An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021This is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again.'American Goshawk', the opening poem in this collection, concludes with these words. The word 'witness' comes with a wealth of meanings. The poems are, at one level, acute observations of the world in its physical and dramatic detail. But eye and ear detect, in what is there, shadows and figures of what is beyond, what imparts to the ...

The conclusion of G. C. Waldrep’s trilogy exploring chronic illness.In The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep contends with the failure of the body, the irreducible body, in the light of faith. What can or should “healing” mean when it can’t ever mean “wholeness” again? And what kind of architecture is “mercy” when we live inside damage? These are poems that take both the material and the spiritual seriously, that cast their unsparing glances toward “All that i...

In this book-length poem, G.C. Waldrep addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafted over twelve trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep responds to such poets as Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, and Carla Harryman, and tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form.G.C. Waldrep's books include Disclamor (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) and Your Father...

Home of the first settlement in the United States and known as Old Dominion and The Mother of Presidents, the state of Virginia’s artistic output proves among the most fecund in the nation, evidenced in this ninth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. This collection includes well-known, established, and celebrated poets such as Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Gregory Orr, Ellen Bryant Voigt, R. T. Smith, Forrest Gander, and Rita Dove, and the editors have dedicated equal focu...

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes.By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn...

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life.The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the ide...

Published to mark the poet's 80th birthday, this collection confirms R. S. Thomas as our pre-eminent poet.'This is the book I've been waiting for' Ted Hughes

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." —Ann PatchettGrowing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father...

Sylvia Plath was, for both English and American poetry, one of the defining voices of twentieth-century, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry. Though she published just one collection in her lifetime, The Colossus, and a novel, The Bell Jar, it was following her death in 1963 that her work began to garner the wider audience that it deserved. The manuscript that she left behind, Ariel, was published in 1965 u...

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 natur...

In this powerful, evocative collection, master storyteller John O'Donohue explores themes of love and loss, beginnings and endings. Inspired by the ancient wisdom of the Celtic tradition and the rugged, majestic landscape of his birth, the west of Ireland, here he also creates a unique vision of a place and time, and the echo of a memory that will never fade.

NBCC Award Winner: "The narrative lyrics in this remarkable collection . . . could stand as compressed stories about anxiety and the body." — The New York TimesVulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry ...