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Poetry Backlist (see more poets) |
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Poetry from America's Poet Laureate of 2002. His metaphysical wit and cosmic puzzlement, expressed always in clean, direct, unpretentious idiom, will touch every reader who is fascinated by the play of a truly original imagination and a disarming way of seeing the world. (more …) 2006, Originally published April 1988 |
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"Few contemporary poets can manipulate light with the care and effectiveness of this one. These poems glow from within, although that light often comes from a tiny flicker or a drug-induced warmth. His surfaces come to life with texture and color from the play of light upon them, and the dreadful becomes even more dreadful in such a rich, luminous world." —Richard Shelton 1997 |
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"Appleman should gain well-deserved attention from this cohesive and substantial collection. His voice is quietly lyrical and deeply rooted in the everyday yet somehow drenched with passion" —ALA Booklist 1996, 280 pages |
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The poems’ contemplative, rigorous intelligence affirms pleasure in the fallen world, picking out the golden thread in a dark tapestry. (more …) 2003 |
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"This book avows that Bruce Bond is a good man making poems of a high and vital order." (more …) —Donald Revell, author of There Are 3: Poems 2001, 88 pages |
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Joe Bolton studied universal connections—the tension between the transitory beauty of the physical world and a yearning for the eternal. He turned his eye to the world, to the cultures and the people around him, and saw reflections of himself. In this collection, he works in both free verse and traditional forms, rendering scenes of exquisite detail that pry into the hearts of his characters and reveal the contradictions that bind father to son, lover to lover, and person to person. From the broken hills and drowsy river valleys around Paducah, Kentucky, to Houston diners and Gulf Coast shrimp boats, to the tropical cityscape of Miami, Bolton creates vivid scenes in which his characters confront the loneliness and the "little music" of their lives. With a richly musical voice and an ear for the cadences of everyday speech, Bolton gives his readers not the trappings of love and grief, but the very things themselves, rendered in lines that reverberate with the authority of sincerity and truth. Joe Bolton was born in Cadiz, Kentucky, in 1961 and received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. He taught at both the University of Arizona and the University of Florida at Gainesville. His work appeared in numerous magazines, and he published two collections of poetry, Breckinridge County Suite (The Cummington Press, 1987) and Days of Summer Gone (Galileo Press, 1990). Mr. Bolton took his own life in March 1990 at the age of twenty-eight. 1999 |
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The Conservator's Song is at once a collection of poems of wit and manners, a social commentary wrought with hard-won irony, and a work of cool compassion in recognition of the grace, or lack of grace, with which we seek to disguise our flaws, real or imagined. 1993, 88 pages |
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Michael Bugeja elegantly reveals the poetry of plain speech, showcasing those moments when words change people's lives. Working in pantoums, sonnet crowns, villanelles, sestinas, and many other forms, Bugeja mines the finest gems of human conversation, discovering a language charged with feeling and wisdom. 1997, 72 pages |
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In his plain-spoken lyrics and dramatic monologues, Michael Burns digs at the marrow of living. His poems—in formal and free verse—are quick, incisive, and always capable of revealing the dark whimsy fate can deal us and the pain of our own actions and inactions. 1998, 80 pages |
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". . . as elegant as the poems themselves. . . . The poems are back in circulation—just for reading; just for enjoyment." —Minneapolis Star Tribune OUT OF PRINT |
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Strong and sensuous, William Dickey's poetry offers no excuses for living and loving. 1994, 120 pages |
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In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence. Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player's hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives. Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won. 96 pages |
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Alice Friman writes her poems with a razor-like intensity. Her metaphors slice through comfortable conventions of nature, family, love, and history. Vultures flock to carrion and "spread / their wings into a tablecloth of frenzy." A male lion takes a dead leopard's head "in his jaws, argues it like a cat with a mole." (more …) 1999, 80 pages |
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In Story Hour, Hay takes many well-known—"Jack and the Beanstalk," "Beauty and the Beast," "Little Red Riding Hood"—and turns them on end. Whether quickening our memory to the darkenss only hinted at before or highlighting the great joke we never caught, her poems always invite us back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we know so well." 1998, 72 pages |
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1988 |
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These poems are the best poems from Jonathan Holden's first seven books, four of which have won significant national competitions. Holden's command of language is staggering, and his range of subjects is extensive. He writes about sex, mathematics, nationalism, propaganda, baseball, and blackmail with an emotional honesty that pushes his observations in surprising directions that the reader can never anticipate. (more …) 2000, 144 pages |
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1995 |
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Humes employs language that is always direct, full of zinnias and mine acid, bakery trucks, red-tailed hawks, and maggots. Out of these concrete images, he builds structural and emotional tensions that give his poems a powerful presence. Like the dirt of Pennsylvania hillsides, like pollen, like the leavings of a butterfly's wings, these poems remain on our hands and in our minds, affecting us long after the book is put down. Author, winner of the 8th Annual World's Best Short Short Story Contest 1995, 72 pages |
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Winner of the eighth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, Martin Lammon writes poems that deal fearlessly and directly with their subjects. Tenderness, complexity, compassion, reverence, and condemnation are all within his range. Writing of love, he can speak broadly and universally of the heart, yet in the same poem, he can intricately describe a woman's hand, a fire on a beach, or the hollows around a lover's eye. Even when he works in the voice of a suicide, his precision can be devastating, as in these lines: "When you lie beside me under stars, each needlepoint / of light pricks my bare arms." 72 pages |
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In search of a world outside the confines of a wheelchair, Launius turns to Freud, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, college, writing, booze, sex, and drugs—on his way to becoming a "radical degenerate poet." 1995, 192 pages |
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Moving from adaptations of Latin and Spanish poems to prayers and lamentations, from elegies and plaints of lost love to flights of comic and ribald fancy, his poetry reaches to the extremes of human experience. The death of friends and family, one's self-betrayals and self-infatuations, the comical confusion of a worried mother, the art of a doomed Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp—all these human dramas play out bravely against the backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent path. (more …) 2000, 208 pages |
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At the center of this new collection—the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected—is the sequence, "God's Pattern," meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or "pattern" still practiced in rural parishes of the poet's native country, Ireland. The meditations are interrupted by several "distractions," hence the book's title. (more …) 2001, 104 pages |
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1989 |
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". . . an instance of communion with the human condition as complex and moving as similar moments in James Wright. This is a fine and welcome book." —William Heyen 1991, 80 pages |
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In exploring the insane, heroic venturesomeness of the many incarnations of "the man," Rafferty cuts to the heart of the difficulties of modern urban life. 1995, 64 pages |
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"Desperately and delightfully unfashionable" was how reviewer Richmond Lattimore characterized Timothy Steele's Uncertainties and Rest when it first appeared in 1979. Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems appeared in 1986 and solidified and extended Steele's reputation as, in the words of Publishers Weekly, "one of the finest contemporary poets to write in meter and traditional forms." Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970–1986 draws together these two books into a single volume. This collection offers the most substantial gathering yet from a body of work widely praised for its tonal and thematic range and for its wit and warmth of feeling. 1995, 96 pages |
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"Rough-cut, vital, primitive in the best sense, the poetry of Frank Stanford forces us to make essential encounters. There are few poets who can do this, but I challenge anyone to read Stanford's work and remain unchanged." —James Dickey 1991, 127 pages |
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In this selection of poems written over a period of thirty years, Leon Stokesbury sees the horror in death, and in the inescapable process of mutability, but finds also the dark joke at the center of things, and the chance for redemptive laughter. Winner of the 1997 Poets Prize 1996, 280 pages |
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"Vivid, precise, genuine and daring, the poems in this book lodge in the heart as securely as the greetings of lovers. A fine achievement." —Fred Chappell 1992 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award 1992, 88 pages |
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Anne & Alpheus: 1842–1882 is a compelling duet of monologues between a frontier man and woman surviving the hardships and recording the small triumphs of life in rural nineteenth-century Kentucky. 1996, 152 pages |
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R. S. Thomas writes his often dour lines out of the hard landscape of the Welsh hills. His poems are so much a part of that land that farmers and their families walk inside of them and he calls them by name. 1985, 216 pages |
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Peter Viereck's career has been an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. Tide and Continuities is the embodiment and culmination of that career. It includes many new poems, never before published, and work—some with stunning revisions—from books as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Terror and Decorum. Tide and Continuties is the revelation of a great American poet. 1995, 400 pages |
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Selected Poems, 1968–1998, represents thirty years of John Wood's work, offering his readers a most comprehensive view of an unusual mind and spirit that is at once eloquent and humorous. In poems that range from narratives, lyrics, and elegies, to odes, satires, and even a mini-epic, his work whips language into intense emotion. Recalled memories tumble with sense and grace. The homely and the visionary intertwine as the often stark realities of human experience are infused with love and light. The prospering genius of these poems is that they seek not so much to redeem or reclaim what is lost, but to redirect perspectives with a generous sweep of possibilities. Wood's craft as a wordsmith gives us a voice that powerfully interprets what it means to be human and alive. John Wood holds professorships in both photographic history and English literature at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he is also director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of three previous books of poetry and seven books of art and photographic criticism. His books have won the Iowa Poetry Prize twice, the American Library Association's Choice Outstanding Academic Books of 1992, and the New York Times Book Review Best Photo Books of 1995. "Here are the best works—so far—of a gifted, mature poet who, by geography, subject matter, tone, vision, and themes comes out of the South's great literary tradition. Like Ransom, Warren, O'Connor, and Faulkner, Wood insists that the human condition is ironic, that we are fated to live stretched between the bow-ends of the real and the ideal, the earthly and the heavenly, the temporal and the eternal. This is a powerful, richly-textured book." "The most lucid and engaging of the postmodern southern poets is John Wood. . . . [He] begins in a uniquely American charnel house and ends in Tuscany with the angels of Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico." —The Southern Review "John Wood's imagination, with one foot on the ground and one dipped in the River Jordan, brings unforgettably to life the homely and visionary mind that has yearned for spiritual utopia in the New World. . . . Wood's rhapsodic free verse rises in lyrical, prophetic periods where the visionary harmonizes with the homely and the erotic." —The Hudson Review 192 pages |
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In his latest collection, Paul Zimmer reaches toward new territory: he takes on grand themes while searching for resonating philosophical insights. "This is vintage Zimmer, which means it is superbly readable, lively, fresh, deeply human, and technically deft." —Robert Wallace Finalist, 1994 Society of Midland Authors Award 1993, 80 pages |
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