An anthology of the best poetry ever written contains more than sixteen hundred poems, spanning more than four millennia, from ancient Sumer and Egypt to the late twentieth century

This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin Chile--Pablo Neruda China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting El Salvador--Claribel Alegria France--Yves Bonnefoy Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos India--A.K. Ramanujan Israel--Yehuda Amichai Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa Mexico--Octavio Paz Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal Nigeria--Wole Soyinka Norway--Tomas Transtromer Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott

Excerpt from A Library of Poetry and Song: Being Choice Selections From the Best Poets, With an Introduction The Publishers take pleasure in believing that many readers will find in this volume inducements to seek complete editions of favorite American poets, in order to become better acquainted with those authors whose writings have made this compilation so complete in the poetical literature of our own land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Translated from the Greek by Brian Sneeden. For the first time in English--a volume of poems by one of Greece's foremost poetic voices. Phoebe Giannisi's Homerica offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, longing, motherhood, and metamorphosis, re-weaving classical mythology with modern experience. Yet the mythic characters and scenes never feel otherworldly--rather, they appear alongside the tugboat, the bicycle, the television, and the helicopter. Brian Sneeden's masterful translation captures the Delphic rhythms of Giannisi's oracular poems, which rarely travel in a straight line but rather glide across multiple threads of time, like a look interweaving strands of the mythological past. "Giannisi's poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained both in architecture and Ancient Greek, her poems tackle the problem of how to inhabit the spaces we live in--from the abandoned lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a pleasure to have the full Homerica series in Brian Sneeden's lyrical translation."--Karen Van Dyck "Sneeden is a meticulous translator and a poet in his own right. He brings Phoebe Giannisi's work to life with immediacy and conviction."--Edmund Keeley "Phoebe Giannisi's poetry collection Homerica is a reinvention of Greek lyric verse and its language."--Shon Arieh-Lerer, World Literature Today "[An] unusually excellent translation." -- Anne Carson, The Paris Review Literary Nonfiction. Film. "A nuanced, clear set of poems that seamlessly articulate homeward journeys--wherever one's home may be."--Kirkus Reviews Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies.

A selection of poetry written during World War I. In the introduction Jon Silkin traces the changing mood of the poets - from patriotism through anger and compassion to an active desire for social change. The book includes work by Sassoon, Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg, Hardy and Lawrence.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life.--Ilya Kaminsky Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland's best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and 'shudders / with a tsunami.' How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry.--Matthew Zapruder

Translated by Rika Lesser. Written after the tragic and unexpected loss of her young husband, this spare and startling collection by celebrated Swedish poet and novelist Elisabeth Rynell offers a raw elegy in which everything lived--a visit with a therapist, a memory of lovemaking, a venture into the wilderness--becomes an expression of grief. Unflinching in their refusal of irony, these poems are elegantly rendered in Rika Lesser's translation, which is the first appearance of Rynell's verse in English. "Rika Lesser's fine translation recreates the demanding original with sympathetic resonance and perfect pitch." --Richard Howard "Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks--which can be read as either one long poem or a cycle of shorter poems--spirals around a woman who experiences the abrupt death of a husband still young. With its concise, intense lines, spare but far from simple, Night Talks oscillates between stark grief and memories of lush sensuality. American poet Rika Lesser brings Rynell's requiem into English with unerring sensitivity. . . . In Rika Lesser's skilled hands, Elisabeth Rynell is revealed as a poet of startling depth coupled with a firm and unpretentious humanness." --Susanna Nied " Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks, translated from the Swedish by Rika Lesser, is an essential work for the twenty-first century. In poems naked as flames, the book confronts a death and its sequel: 'out of this despair / grows a force / more than human. . . .' Night Talks is visceral, broken, adamant; Lesser's translation is seamless."--D. Nurkse Poetry. Women's Studies.

Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. An essential new translation of one of Italian literature's most celebrated poets. Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals. "This collection is a revelation. In Geoffrey Brock's impeccable versions, Pascoli becomes a poet who demands to be read out loud. Time and again I found myself stopping to savor a phrase, a line break, a rhyme, a stanza. And then reading the poem over from the start. 'The Sleep of Odysseus' is heart-stopping. It's difficult to overstate my admiration for that tact, grace, and formal imagination that shape these remarkable translations."--Clare Cavanagh "A champion of childlike intuition, muted tones, and 'small things,' Pascoli has until now been confined to his corner of the map. In this personal anthology, poet and translator Geoff Brock conveys to us the best of Pascoli. His Pascoli is the author of subtle, bewitching poems that look both inward and outward, celebrating the natural world and the inner life of humble objects: kites, walking sticks, the little nests of spring. Brock has kept the rhymes and meters, and his deeply intelligent remakings breathe new life into the old idiom."--Will Schutt

The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry : 1900 to the Present is a comprehensive introduction to 20th and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems.

The definitive biographical guide to poetry throughout the world in the twentieth century and the only book of its kind to look at non-English language poets in such detail. Written in lively prose, with over 900 entries by over 75 international contributors, it brings a uniquely global perspective to bear on modern verse, encapsulating the lives and works of a vast array of poets in precise, compact detail alongside expert critical comment. Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry is a scholarly and hugely enjoyable guide through the diverse arena of modern international poetry.