Ten Poems For A Picnic

"The chatty informal rhythms and the mix of everyday detail with the universals make this picture book a great family read-aloud." —Booklist "Dawud's latest book A Picnic of Poems is another masterpiece of poetry that captures the essence of every child's hopes, dreams, and fears, in the most colorful and imaginative way. It is a delectable treat for the whole family, filled with beautiful illustrations. Every part has a wonderful lesson to draw from and will provide all, young and old, with great guidance for generations to come." —Zain Bhikha, South African singer/songwriter A collection of thirty poems to keep the young and young-at-heart entertained for hours. These poems cover a number of topics including motherhood, daily prayer, baby siblings, life on a farm, the animal kingdom, bullying, mosques, Ramadan, appreciating nature, and more. The book comes with an audio CD to sing along to these joyful yet educational poems. "A Picnic of Poems" I've packed some poems for lunch, some rhymes for us to chew, a simple, sippy, soup of songs, to stir and sing and stew. Like all good meals to munch, it would be very rude not to begin with bismillah, to bless our poetry food. Canadian-born Dawud Wharnsby began writing poetry, composing music, and performing in his teens. Since then he has become a voice for socially conscious and spiritually minded individuals in the twenty-first century.

Poems for a Picnic, "Expressions of Love" is a collection of poetry and prose meant to be shared with the one you love. So pack a lunch, grab a bottle of wine, a blanket, find your space and simply enjoy each other.

The fourth volume in the popular series that began with Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime focuses on what it means to be truly human. In it, Roger Housden offers us poems on life and death, happiness, seeing ourselves in relation to the world, and, of course, the ineffable—the things that really matter when the chips are down. He describes these passionate poems as “bread for the soul and fire for the spirit.” The poets Housden has chosen are Billy Collins, Hayden Carruth, Dorianne Laux, James Wright, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver from the United States, D. H. Lawrence and John Keats from England, Rainer Maria Rilke from Germany, Fleur Adcock from New Zealand, and Seng-Ts’an from sixth-century China. And yes, that adds up to eleven, not ten. Housden decided to include a bonus poem for his faithful readers in this, the final volume of the series. As before, Housden’s luminous essays provide an elegant and easy passage into the sometimes daunting world of poetry, enabling readers to feel that in him they have found a trusted guide and mentor.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet “illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight” (Booklist). The poems in Charles Simic’s new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger’s front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision. “What is beautiful,’ he writes in one poem, “is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost.” Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives. “This first book of poems since 1999’s Jackstraws continues Simic’s familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . . Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, ‘the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.’ It is a world that should be familiar.” —Publishers Weekly “Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss.” —Booklist

The debut collection of an award-winning Black poet with an unusually warm and compassionate voice

Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry Prize Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."