Water S Leaves Other Poems

Winner of the 2004 Verse Prize, this second collection confirms Nutter's reputation for strange, beautiful, original work.

A collection of poems that provide a look at some of the animals, insects, and plants that are found in ponds, with accompanying information about each.

Leaves of Water is an inspirational, thought-provoking poetry book with poems featuring such topics as the calming symphony of rain on the leaves, the silence of the wind and the glory of God. Fr. Ralph Wright, who is a poet of great distinction, pens works that reflect his knowledge of and respect for the masters. His images are both beautiful and startling; his metaphors perceptive, his use of rhyme natural. His expertise lies in the unity of word and idea that is the essence of poetry. Leaves of Water is his sixth book of verse. The poetry of leaves of water is never obscure but nevertheless demands that we return, again and again, to delight in and savor both words and subtle meanings. Leaves of Water offers a soothing escape from the pressures and turmoil of every day life.

How to find wisdom and spiritual sustenance in a time of crisis and uncertainty? In Divine Fire, David Woo answers with poems that move from private life into a wider world of catastrophe and renewal. The collection opens in the most personal space, a bedroom, where the chaotic intrusions of adulthood revive the bafflements of childhood. The perspective soon widens from the intimacies of love to issues of national and global import, such as race and class inequality, and then to an unspoken cataclysm that is, by turns, a spiritual apocalypse and a crisis that could be in the news today, like climate change or the pandemic. In the last part of the book, the search for ever-vaster scales of meaning, both sacred and profane, finds the poet trying on different personas and sensibilities—comic, ironic, earnest, literary, self-mythologizing— before reaching a luminous détente with the fearful and the sublime. The divine fire of lovers fading in memory—“shades of the men in my blood”—becomes the divine fire of a larger spiritual reckoning. In his new book of poems, Woo provides an astonishing vision of the world right now through his exploration of timeless themes of love, solitude, art, the body, and death.

Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize • An illuminating collection of poems from the middle of Carver's career that “function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge” (The New York Times). "The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." —The Village Voice "There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poems of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms.... They are very moving, very memorable." —Poetry

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Leaves of Water is Fr. Ralph Wright's sixth book of poetry. It contains twenty-eight new poems and selected poems from 1978-1992. Leaves of Water again shows Wright as a poet of great distinction whose work can delight and surprise the reader with his keen eye for observation and subtle sense of humor, while being inspirational and spiritual in the very best sense of these words. His poems evoke images both beautiful and startling. His metaphors are perceptive, his use of rhyme natural. Wright's gift lies in the unity of word and idea that is the essence of poetry and is expressed so well in the title poem.

A Romantic View of Poetry was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Poetry is of the very essence of living. In this belief Joseph Warren Beach discusses the ways in which poet and reader create and live "a being more intense" and thereby fulfill the function of poetry. "Wherever there is life," says Beach, "there poetry is present potentially and in its rudiments . . . and poetry, as I conceive it, is the sovereign means we have of realizing the satisfaction which we take in living." Against the background of the Romantic School, he develops a pattern for the understanding of poetry that applies to all schools and to all readers. Poetry of realization and release cannot be circumscribed. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley stand here as examples of the poetic artist. And every person who responds to the work of the poet shares with him the imaginative stimulus of poetic creation. A Romantic View of Poetry consists of a series of lectures delivered by Mr. Beach at the Johns Hopkins University in 1941 on the Percy Turnball Memorial Foundation.