From Twenty Books of Verse published between 1940 and 1993, John Ciardi gives us poems of love written with care and honest discernment; poems of the natural world that reveal humanity's kinship to spiders and nebulae, oceans and thickets; and poems that tellingly render the ritual dance of human life and mortality.

Poems consider the past, parenthood, mortality, success, misunderstanding, sleep, love, and travel

Here one of our best-loved poets gathers his most representative work from twelve collections and adds some new pieces as well. An American original, Miller Williams involves the readers emotions and imagination with an effective illusion of plain talk, continually rediscovering what is vital and musical in the language we speak and imagine by.

For beginning readers, these poems lead children to new words through rhyme, riddles, context, and word game.

In this study of Ciardi's life, Edward Cifelli has captured all the deep concern, passion, and thoughtfulness that marked Ciardi's long career in American letters. With care and penetrating detail, Cifelli evokes Ciardi's early childhood in Boston, his Italian heritage, his service as a gunner on a B-29 during World War II, and his years teaching at Harvard and Rutgers. Illuminated here are Ciardi's widely read contributions as an editor of Saturday Review and World magazines, as well as his tireless effort to bring an awareness and love of language and poetry to America through radio, television, the lecture circuit, and his twenty-six years on the staff of the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a gathering he directed for seventeen years.

‘Thirty-five imaginative and humorous poems for an adult and a child to read aloud together. . . . The entertaining verses are varied as to length, rhythm, and subject and are illustrated with harmoniously amusing drawings.’ —BL.

In Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems, Paul Mariani revisits forty years of writing poems, including revising many of his earlier lyrics, to shape his latest volume into a life lived and lived again over the past seven decades. The eight sections--or cantos--each composed of twelve poems, cover roughly a decade apiece and contour Mariani's search for answers to the constant interplay of the felt presence of the Mystery we call God as it plays with the modern imagination. Mariani's background is Catholic and broadly classic, and warmly embraces all aspects of Christianity and Judaism and the world even beyond those.The Poiema Poetry Series Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won't twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet's company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value--to get at something important. Ephesians 2:10 says, "We are God's workmanship . . ." poiema in Greek--the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship. These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries--through the diverse poetic visions of Dante

Our Emily Dickinsons situates Dickinson's life and work within larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America. Examining Dickinson's influence on Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and others, Vivian R. Pollak complicates the connection between authorial biography and poetry that endures.