Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places were they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

Using the poet's native Italian landscapes, Gilbert Highet recreates these poets in situ to evoke the essence of their work. His translations summon a land enchanted by presences - from Horace's beloved Tivoli to Ovid in the Abruzzi. Highet lets each poet tell his own story - their pleasures and agonies, passions and hates and above all their devotion to the natural world around them.

A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur’s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband’s approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height—and then there’s the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes Figures in a Landscape feel radiant, visionary, and exhilarating, rather than elegiac. Mazur’s masterly fusion of abstraction with the facts of a life creates a coming to terms with what Yeats called “the aboriginal ice.”

The poems in Landscape with Sex and Violence explore what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

This classic anthology of translations has long been out of print. The poems come from one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics probably recorded during the first three centuries AD. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here beengiven a modern language and form. In an effort at fidelity to the effect of the images and their placement in the original, Ramanujan has given a visual shape to the poems by typographic devices. An essay on Tamil poetry explains its techniques and enriches the reader's pleasure in these quiet, controlled, yet dramatic poems.

"A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes. Christopher Gilbert's award-winning 'Across the Mutual Landscape' has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, 'Turning into Dwelling' offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets."--Provided by publisher.

A visionary new work from an award-winning poet.