Poetry Potpourri

Aimless Love: new and selected poems by Billy Collins

Robert Pinsky , another former U. S. Poet Laureate, selected 100 poems from every past volume in The Best American Poetry series, so there are poems for everyone’s taste here. This gives one a great overview of the state of contemporary poetry in the United States.

Long the go-to book for accomplished and beginning poets, who wish to explore the happy restraints and creative structures of formal and metrical poetry. Turco’s The Book of Forms now appears in its newest edition with more unusual contemporary examples of creativity included. This work appeals not only to poets, but also to teachers, scholars, and critics.

This collected works edition of Ron Padgett’s fifty-year-long career in poetry brings needed attention to a life and oeuvre that passes in and out of favor, but never flags in its importance or excellence. Gathered together are the surprising pieces that made Padgett (b. 1942) famous and that brought him into contact with a wide array of friends and associates while connecting them to his life in reading and writing.

Mentored by San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth and championed while still a teenager by no less than André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, Philip Lamantia (1927 – 2005) is often included in anthologies of Beat Generation writers, because he also traveled in those wild, romantic circles. Working in a Romantic vein in its 20th century American manifestation, Lamantia created exquisite works that are here brought together in one volume.

Born in England, but residing in the U. S. since 1948, Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997) wrote poetry in the traditions of modernism, especially influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but in a style that forged new territory. Her work often explored Jewish and Christian themes as well as being informed by Transcendental mysticism and later political and social concerns. This sizeable volume contains every poem Levertov ever published over the course of six decades in chronological order.

Chock full of old favorites by those who served in the Great War like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, this volume also includes less well-known civilian men and women who recorded their responses to this monumental conflict, now in its 100th anniversary. Music-Hall and Trench Songs and end notes round out this compact collection.

This large trade paperback packs in five hundred years of poetry in English that contains descriptions or reflections on human suffering, casting familiar passages in classic and contemporary works from the point of view of or in the context of political and social strife and war.

Fourteen-year-old twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court as their father ignores his declining health.

This book-length poem, a posthumous publication of famed author J.R.R. Tolkien, features episodes from the legendary tales of King Arthur as epic poetry for young adults.

Jane, who survived a shark attack that cost her an arm, and who is an aspiring artist, reevaluates her ambitions and sense of identity while harboring a crush on her attractive tutor and considers a relationship with a boy from her science class. (Sequel to Shark Girl told in narrative verse)

The fifty poems in this book by Marilyn Nelson, the Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist, tell the story of her development as an artist and young woman during the Civil Rights struggle and Cold War of the 1950s.

In free verse, the author evokes the voice of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, a book-loving writer, feminist, and abolitionist who courageously fought injustice in nineteenth-century Cuba.

In this novel in verse by Lesléa Newman, author of the famed book Heather Has Two Mommies, is her sensitive poetic account of that night of October 6, 1998, when a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was lured from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to die. Newman approaches the subject from various voices and points of view.

Noted poets of the past and present contribute to this compendium of 100 poems that express every emotion or situation which young adults will recognize as their own. Familiar poems reveal familiar feelings in a fresh way.(Book includes CD)

A celebrated poet brings together the poetry of 25 poets under the age of 25. Ranging in style and subject these young voices speak the thoughts, hopes and concerns of their generation.

Oliver’s poems and dePaola’s illustrations work well together to engage our youngest ones in the pleasures of poetry.Containing many moments of discovery and fun in verse, this is the perfect first book to introduce poetry to children.

This book of poems and images showing the wonder of the world, engaging young and old alike, is another delightful collaboration between Janeczko and Sweet.

Author and artist John J. Muth takes panda bear Koo and our young ones through the four seasons with delightful haiku and delicate illustrations.

This laugh-out-loud poetry collaboration from a New York Times bestselling author and a Caldecott Honor illustrator is anything but ordinary. Dive in to Karma Wilson's latest collection of more than 100 poems-some humorous, some poignant, and all of them ‘outside the box’.