Ever since her death in 1966 Anna Akhmatova has been recognized as the greatest modern Russian poet. A rich and representative selection of Akhmatova's work-from her poignant, deeply personal love poems to her haunting laments for the martyrs of the Stalinist purges-has been newly translated by the American poet Lyn Coffin. In her finely crafted translations Coffin has been uniquely successful in reproducing the directness and striking effects characteristic...

Professor Willard Spiegelman's friendly yet sophisticated approach to poetry has been delighting students at Southern Methodist University for almost thirty years. In the 24 captivating lectures represented here, he invites you to share what he has learned over his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of literature.

"Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him. In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate...

"Billy Collins's thirteenth collection, and first in four years, contains more than fifty new poems that showcase the playfulness, wit, and wisdom that have made him one of our most celebrated and widely read poets. This collection covers many themes, including Collins's profound insights on aging and mortality"--

"Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, Charles Wright has built 'one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century'"(David Young, Contemporary Poets). Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work--including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality--showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the...

"A luminous collection of essays from one of our most original and influential poets. Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving...