Selection From The Poems Of Ma

Poetry. Translated by Stephen Nashef. The poetry of Ma Yan, born in 1979 in Sichuan province, has garnered increasing attention in China since her untimely death in 2010. She stands out as a poet who is simultaneously playful and fearless in her explorations of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, writing intimate yet arresting poetry of great emotional breadth. Her work delves into questions of gender, mental health, death, desire, physicality and our personal interactions to show how they all shape the raw experience of existence. I NAME HIM ME is the first collection of her poetry to appear in English.

One of the astonishing aspects of [Oliver's] work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets. . . . These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major Romantic poets and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English Language. In this volume, the editors have selected the most popular, significant and frequently taught poems from the six-volume Longman Annotated edition of Shelley’s poems. Each poem is fully annotated, explained and contextualised, along with a comprehensive list of abbreviations, an inclusive bibliography of material relating to the text and interpretation of Shelley’s poetry, plus an extensive chronology of Shelley’s life and works. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary for an informed reading of Shelley’s richly varied and densely allusive verse, making this an ideal anthology for students, classroom use, and anyone approaching Shelley’s poetry for the first time; however the level and extent of commentary and annotation will also be of great value for researchers and critics.