Böcker i New Directions Paperbook-serien

The Infinite Moment is a personal selection made by a poet known for his elegant translations from several languages, Chinese, Japanese, Estonian, Latin, and now ancient Greek. Drawing from the classic Lyra Graeca and The Greek Anthology, Sam Hamill has made new, American translations of poems in the thousand-year tradition that begins with Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anakreon in the 6th century C.E. The love poems, epigrams, and sly invective of over forty poets remind us once again of the deep wellspring of ancient Greece that nourished the roots of so many cultures.The Greek lyric poem was made to be performed with musical accompaniment, but like its modern descendent it seeks to articulate the experience of insight attained in the infinity of the moment. Says Hamill: "The fundamental experiences of humanity remain simultaneously universal and particular. The tears of Lymnos on the banks of the Akeron are the same tears Hitomaro shed a thousand years later on the shores of the Omi Sea."

A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer.A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the waves. Two old friends spend their waning days traipsing amongst ruined walls, imagining bubbling brooks and lush marshland. An old man lives atop a bizarre wooden building in the clouds, where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth.These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical. Can Xue's literary world is inhabited by ghosts, dying old men, street urchins, cobblers, farmers, cats, rats, and stray dogs. Much influenced by Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz, this new collection of Can Xue's surreal stories confirms The New York Times' assessment that "reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."

An evocative, often mischievous remembrance and reinvention by the poet of his youth in the New York City of the '40s and '50s. In Loew's Triboro, John Allman's fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queensone of the five boroughs of New York Cityand its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of Astoria with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Asphalt Jungle. The book itself becomes a narrative place where real and cinematic lives interact, where movies are the engines of history and myth and the motif of journey is implicit from the first poem to the last.

Three of Denise Levertov's classic volumes, now available in a single edition. Here gathered for the first time in a single edition are three of Denise Levertov's finest books: The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). This new compilationbeginning where Denise Levertov's Poems 1968-1972 left offtestifies not only to Levertov's technical mastery, but also to her spiritual vision, especially in regard to the Vietnam War. Some of Levertov's best war poems, the result of her visit to North Vietnam in 1972, are contained in this marvelous collection. Poems 1972-1982 enables readers to observe a crucial phase in Levertov's poetic development. At the same time, it illuminates Robert Creeley's assessment that she "was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us."

Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite's long unavailable, landmark trilogy--Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)--now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its "Video Sycorax" typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the "intercovery") of Brathwaite's African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.

Corman is one of modernism's enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among those many giants, Corman's verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation of "effect" for the tactile ink of line and "touch." Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of Zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: "There's only/one poem:/ this is it."

In her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities, Rosmarie Waldrop once again pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. As the author herself says, she "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Instead, her "gap gardening" tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. Yet the overriding point of the dialogues is determinedly human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging," "Depression," "Desire," and even ''The Millennium."

"Rain Mirror," writes Michael McClure, "stands as my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Haiku Edge' and 'Crisis Blossom,' which are quite disparate from one another." Together, the poems complement each other as do light and dark. "Haiku Edge" is a poem of linked haiku, often humorous, sometimes harsh, and always elegant. "Crisis Blossom," in contrast, is a long poem in three parts that records the author's "state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers down where they exist without management," and the months of shock and recovery during a psychophysical meltdown.

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich, arid, beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts - "Fragments," "Drought," and "Flowers." In Brathwaite's voice, as The Beloit Poetry Journal noted, "the false distinctions between poetry and polemic, between tragic vision and comic insight, between anger and tenderness, here disappear. At last a major poet of our troubled history and troubling time is available to readers in this country." "His dazzling, inventive language, his tragic yet unquenchable vision," as Adrienne Rich declared, "make Kamau Brathwaite one of the most compelling of late 20th century poets."

An experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer's Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles-from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.

The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials, establish a dialogue with silence. Breath, its syllables buried in the resonant space between the word and the void, unlocks "the gloriole, the ring of things released." Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems are not more nor less than a search in the redemptive, celebrating the regeneration of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials once again confirms the praise of Robert Duncan, who described Sobin's work as "a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarifies renewed."

The running theme in Michael McClure's Simple Eyes & Other Poems is: looking at the world directly. The results are often as disquieting as they are illuminating, whether he directs his unblinking gaze on the American cityscape, the landscapes of Mexico and Kenya, or the mind's own terrain. In the long title poem, "Simple Eyes (Fields)," the stanzas on the Persian Gulf War bloom out of images of all wars the poet has known--"the spiritual wars, the napalm and cordite and nuclear wars, and the war against nature"--and become a kind of spiritual autobiography. At the heart of the poetry is McClure's return to the ancient concept of agnosia, the idea of knowing through unknowing, as a way of living in desperate times, in which deep human or humane feelings have almost become outlaw. Simple Eyes is an outspoken poet's statement, unsentimental, yet with mind and eye quickened by love.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war--Laughlin's muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war--Laughlin's muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin's efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a "continuous present" in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin's cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.

In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."

Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."

Stitching Porcelain, Deborah Larsen's first book of poetry, is a narrative-lyric sequence based on the life of Matteo Ricci, the resourceful Jesuit who entered China in 1583 and stayed for a quarter century. Pondering cultural accommodation as well as faith, many of the poems center on actual events: Ricci's dressing as a Buddhist; his awe-inspiring map (with China shrewdly centered); his prostration before an empty Dragon Throne. Other events the poet imagined. (In the title room, Ricci addresses a love lyric to China: "Your porcelain is so fine, so thin,/a brass wire can repair it . . . /Once I saw you beneath the bamboo/ . . . bent back/from the world, stitching porcelain.") With a felicity rare in a debut volume, Larsen's opalescent poetry works in perfect counterpoint to the strange and brilliant Ricci.

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."

Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands is Hayden Carruth's fourth book of poetry with New Directions. This is a full and rich collection which has been separated into two parts. Part one offers a varied wealth of poems, remarkable as always for their meditative powers and for their "principled alertness..." (NYTBR). The seccond part is one long poem, "Mother," a work of fierce emotion addressing the long life and slow torturous death of Carruth's own mother.

In Curve Away from Stillness, John Allman affirms the connections between poetry and science. They are, he says, as "old as the ones between poetry and cosmology, beauty and knowledge, pleasure and speculation." In reading this collection of "Science Poems," we are reminded of a philosophical tradition in literature that, with Lucretius, sees in the power of love the binding force of the universe. Allman's poems, however-meditations on "Physics," "Chemistry," "Biology," essential "Principles," the "Planets"-are grounded in the science of our time, in all its elegance and awesomeness.Curve Away from Stillness is Allman's fourth book of poetry, his third with New Directions. His previous publications include Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape (1986), speculative reflections on art and nature; the "historical epiphanies" of Clio's Children (1985); and Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton University Press, 1979).

Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape, John Allman's third collection of poems, is a book as remarkable for its lyricism as it is for its capaciousness, for there seems to be no area of thought, no branch of learning, no dark region of the mind into which the poet is unwilling to delve. His recent Clio's Children: Dostoevsky at Semyonov Square and Other Poems is a reminder, as the title implies, that history is a narrative art. In his newest book, Allman reflects on art and nature, love and death-the dualities that animate our common humanity. The poems in Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape look back, at one level, to the mutable, mythic cosmos of Ovid as well as Lucretius' universe of benign random change. But to these ancient considerations Allman brings the insights, indeed the language of modern science and evolution, creating a speculative aesthetic appropriate to the awesome possibilities of the atomic age."I would say," Allman observes, "that Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape is about nature; that the poems speak in the complementary idioms of art and science in an attempt to comprehend nature; that love recapitulates all life forms; and that love, finally, is the only ground we stand on, the only steadiness beneath us, earned by us, yet strangely given, as we sing of glory and grief."John Allman's previous books of poems are Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton University Press, 1979) and Clio's Children (New Directions, 1985). He is a professor of English at Rockland Community College, State University of New York.

So cleverly and wittily are the stories told that we sense we belong in the charmed café society of post-1918 Britain, and life seems, as Ernest Jones says in his critical introduction, "a Nirvana in which homosexuals are the ultimate chic and in which... almost everyone turns out to be at least bi-sexual." In Vainglory, Mrs. Shamefoot, who "almost compels a tear," embraces the quest for a cathedral stained-glass window "that should be a miracle of violet glass." In Inclinations, Miss Brookomore, filled with longing for her companion, the "sunny" Miss Mabel Collins, travels to Greece where Mabel, rather treacherously, acquires a husband and baby. And in Caprice, Miss Sinquier flees her rural parents and the comfort of her black slippers ("all over little pearls with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes") to pursue an acting career in bohemian London. To quote Mrs. Shamefoot describing a novelist clearly meant to be Firbank: "He has such a strange, peculiar style. His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way. If one should by chance turn about it's usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to beckon. And they seldom really touch." Originally published in 1951, Three More Novels by Ronald Firbank is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook.

America's paved-over landscape dotted with its oases of shopping malls and franchise strips is the setting for Hayden Carruth's Asphalt Georgics, a new collection of thirteen poems in the common speech of Upstate New York. Here are the voices of Charlie Spaid, talking of the death of his landlady, Marge; of Septic Tanck, musing on his own peculiar name; of old Capper Kaplinski, still watching the girls pass by; of Art and Poll, back in the old neighborhood. What they tell about their lives is hardly what they themselves would ever expect to read in the pages of a book of poetry. Yet to capture the rhythms of their very colloquial language, Hayden Carruth has invented a new verse form, his Georgics-quatrains in strict syllables and rhyme, though with no accentual pattern--which achieve by their special artifice a classic and earthy elegance.

This book (originally published in 1972 by The Seabury Press as The Orchid Boat) is the first representative collection of the poetry of Chinese women to appear in English. Unlike Japan with its long tradition of women writers, poetry by women did not become fashionable in China until the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), although poems from earlier centuries that do in fact survive will quickly dispel any stereotyped views. Included here are samplings from the legendary earliest poetry of courtesans, palace women, and Tao priestesses to works by contemporary Chinese women living in both the East and West. Appendixes include notes on the poems, an introductory essay on Chinese women and literature, a table of historical periods, and a bibliography.

In 1944, New Directions brought out Thomas Merton's first book of verse. By the time of his tragic, untimely death in 1968, Father Louis (as he was known at the Trappist monastery where he lived for twenty-seven years) had published upwards of fifty books and pamphlets, including several more collections of poetry. All of these poems have been assembled in a single, definitive volume (first published by New Directions in 1977) which includes much additional unpublished or uncollected material drawn from the archive of the Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, or supplied by the poet's friends and associates. Brought together in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton are: Early Poems (1940-42, published posthumously in 1971), Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), The Tear of the Blind Lions (1949), The Strange Islands (1957), Original Child Bomb (1962), Emblems of a Season of Fun (1963), Cables to Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (completed in 1968 and published posthumously). These are followed by Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems, a book which Merton completed shortly before his death. There are also sections of uncollected poems, humorous verse, poems written in French, with some English translations, Merton's translations of poetry from various languages, drafts and fragments, and a selection of concrete poems. With the availability of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton as a New Directions paperbook, an ever wider audience may more fully appreciate the impressive range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision.

Subtitled "The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet," this unique volume was the result of a series of informal conversations in the mid-1950s between Dr. Williams, his wife, and Edith Heal, then a student at Columbia University. In the relaxed atmosphere of the Williams home in Rutherford, New Jersey, the three discussed, chronologically, the poet's works as collected on his very own library shelves. "There was an air of discovery about the whole procedure," Miss Heal writes in her introduction, "the poet's excited 'Why I'd forgotten this dedication,' the unexpected appearance of reviews that had been tucked away in the pages of the books, pencilled corrections in the text, scrawled first drafts on prescription blanks." I Wanted to Write a Poem is, then, a brief "talking" bibliography, alive with the Williamses' memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being--in Miss Heal's words, "a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world."

The three sequences in the book-"Logging," "Hunting," "Burning"-show the remarkable cohesiveness in Snyder's writings over the years, for we find the poet absorbed, then as now, with Buddhist and Amerindian lore and other interconnections East and West, but above all with the premedical devotion to the land and work.

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: "I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large." The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his "Structures of Rime," the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before the War (1983), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). "Structures of Rime" affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in "The Structure of Rime I" he declares: "O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be."

Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York's famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba's Children, written three years before Arthur Miller's Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting - the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950's. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.