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	the collected poems, 1956-1998 ~ zbigniew herbert translated from the Polish by czeslaw milosz and peter dale scott Every so often you will read a poem so fine it makes you weep when you first read it. You don't even know what it's about yet, but still, your throat goes tight, your eyes blur up the last lines, it is so, so, so deeply beautiful. You will read it again and again, over days, months, years. You will copy it and send it to people, you will tape it to your wall, you will repeat its last lines until they become an echo of something you were born with. It will become as important as your most precious memories. Many times it will mean many different things, many times you will again not know what it means, and every time it won't matter.
Because even as you read it for the hundredth time, even though the TV's on and the traffic is too noisy, too late, even so: you know it like the alphabet and yet, there is something new again, and there, almost at the end, your throat goes tight, and your eyes blur up the last lines you know so well.
*read Elegy of Fortinbras* return to top**
{140 pages} {paperback} {Ecco Press}

vacationland ~ by ander monson, 2005

Visit the fiction page to read the review of and excerpts from Ander Monson's Vacationland and Other Electricities.

giuseppe ungaretti ~ selected poems
a bilingual edition with the original Italian, translated by andrew frisdardi

Over ten years ago I bought a skinny little Dover dollar book of Italian poetry in translation. Giuseppe Ungaretti's You Were Broken was in there, and I fell deeply in love. That skinny little book still splays open to that page, its tiny spine broken over the love of just one poem. I could never find anything else by Ungaretti in print, and so I tenderly wore that one poem down over the years, committing it to memory like a song.

So you can imagine that my delight was audible, as I was flipping casually, disappointedly through publisher's catalogs, sloppily dashing off checkmarks and question marks and x's and quantities -- and there it was -- this collection glittering from the page, offering unspeakable treasures I'd not even imagined possible... I gasped and jumped up and sat down again and drew a very joyous circle around this book.

read excerpts: You Were Broken page 1 page 2 return to top

{287 pages} {paperback} {Farrar, Straus & Giroux}

	love is a dog from hell ~ by charles bukowski It’s the fascination with the profound existence of the quiet, ultimately humane, merciful moment of no words that rises out of facts and objects that makes up a poet’s mind and bread, and it’s the confluence of this and all the drinking and screwing and vomiting that makes Charles Bukowski. I know a lot of people like to disregard him because he “only writes about girls and drinking” or because he “objectifies women.” I don’t like those people.
Bukowski’s poems often have the character of a sigh about them to me. There are dirty panties under the bed, empty bottles on the carpet, and a stink in the air, but there it is, and there’s a poem all wrapped around it, the inevitable ghost of beauty, specter of humanity that is the job of the poet to write write write into existence. read excerpts return to top
{307 pages} {paperback} {Black Sparrow Press}

	residence on earth / residencia en la tierra ~ by pablo neruda, 1973 Tr. Donald D. Walsh Neruda writes with the intensely physical, his poems fleshing out as if living, dripping, growing. They have tangible shape in their metaphor, hot breath in their meter. His naming of things is their very incarnation, each object rising up within a vision as vivid and baroque as a fever dream. But for all their majesty, feathers, wax and shadows, these poems are clean, their form and craftsmanship refined and clear. All these images and metaphor that could become a gorgeous, muddy, meaningless swarm rise out washed and bathed in the light of Neruda’s sense of thru-line, rhythm and solid words.
Donald D. Walsh is Neruda’s best translator, not forsaking fidelity for fancy, but rather finding the perfect English incarnation for Neruda’s poems. Walsh translates carefully and faithfully, but with a great sense of the rhythm and sound. This is a dual-language edition, so you can read both. read excerpts return to top
{359 pages} {paperback} {New Directions}

	lunch poems ~ by frank o'hara I love this book. I give it as a gift more than any other, for it’s exquisitely satisfying almost 5 inch square size, and for it’s devourable insides. The first poem I read of O’Hara’s, on page 21 and excerpted here, changed my conceptions and perceptions of poetry, and of what I thought I knew of love at the magnificent age of fifteen.
The Lana Turner poem remains one of the finest I have ever read, and changed forever the parameters of the perfect poem. I cannot conceive of the genius of what is contained in that last line. This is in the first 5 ingredients to include in the Library of Necessary Books. Frank O’Hara curated for New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the meatiest heyday of American art and the birth of the New York School painters and writers. Not a critic, but a celebrator, O’Hara celebrates the romantic grime of Manhattan’s sidewalks, blending still resolve with a sense of humor that avoids irony and self-consciousness. Maybe it’s that half of the hundreds of poems that were later collected after his death were found in his bathrobe pockets or used as bookmarks – maybe that’s why they’re so un-self-important, so sweet and so good. read excerpts return to top
{82 pages} {paperback} {City Lights}

	the gold cell and the wellspring ~ by sharon olds I think one thing I love most about these poems is that they contain small but great moments of grace, without overbearing purpose or motive. They contain grace in their observation, in their detail, in their quiet metaphor that emerges from strong, clean bones of good solid words, their sound rich with the satisfying cadence and timbre of American English. Sharon Olds' poems remind me of the particular hard, clean, construction of our words in a way that no other poet does.
Because it’s not about the words, only, or the story, only, but this driving balance between form, language, content, and narrative that makes her poems so ultimately readable. If you love poetry, and haven’t read these yet, you are in for a very satisfying treat. But, more importantly, if you’re not really “into poetry”, if you find it un-pleasurable to read, find it hokey or too thick, or boring, or irrelevant, this may be the very book to bring you back. read excerpts return to top
{paperback} {Knopf}

elizabeth bishop, the complete poems, 1927-1979

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

The Armadillo for Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars –
planets, that is – the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,
receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! – a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
0 falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

return to top

{276 pages} {paperback} {Noonday Press}