that have survived is extraordinary—from heartbreaking sorrow to wide-eyed wonder, from the wisdom of old age to the hot blood of battle, and to the deepest and most poignant loneliness. There is breathless storytelling and ponderous cataloguing; there is fervent religious devotion and playful teasing. The poems translated here are meant to provide a sense of some of this range and diversity; in doing so they also offer significant portions of three of the important manuscripts of Old English poetry—the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Exeter Book.

Nobel Laureate Milosz's personal selection of the world's greatest poetry, selected for their language, imagery, and ability to move the reader. Poems range from eighth-century China to contemporary America.