This powerful and moving collection of sixty poems written chronologically over a period of one year when the author was 60 provides an illuminating and observational reflection of day-to-day life in a mixture of lighter and more serious works. The rhyming style creates an immersive feel to the work, while the prose-led pieces stand out in their difference. The striking honesty of the work allows the reader to act as a travelling friend or a confidant rather than an audience as they are drawn deeper into the author’s personal reflections. The moments of humour interwoven between the more painful considerations have a captivating effect.

Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best known poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.

Seer, critic, lover, madwoman--the poet's sensibility gives us a chance to experience them all. This rich, wide-ranging collection of work by scores of America's contemporary poets brings you both wisdom and entertainment in short verse. In it are represented, with one poem each, the chancellors, fellows, and award winners of the Academy of American Poets since 1934. The result is a unique sampler of the various literary styles and themes that have left their marks on the past five decades. Fifty Years of American Poetry gives readers the opportunity to hear familiar voices and new ones--and encounter the great American poems that have captured both our minds and our hearts. The Academy of American Poets has as its stated purpose ''To encourage, stimulate, and foster the production of American poetry..." This was never limited to poets of any particular school, method, or category of poetry so this anthology is as representative a cross-section of American poetry in the last 50 years as any of its kind. The Academy is not a stodgy eastem provincial institution. It encourages young poets, recognizes the importance of change and growth in the poetry of America, and believes that poetry is not for poets only. This anthology was compiled on this basis. Fifty Years Of American Poetry is not only educational, but also inspirational, hopefully imbuing everyone who reads it with a sense of the dynamic and development of American poetry in the last half century. The Academy of American Poets is the only institution which could compile such a unique anthology because it is the oniy group which has consistently played a large part in the American poetry scene through its patronage to poets and its mission to make poetry an accessible and vital part of the American literary landscape. -->

Judith Viorst is known and loved by readers of all ages, for children’s books such as Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day; nonfiction titles, including the bestseller Necessary Losses; and her collections of humorous poetry in her "decade" series, which make perfect gifts for birthdays, Mother’s Day, graduation, Christmas, Chanukah, or at any time of year. Suddenly Sixty is a funny and touching book that speaks directly to the sixty-ish woman, inviting her to laugh about, sigh over, and come to hopeful terms with the complex issues of this decade of life. Among the poems in this charmingly illustrated collection are those exploring the joys—and strains—of children and grandchildren, and the intimacy of old friends who’ve ‘known each other so long/We knew each other back when we were virgins.” There are poems that tip their hat to mortality, wrestle with a husband’s retirement —“He’s coming with me when I shop at the supermarket/So I won't have to shop alone. I like alone.”— and acknowledge the fact that at this stage of life we’d “give up a night of wild rapture with Denzel Washington for a nice report on my next bone density test.” Offering plenty of laughs, a few tears, and cover-to-cover truths, these are poems for everyone who would “rather say never say die than enough is enough.” Every woman who has reached this decade will—rueful and smiling—find herself in the pages of this book.

The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet who has also become renowned as an energetic, generous and thought-provoking guide to reading poetry. Her 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, with its lively overview of contemporary writing and eye-opening readings of individual poems, is indispensable for anyone who writes poetry, teaches it, or simply wants to enjoy it. In her new book, she uses sixty poems by some of our finest poets to look at the idea of the journey, through literature and through life.As Padel makes clear in her fascinating introduction, today's debates about how accessible a poem should be are poetry's older tradition. To rhyme or not to rhyme? The Elizabethans fought over that one, while the Greeks couldn't agree about whether poetry should be dumbed down or remain the preserve of the elite. Combining her training as a Classicist with her insights as a poet, Padel highlights the ways in which the best poets now find a balance between rhymed formal verse and modernism's freer styles, using a traditional, formal craft to convey genuinely felt, up-to-the-minute experience. In an increasingly unstable world, she argues, we need poetry more than ever to help us to see afresh and understand the journeys of our lives.

Poems, like flowers, unfold in mysterious ways. Poet Mariann Wizard's 60 personal best reveal surprising details of a complex, engaged life. Deeply personal yet readily accessible, they are by turns funny, erotic, tender, or rabble-rousing, spanning haiku, sonnets, and protest songs. Sixty of Scout Stormcloud's lushly textural photographs of flowers, trees, and other living creatures more thoroughly explore a single aspect of her art and wide-ranging interests, invoking contrasting, complementary notes from the enduring natural world in which we are but guests. Woven together in a generous, full-color volume, poems and photographs become an exuberant tapestry celebrating life in progress. Wizard and Stormcloud, who both live in Austin, Texas, were born two days apart and have been best friends for half their lives. Passionate but not sentimental, here is the work of two women on a creative roll: balanced, accomplished, and assured. 100 pages, 8.5 x 11" paperbound.

The Newfoundland Poetry Series was begun in 1993 as Breakwater's twentieth anniversary project to honour and preserve the literary talents of our Newfoundland and Labrador poets. Selection is based on quality. Breakwater's aim is to make the series affordable to as many lovers of poetry as possible.

The Gift of an Ordinary Day is an intimate memoir of a family in transition, with boys becoming teenagers, careers ending and new ones opening up, and an attempt to find a deeper sense of place—and a slower pace—in a small New England town. This is a story of mid-life longings and discoveries, of lessons learned in the search for home and a new sense of purpose, and the bittersweet intensity of life with teenagers—holding on, letting go. Poised on the threshold between family life as she's always known it and her older son's departure for college, Kenison is surprised to find that the times she treasures most are the ordinary, unremarkable moments of everyday life, the very moments that she once took for granted, or rushed right through without noticing at all. The relationships, hopes, and dreams that Kenison illuminates will touch women's hearts, and her words will inspire mothers everywhere as they try to make peace with the inevitable changes in store.

A.E. Stallings writes that like the minutes of the hour, these Sixty Sonnets both combine to make a whole and shine as individual moments. While groups of these sonnets occasionally suggest a narrative refreshingly, like the fugitives and weary academics that people these pages they work alone. The newspaper crime blotter itself, from which, perhaps, some of these incidents are torn, speaks up as a single sonnet. Here are barflies, high-school dropouts, retired literary critics, washed-up novelists and war-zone reporters, suburbanites and historians, and lyrics with a range of reference from Zippos and Star Wars figures to William James and Thomas Eakins. Mostly in a decasyllabic line that allows for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech, these sonnets tend to conclude in true iambic pentameter, the tradition that haunts rather than dominates these poems. It is the voice of a less lyrical Prufrock ( We ll head out, you and me, have a pint ), a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the Gentlemen at the Tavern but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself as much listener as talker something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter. "