Poetry

"The popularity of [Dog Songs] feels as inevitable and welcome as a wagging tail upon homecoming." --The Boston Globe

Mary Oliver's Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet's relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. Oliver's poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision, these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.

Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver's beloved Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver's life merge as fellow travelers and as guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.

The first-ever English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­- reissued for the first time in 90 years

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.

Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.

Sylvia Legris's Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world's most cherished pastimes: Gardening!
"At the center of the garden the heart," she writes, "Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff." As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris's poems map the garden as body and the body as garden--her words at home in the phytological and anatomical--like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky's "80 Flowers." In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation--spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

The poems of Geosmin (the scent of soil) are celebration of the startling and shimmering earth, praising creatures of soil, sky, and in-between. Ecologist, farmer, mother, and poet Catherine Young honors land and what it means to be human in this world. Her poems journey through earth, water, tree, and stone, the heartbreak and beauty of seasons across a rural year, and take a panoramic view of aging. Young paints a deep map of Wisconsin's Driftless region while evoking a place found within regions of the heart.

An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American tradition

We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us.

In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew--from Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" and Phillis Wheatley's "To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works" to Garrett Hongo's "Ancestral Graves, Kahuku" and Joy Harjo's "Rabbit Is Up to Tricks"--exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.

"This is a personal book about American poetry," writes Hirsch, "but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me,
part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations."

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón."I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings--and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"?With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions--incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive."

In a beautiful and transporting volume of poems, the beloved author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series takes us on a captivating journey from Africa to Greece, London to North America to Mumbai, and back home to Scotland, celebrating people, places, animals, and books.

What matters most in life? For Alexander McCall Smith, it is friendship, love, and travel--the themes found throughout his work that have made him a cherished writer the world over. This first collection of McCall Smith's poems reflects on these topics with all his characteristic wit and charm.

There are moments of sweeping insight and soaring feeling, and moments that will have you laughing along as they subtly shift your worldview. This inimitable writer shares his distinctively astute and good-natured observations on life, love, and beauty, reminding us of the deep satisfaction that can be found when we open ourselves up to the world with our whole heart, and watch as it takes on a kinder and gentler shape.

Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us hereâ "white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalismâ "and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus' fifth-century B.C. trilogy "The Oresteia," which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides, Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely "to loose battle" or "sow chaos," a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

An anthology of poetry edited by Marilyn L.Taylor and James P. Roberts, published by Kelsay Books.

Contributors:

Ned Balbo, Mary Jo Balistreri, Melissa Balmain, Kate Bernadette Benedict, Margaret Benbow, Bruce Bennett, Jerome Betts, Meredith Bergmann, Kim Bridgford, Debra Bruce, Michael Cantor, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Maryann Corbett, Paul Creswell, Barbara Crooker, T..A. Cullen, Thomas O. Davenport, Laurel Devitt, Moria Egan, Martin Elster, Anna M. Evans, Annie Finch, Claudia Gary, Taylor Grahm, Emily Grosholz, Catherine Abbey Hodges, Jeff Holt, Paul Hostovsky, Nancy Jesse, A.M. Juster, Julie Kane, Karen Kelsay, Brian Jerrold Koester, Amy Lemmon, Barbara Loots, Eileen Mattman, Janet McCann, Susan McLean, Richard Merelman, Mary Meriam, Leslie Monsour, Burt Myers, Chris O'Carroll, Angela O'Donnell, Jennifer Reeser, Richard Roe, Jane Satterfield, Wendy Sloan, David Southward, Susan Delany Spear, Andrew Szilvasy, Judith Terzi, Pat Valdata, Kathrine Varnes, Lisa Vihos, Ed Werstein, Lesley Wheeler, Gail White.EDITORS:

Marilyn L. Taylor former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin is the author of six poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Able Muse. Measure and Light, among many other journals and anthologies. She was recently awarded the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for verse in forms, and was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Parody Contest, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet award, and the 2018 Lascaux Review prize. She currently serves on the editorial staffs of Verse-Virtual and Third Wednesday.

James P. Roberts, Editor Author of 16 books in the fields of fantasy & science fiction, poetry, literary biography and baseball history. James is a regional Vice-President for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin where he has a passion for women's flat-track roller derby and is very much involved in the Little Free Library movement. (You may even find a Little Free Library in the Villa Nelle!)