Synopses & Reviews
My aim is to take familiar things and make
Poetry of them, and do it in such a way
That it looks as if it was as easy as could be
For anybody to do it . . . the power of making
A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much.
--from "The Art of Poetry"
When David Ferry's translation of The Odes of Horace appeared in 1997, Bernard Knox, writing in The New York Review of Books, called it "a Horace for our times." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, in which Horace perfected the conversational verse medium that gives his voice such dazzling immediacy, speaking in these letters with such directness, wit, and urgency to young writers, to friends, to his patron Maecenas, to Emperor Augustus himself. It is the voice of a free man, talking about how to get along in a Roman world full of temptations, opportunities, and contingencies, and how to do so with one's integrity intact. Horace's world, so unlike our own and yet so like it, comes to life in these poems. And there are also the poems -- the famous "Art of Poetry" and others -- about the tasks and responsibilities of the writer: truth to the demands of one's medium, fearless clear-sighted self-knowledge, and unillusioned, uncynical realism, joyfully recognizing the world for what it is.
Review
"Ecstatic, despairing poems . . . Metaphors explode here like supernovas aborning, and from the debris Seidel makes dense, durable poetry." (David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review)
Review
"Dante is more than a revered bygone giant. There has never been so much evidence of his continuing vitality." (The Economist)
Review
"[The translations are] both ingenious and accurate, setting a very high standard for translation of verse from Spanish." (Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books)
Review
". . . Dostoevsky's [world], with . . . its resourceful energies of life and language, is . . . beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader." (John Bayley, The New York Review of Books)
Review
"Does justice to all [the novel's] levels of artistry and intention . . . come[s] as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible." (Joseph Frank, Princeton University)
Review
"No reader . . . should ignore this . . . [or] wait any longer to acquaint himself with one of the peaks of modern fiction." (USA Today)
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". . . brings out the richness and depth of the original . . . similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting." (The Independent [London])
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"Impeccably reported and often hilarious." (The Economist)
Review
"The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess." (Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe)
Review
"Funny, sound, and compassionate, Get Out of My Life will truly help you talk with your kids and not get mad . . ." (Beth Winship, The Boston Globe)
Review
"Funny, sound, and compassionate,
Get Out of My Life will truly help you talk with your kids and not get mad . . ." --Beth Winship,
The Boston GlobeGet Out of My Life has Spock's common sense, the insight of Freud, and the wit of Bombeck. I welcome this book." --Dorothy Zeiser, Ph.D., Chairman, Department of Child Study
Synopsis
Beleaguered parents will breath sighs of relief and gratitude over this bestselling guide to raising teenagers
In this revised edition, Dr. Anthony E. Wolf tackles the changes in recent years with the same wit and compassion as the original edition. Dr. Wolf points out that while the basic issues of adolescence and the relationships between parents and their children remain much the same, today's teenagers navigate a faster, less clearly anchored world. Wolf's revisions include a new chapter on the Internet, a significantly modified section on drugs and drinking, and an added piece on gay teenagers.
Although the rocky and ever-changing terrain of contemporary adolescence may bewilder parents, Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall? gives them a great road map.
Synopsis
What's Joel
Got to do but let the jewel
Hatch
The light and hook
It to the flesh
It will outlast
And point the staring woman
At a mirror?
--from "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal"
Dante's Divine Comedy begins with a journey through Hell and ends in Heaven. Frederick Seidel's Cosmos Poems trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, and descends.
Life on Earth is the second book in this trilogy. It includes natural and human history, which are the history of the self, and biography, which is the history of everything else, told in vignettes of beauty, sublimity, horror, and regret.
Synopsis
In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.
--from "Perch"
Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least, the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding -- whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.
Electric Light ranges from short takes to conversation poems. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the elegizing of friends and fellow poets. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard extending his word hoard and roll call in this, his eleventh collection.
Synopsis
Lean and dramatic poetry by one of our finest and most original lyric poets.
How scarified it is,
devotion's face -- as from the labor of
too long accepting
substitution
over what it fears has been
nothing at all . . .
--from "Little Dance Outside the Ruins of Unreason"
In these twenty-eight new poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection, between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch, and tends the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground.
Contemporary literature can claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. The Tether gives us a lyric poet at the height of his skill.
Synopsis
The poems of the legendary Nobel Laureate, in one volume of "eye-opening intensity" (Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review)
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile: it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about life? That it's been long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
--from "May 24, 1980"
One of the greatest and grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months of internal exile at hard labor, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this is the essential volume of Brodsky's work.
Synopsis
Essays on the most celebrated Italian poet by the eminent poets of the twentieth century.
This collection is a testament to Dante's continuing, uncanny presence in twentieth-century poetry; a presence that appears, as Robert Lowell observed, "in the way most gratifying to a poet -- in the works of his fellow poets who write long after, in other styles and other languages." The collection brings together previously published essays by some of our most renowned poets: Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Montale, Borges, Lowell, Merrill, Nemerov, Auden, and Heaney. But the editors have also commissioned new reflections on Dante by a number of others: Charles Wright, Jacqueline Osherow, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Geoffrey Hill, Rosanna Warren, W. S. Di Piero, Daniel Halpern, Alan Williamson, Mark Doty, C. K. Williams, Mary Campbell, and Edward Hirsch. These poets approach Dante as both model and foil, in fresh responses to his legacy that are contentious as well as admiring. Together they attest to what Mandelstam called Dante's "inexhaustible contemporaneity."
Synopsis
A dazzling and diverse collection of poems spanning the career of a true original.
My hands are raw. I'm itching to cut the twine, to unpack
that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.
It must be ten o'clock. There's still enough light
(not least from the glow
of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain
that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight
from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much, at least,
I know.
--from "Hay"
Poems 1968-1998 -- a gathering of Paul Muldoon's eight volumes -- finds a great poet reinventing himself at every turn, "a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down," as Richard Eder observes. "Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does . . . authentically touched or delighted." Muldoon, whom The Times Literary Supplement has called "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War," situates us in a fascinatingly mutable climate in which each freshening period brings -- as his first collection was predictively titled -- new weather.
Synopsis
James Fenton is unique among contemporary writers in having achieved equal distinction as a poet and -- in his reportage and criticism -- as a master of trenchant prose. What is more, he has shown himself a devoted critic of both American and British modern poetry, an explainer of each tradition to the other and to itself. In these lectures, delivered at Oxford (where he succeeded Seamus Heaney as Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999), Fenton moves easily from Philip Larkin's laments for the British Empire, to Heaney's uneasy rebellion against it, to Robert Frost's celebrations of American conquest; from W. H. Auden on Shakespeare's homoeroticism to the vexed "feminism" of Elizabeth Bishop; from Wilfred Owen's juvenilia to Marianne Moore's youthful agitation for women's suffrage.
In these lectures -- many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books -- Fenton makes sense of the last century in poetry, and explores its antecedents and its legacies, with the lucidity, wit, and gusto that have made his criticism famous.
Synopsis
A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work.
And I who was walking
with the earth at my waist,
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was neither.
-- from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"
Federico García Lorca was the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who -- as Maurer says in his illuminating Introduction -- "spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."
Synopsis
The award-winning translation of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel.
Synopsis
Louisiana is our most exotic state. It is religious and roguish, a place populated by Cajuns, Creoles, Rednecks, and Bible-thumpers. It is a state that loves good food, good music, and good times. Laissez les bons temps rouler -- let the good times roll -- is the unofficial motto. Louisiana is also excessively corrupt.
In the 1990s, it plunged headlong into legalized gambling, authorizing more games of chance than any other state. Leading the charge was Governor Edwin Edwards, who for years had flaunted his fondness for cold cash and high-stakes gambling, and who had used his razor-sharp mind and catlike reflexes to stay one step ahead of the law. Gambling, Edwin Edwards, and Louisiana's political culture would prove to be a combustible mix.
Bad Bet on the Bayou tells the story of what happened when the most corrupt industry came to our most corrupt state. It is a sweeping morality tale about commerce, politics, and what happens when the law catches up to our most basic human desires and frailties.
Synopsis
Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate.
On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history.
In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.
Synopsis
The stock market is big news today. Over 50 percent of the American public own stocks directly or indirectly, meaning that the financial well-being of tens of millions of people is directly tied to the market. Alan Greenspan has stated that it is not possible to understand the modern economy without understanding the stock market. But this has not always been so.
Many people now alive can remember a very different time, when the stock market was little more than a primitive insiders' game, viewed by most Americans with skepticism and suspicion. In Toward Rational Exuberance, B. Mark Smith, a professional stock trader with two decades of practical experience, tells the story of how this stunning transformation occurred. It is a fascinating story, involving colorful personalities, dramatic events, and revolutionary new ideas. In the course of the narrative, Smith traces the evolution of popular theories of stock market behavior, showing how they have greatly influenced the way the investing public views the market. But he also shows how some of these theories are based on faulty interpretations of market history that may lead investors astray. Freshly updated, this is a timely -- and definitive -- account of the market's true history and dangerous myths.
Synopsis
The autobiography of the Nobel laureate.
Before he emigrated to the United States, Czeslaw Milosz lived through many of the social upheavals that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know.
Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself.
In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.
Synopsis
A brand new edition of the bestselling guide to raising teenagersWhen Anthony E. Wolf's witty and compassionate guide to raising adolescents was first published, its amusing title and fresh approach won it widespread admiration. Beleaguered parents breathed sighs of relief and gratitude. Now Dr. Wolf has revised and updated his bestseller to tackle the changes of the past decade. He points out that while the basic issues of adolescence and the relationships between parents and their children remain much the same, today's teenagers navigate a faster, less clearly anchored world. Wolf's revisions include a new chapter on the Internet, a significantly modified section on drugs and drinking, and an added piece on gay teenagers. Although the rocky and ever-changing terrain of contemporary adolescence may bewilder parents, Get Out of My Life gives them a great road map.
Synopsis
Offers parents a new view of their teenagers so they will look at them in a whole new light, seeing them as young people on a journey to empowerment
Synopsis
Dr. Wolf updates his classic blockbuster as times changeIn 1991, the first edition of Get Out of My Life by Dr. Anthony E. Wolf, became an enormous success, selling over 300,000 copies. The words of Dr. Wolf were so on target that parents wondered if he had placed tape recorders around their homes.
But the world has not stood still—in fact, it is changing faster than ever. And while the classic struggles between parents and teenagers still remain, societal changes have brought about many new ones that parents of earlier generations never dreamed of. Todays parents must deal with such “new problems” as their children experimenting with the latest recreational drugs; increased sexual activity at a younger age; the Internet; and above all, a world that seems far less safe than ten years ago. Dr. Wolf realized the importance of these ever-evolving issues, which is why he has decided to significantly revise Get Out of My Life.
Get Out of My Life provides parents with a new understanding of their teenagers so they will look at them in a whole new light, seeing them as young people on a journey to empowerment. And most importantly, he reassures parents that everything will turn out alright.
Synopsis
Dr. Wolf updates his classic blockbuster as times changeIn 1991, the first edition of Get Out of My Life by Dr. Anthony E. Wolf, became an enormous success, selling over 300,000 copies. The words of Dr. Wolf were so on target that parents wondered if he had placed tape recorders around their homes.
But the world has not stood still—in fact, it is changing faster than ever. And while the classic struggles between parents and teenagers still remain, societal changes have brought about many new ones that parents of earlier generations never dreamed of. Todays parents must deal with such “new problems” as their children experimenting with the latest recreational drugs; increased sexual activity at a younger age; the Internet; and above all, a world that seems far less safe than ten years ago. Dr. Wolf realized the importance of these ever-evolving issues, which is why he has decided to significantly revise Get Out of My Life.
Get Out of My Life provides parents with a new understanding of their teenagers so they will look at them in a whole new light, seeing them as young people on a journey to empowerment. And most importantly, he reassures parents that everything will turn out alright.
About the Author
Anthony E. Wolf, received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the City University of New York. For the past twenty-five years he has been in private practice seeing children and adolescents in the Springfield, Massachusetts area. Married, Dr. Wolf is the father of two grown children. He has written five books on parenting and numerous articles, which have appeared in such magazines as
Child Magazine, Parents, and
Family Circle. He has also written a monthly column for
Child Magazine.