Offers a guide to the major poets who found a voice for the experience of survival. This title focuses on the first post-war generation of Central and East European poets, who wrote in direct response to a war of unprecedented destruction in Europe.

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia. While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the "thing-in-itself," metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia. Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutiniing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. John Taylor has lived in France since 1977. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Context, the Yale Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Antioch Review (in which he writes the “Poetry Today” column), he has introduced numerous European writers and poets to English readers, often for the first time. Some of his works include The Apocalypse Tapestries, a book of poetry and prose based on the tapestries in the Chateau of Angers, and Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Volumes 1 and 2).

Something Indecent is a kind of symposium on European poetry, conducted by seven contemporary Eastern European poets. The poems they've chosen span the continent and the millennia, from Sappho and Catullus to Machado and Tranströmer.

How medieval songbooks were composed in collaboration with the community—and across languages and societies: “Eloquent…clearly argued.”—Times Literary Supplement Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook’s role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.

Winner of the Herder Prize, Nichita Stanescu was one of Romania’s most celebrated contemporary poets. This dazzling collection of poems – the most extensive collection of his work to date – reveals a world in which heavenly and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound, where love and a quest for truth are central, and urgent questions flow. His startling images stretch the boundaries of thought. His poems, at once surreal and corporeal, lead us into new metaphysical and linguistic terrain.

Europe is the poetic journal of Louis Dudek's cultural pilgrimage to the famous buildings and fabled sites of Europe. Although the sections of the poem are arranged chronologically in the order of his journeyings, the poem is less the story of Dudek's travels than a series of moral and aesthetic meditations prompted by his experiences. Expecting to find in Europe culture in its most evolved forms, the poet is confronted instead by materialism and superficiality, by exhausted peoples who are the unworthy inheritors of past greatness. Eventually the poet comes to realize that it is the sea, `constant always in beauty, ' that is the real object of his quest.