Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the IMPAC Award-winning translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, intensity of feeling, and acute intelligence. From the richly...
A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant...
With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse....
“The greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. … No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime.”—The New Yorker
This eclectic and generous work full of wisdom and wit...
So much of what we live goes on inside-
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters...
The most indispensable poems of Brazil's greatest poet.
Brazil, according to no less an observer than Elizabeth Bishop, is a place where poets hold a place of honor. "Among men, the name of ‘poet' is sometimes used as a compliment or term of...
The gauze of James Pate’s nightmare, critical & cinematic beauty keeps rising & falling on a “crimson couch,” “a scarlet curtain” & a “crisp red light”—like Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn. & like Homer the language is...
A mythological masterpiece about dedication and the disintegration of romantic affection.
In this magnificent epic poem, John Gardner renders his interpretation of the ancient story of Jason and Medeia. Confined in the palace of King Creon, and...
She is a shimmering, tattooed, and acerbic angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He, an accountant worn down by the day-to-day struggles of the nine to five, is dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to...