The poetry of Dan Vera is clear, strong, honest and funny. He's the sharp-eyed observer in the corner who doesn't say much, but makes every word count. He handles the political and the personal with equal grace, even as the lines blur. Dan Vera is damn good company. You'll see. Martín Espada This is what we first understood poetry to be, miraculous and humble. In the deepest part of the heart where we truly reside, there is always a wish that poetry will rinse off artifice. This is it. This is the most satisfying book of poems we can read if we want to witness language with a real poet as its servant. Grace Cavalieri Ranging through landscape and history, family legacy and gay life, Dan Vera's poems are melodic, lucid, and concise examinations of "the limits of earthly loving." They remind us of what blessings the world possesses and what flesh-hating forces endanger those delights. Jeff Mann

POETRY: A Delightful Journey Through Life is an arrangement of over eighty well-selected classical poems into eight basic life stages in which most people pass through or experience in the course of a lifetime. These eight stages are Childhood, Beyond a Bumbling Society, In Search of Love, On Pain and Irony, Satisfaction with the Simple Things of Life, The Seasons, On Death, and Lines to Lift and Inspire. Each of the eight stages is first introduced within an appropriate setting or frame of mind under which the selected poems follow. The reader is then carefully introduced to each poem, making it more readily understood. Inasmuch as poetry generally uses figurative symbols and imagery, the reader, coming from any number of backgrounds of education and experience, is allowed to put his or her own finishing touches on the poem, and can thus experience personal enjoyment from the poetic images embodied in the poems.

I: English literature. The genius of Shandy Hall : Laurence Sterne ; Double life : Jane Austen ; Best and worst : Charles Dickens ; Living with Trollope : Anthony Trollope ; Eminent Victorian : George Eliot ; The two Hardys : Thomas Hardy ; The King's trumpeter : Rudyard Kipling ; Life in the head : John Cowper Powys ; Nothing nasty in the woodshed : P.G. Wodehouse ; Like ink and milk : D.H. Lawrence ; Baby face : William Gerhardie ; The last Puritan : George Orwell ; Mr. Toad : Evelyn Waugh ; God's Greene : Graham Greene -- II: The English poets. Family man : William Wordsworth ; Unmisgiving : John Keats ; The all-star Victorian : Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; An art of self-discovery : Edward Thomas ; Fun while it lasted : Rupert Brooke ; Gallant pastiche : Cecil Day Lewis ; The best of Betjeman : John Betjeman ; The flight of the disenchanter : W.H. Auden ; The last romantic : Philip Larkin -- III: Mother Russia. Cutting it short : Alexander Pushkin ; Under the overcoat : Nikolai Gogol ; The strengths of his passivity : Ivan Turgenev ; An excellent man : Anton Chekhov ; The backward look : Ivan Bunin ; Poems with a heroine : Anna Akhmatova ; A poet's tragedy : Marina Tsvetaeva ; On the horse parsnip : Boris Pasternak ; The hard hitter : Isaac Babel ; A prig of genius : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- IV: American poetry. Songs of a furtive self : Walt Whitman ; Mothermonsters and fatherfigures : E.E. Cummings ; Lowellship : Robert Lowell ; "One life, one writing" : James Merrill ; Richly flows contingency : John Ashbery -- V: Out of Eastern Europe. The power of delight : Bruno Schulz ; Something childish : Witold Gombrowicz ; Poet of holy dread : Paul Celan ; The art of austerity : Zbigniew Herbert ; Return of the native : Czeslaw Milosz -- VI: Aspects of novels. The point of novels ; Gossip in fiction ; Little green crabs : Marcel Proust ; The order of battle at Trafalgar ; In which we serve : Patrick O'Brian ; Seer of the ego : Stendhal ; What will you do to keep the s

Young people are encouraged to experiment with a variety of poetic forms and to recite and preserve their creations.

In this introduction to Scripture, Leland Ryken organizes biblical passages into literary genres including narratives, poetry, proverbs, and drama, demonstrating that knowledge of a genre's characteristics enriches one's understanding of individual passages. Ryken offers a volume brimming over with wonderful insights into Old and New Testament books and passages--insights that have escaped most traditional commentators.

Here, in over seventy disturbingly dark chapters, the poet takes us on a whirlwind into our very psyche. We are confronted by our innermost fears, our secret desires, and our twisted dreams. These poems dredge up the sick, the twisted, and the macabre. They make us realize that, since you cannot run from darkness, perhaps it is best to embrace and learn from it.

A Study Guide for Ted Kooser's "Delights and Shadows," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.

Light and Delight is an extraordinary collection of poems by two highly distinguished poets Maria Do Cu Pires Costa and Rachid Acim. Dr. Santosh Kumar, editor, Cyberwit.net Rachid and Maria seem to blur the boundaries between those conventional genres. Their poetry is replete with poems that express their emotional states towards nature, emotional experiences and human sufferings. Yet they also narrate through their sublime internal ego others plots, sufferings and experiences. Expressing their sympathies and, maybe elegies, towards turbulent countries like Tunisia, Gaza Strip, and Syria creates an inner sympathetic soul that not only cares about what is within but equally what is without. Dr. Hassen Zriba, editor in chief, International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies