Poets Laureate Collection (Library of Congress)

The former U.S. poet laureate and best-selling author of Nine Horses and Around the Room presents a new compilation of his acclaimed poems, some of which have never before been published.

Here for the first time in one volume is a selection of the astonishing poems of Rita Dove, the nation's new Poet Laureate, the youngest poet so named, as well as the first African-American chosen for the position. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the...

This volume presents a collection of poems reflecting the author's life. Mysteries of light, darkness, temporality, and eternity weave throughout his poetry. His memories are focused and profound, of Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." From the universe's contradictions,...

A collection of sixty-four poems by the former United States Poet Laureate and the winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature.

An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000). On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate. Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major...

Marking the year of his ninetieth birthday, one of the masters of contemporary poetry presents his ninth collection. Stanley Kunitz, recipient of both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes, here gathers a rich selection of his work, including new poems that remind us of his prefatory statement: "Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence." Nearly all the poems of his later years, beginning with The Testing Tree (1971), are included,...

The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger's front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home;...

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry comes the last title in Wright's series of three trilogies.