The Poetry of Lifting Potatoes To ask a farmer of poetry is a strange request, worse yet a potato farmer. I have known Horia for a long time, to a time before either of us imagined being grandfathers. We were compatriots in what is the durable and subtle empire of the potato. He a researcher, I the actual dirtball. As fellow writers we were a touch odd for our earthy environment, whence came a certain compassion for each other. Of a poet caught, or perhaps trapped, in this hectic, grimy business of agriculture. As an essayist I’m not well mannered compared to the spare words of the poet. As a story writer I do approach words rather like a Lenco potato harvester comes to the harvest. In bulk form. Lots of words, though I’d never admit to excess. Decent people do not recognize the Lenco reference. In practice a farm machine the size of a nice house, wheels the size of small sheds, propelled by traction motors capable of lifting off the face of the earth every fall to avail the potatoes laying beneath. A Lenco is not a poetic thing. Monstrosities are not often seen as poetic. This machine hogs the town road. Impatient drivers honk at it. The Lenco disembowels the earth 12 rows at a time. It bellows. It smokes. It smells. It leaks. It works. It isn’t poetic. Poetry is a potato fork. I have several. With a fork you feel the earth, feel gravity, feel the lifting, feel the worms, feel the soil, feel the sweat, feel the tilth. And if you are like Horia and me, feel the godliness of the potato. This book of poems by Horia is not that monster Lenco, instead a potato fork. Poetry equipped with a short handle to feel the gravity of our lives, its worms, its tilth. A forkful at a time, digging is necessary, and in the lifting, to feel the earth’s desire. These words of this potato researcher I’m so honored to know and call friend. Justin Isherwood, writer and potato farmer, in Plover Township, below the moraine where all the streams run west.

"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

A collection of more than 400 hundred poems from all around the world.

You know that Santa can fly a sleigh, squeeze down chimneys, and circle the globe in a night. But did you know that another of his talents is writing haiku? "December 1: White envelopes float / from my overfilled mailbox— / December's first storm." "December 24: Which is packed tighter / the sack full of toys or the / red suit full of me?" These twenty-five short poems—composed by Santa himself—give you a peek into life at the North Pole as the December days tick down to Christmas. See the hustle and bustle of the elves' workshop, feel the serenity of moonlight on fresh snow, and find out how Santa and Mrs. Claus keep busy as Santa's big night draws near.

This book consists of close readings of four poems illustrating Gottfried Benn's developing conception of stillness or stasis: Trunkene Flut (1927), Wer allein ist-- (1936), Statische Gedichte (1944), and Reisen (1950). Mark Roche pays particular attention to the interrelation of form and content, and he uncovers previously overlooked allusions to thinkers such as Aristotle, Seneca, and Meister Eckhart. Benn's supposedly pure poetry of stasis is in reality an expression of opposition to nazi ideology, Roche argues, and should be viewed in the context of inner emigration. Nevertheless, Benn's opposition to nazism unwittingly rests on the same decisionistic foundation as the power positivism he deplores. Benn's well-intentioned critique of nazism is ultimately unsuccessful. The book concludes with a theoretical postscript that suggest ways in which intellectual history could be made productive for literary interpretation and provides arguments in favor of an "aesthetic" analysis attentive to both formal structures and philosophical coherence.

A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson is the third volume in the distinguished series "Cornell Concordances." Like the others, it was programmed on an IBM 704 electronic computer and provides an alphabetical list of all significant words—each word given in context. In order to provide variants, it was based on Thomas H. Johnson's three-volume edition of all the known texts of Emily Dickinson's poems. Included are an analytical preface by the editor and an index of words in the order of frequency.

Northern Irish Poetry and Theology argues that theology shapes subjectivity, language and poetic form, and provides original studies of three internationally acclaimed poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union. Through their references to Russia the three poets achieve a geographical and mental detachment allowing them to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.