Product Description
The Secret Language of Women by A.M. Juster, recipient of the 2002 Richard Wilbur Award, is a remarkably versatile collection of finely crafted poems and translations. Equually adept at satires, lyrics, epigrams and narratives, Juster meticulously crafts each of his poems so that they resonate uniquely and unexpectedly in his readers' minds. Mona Van Duyn, who chose Juster's sonnet "Moscow Zoo" for the Howard Nemerov Award, remarked how effortlessly "the poem drops without heaviness into its depth," and W.D. Snodgrass described another of Juster's award winning poems as "full of surprises" and "full of invention." In an era of endlessly dull and familiar lyrics, Juster's verse marks itself as strikingly different and permanent, both in its use of form and its subtlely of meaning. As Rhina P. Espaillat has commented on the wide-ranging poems in The Secret Language of Women, "Poems that work this hard in the reader's mind, and do it with such grace and wit that the work is also play, make me grateful that I can read." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Thumbs Down
Bland and contrived, the poems in this collection represent all that is wrong with 90% of formalist poetry.For poetry to work, whether free or metered, it must maintain some element of spontaneity and surprise.Juster's poems never achieve this and come off as uninspired exercises.

great book
The Richard Wilbur Award usually signifies a good collection of poetry, and A.M. Juster's book is no exception, in fact, it is a really good collection of poetry. Juster has mastered the sonnet and shorter poem, but where he really shined here was his long narrative, "The Secret Language of Women," which is such a phenomenal poem. It's really one of the better narratives I've read recently. This is definitely one of those collections you want to add to your poetry shelf.

An elegance and wit rarely found today.
Like X.J. Kennedy and the late John Frederick Nims, A.M. Juster excels in epigrammatic, flowing yet tightly constructed formal verse. This sort of cool, witty elegance was casually discarded by most American poets sometime around 1950, but fortunately a few noble eccentrics such as Juster have insisted on reviving it. The long title poem of "The Secret Language of Women," set in an indeterminate, long-ago imperial China before shifting at the end to the time of Mao, is a superb example of formal narrative verse and a moving demonstration that poetry may be driven underground, but it can never be killed. However, I found myself even more attracted to the shorter, funnier pieces--the excellent translations from the Chinese, French, and Latin, and such cheeky sonnets as "The Awesome Attorneys of Oz" and "On Remembering Your Funeral Was Today" ("I bet by now that you have stolen time/To edit `The Beginner's Guide to Hell'...I see you basting in satanic slime /Before deep-frying in your cockroach shell"). My favorite poem in the collection--one of my favorite poems, in fact, of the past decade--is "Letter to Auden," in which Juster attempts to bring the deceased poet up to date: "However, I'm delighted to report/That you became a hot pop property/When `Four Weddings' exhumed your poetry./You would have been amused to see its star/Arrested with a hooker in his car..." Hilarious and humane, A.M. Juster brings the pleasure principle back to poetry. "The Secret Language of Women" is a must for those who refuse to believe that formal poetry is dead. ... Read more

Product Description
An anthology, first published as a limited edition in 1955, features more than fifty line drawings by the world-famous sculptor, accompanied by classic literary excerpts on animals of every ilk. 25,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Quoted from the dust jacket of the 1993 edition published by FOURTH ESTATE
This is the first UK publication of A BESTIARY, a beguiling menagerie in words and drawings only hitherto available as a signed, limited edition published in the United States in 1955.This beautifully produced book is based on the original collaboration between Richard Wilbur and Alexander Calder, for which Calder created more than fifty whimsical drawings in his own unique style and Wilbur choose excerpts from classic works of literature -- poetry, essays, novels, plays, stories -- to accompany them.

In this enchanting book one finds such unexpected combinations as Faulkner on the Dog, Machiavelli on the Centaur, Disraeli on the Ape, T. E. Lawrence on the Camel, Thoreau on the Mouse, Laurence Sterne on the Fly, Plato on the Grasshopper, and Bertrand Russell on the Unicorn, among many others.

A BESTIARY is timeless, with delights for young and old alike.It is a book that will bring endless pleasure, proving that the combination of animals, art and literature is irresistible. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

acompetent book of poetry
I fully expected to love this book - rural setting, conciseness influenced by far Eastern poetry, political and religious awareness.All the poems are well written - but neither images, word usage or emotion stick in the reader's memory.Yes, there are a few exceptions: "You (the earth)were hungry / like us / for seed" in "the earth" or from "the old teacher": "that's how he wanted to help us / construct the world: / solid everyday life/ and occasional expeditions / inward to the borders of mystery."But there are few enough exceptions for me to recommend this book only to those with a specific interest in Scandanavian or Norwegian poetry.

acompetent book of poetry
I fully expected to love this book - rural setting, conciseness influenced by far Eastern poetry, political and religious awareness.All the poems are well written - but neither images, word usage or emotion stick in the reader's memory.Yes, there are a few exceptions: "You (the earth)were hungry / like us / for seed" in "the earth" or from "the old teacher": "that's how he wanted to help us ' construct the world: / solid everyday life/ and occasional expeditions / inward to the borders of mystery."But there are few enough exceptions for me to recommend this book only to those with a specific interest in Scandanavian or Norwegian poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
160 pages, 173 poems with introduction, selective bibliography, chronology, and index of first lines. ... Read more

Product Description
Levering Avenue by Robert Daseler, recipient of the 1998 Richard Wilbur Award, is a unique and powerful collection of contemporary sonnets dealing with the tragedy of human loss -- specifically the loss of a beloved wife. The collection's lyric poems stand both individually and collectively as a moving portrait and examination of the devastation of human grief. As poet and critic Robert Mezey explains, "Daseler writes of serious matters in a vigorous, plain English, and he sees things from an original and often unpredictable angle." As with Thomas Hardy's poems about the death of his wife, Levering Avenue renders an unforgettable, moving, and ultimately heroic confrontation with the inevitable human tragedies of loss and loneliness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Fathers
I am the father of two daughters, a two- and a four-year-old.Maybe because of that this poem caught my attention recently:

He was so beautiful at four I scarce could look
At him without a kind of squeezing of
My heart, a tugging and a throbbing that took
My breath away, and though we call this love,
I cannot name it that, for so debased
A word cannot approach the flood
Of feeling he awoke in me or taste
The savage surging crisis in my blood.
A child to hold is unlike any other
Investment we can make. A heart grown hoarse
With care is found generally in the mother,
But fathers also yield to nature's force
And feel their hearts torn open and exposed,
More hostage to this care than they supposed.

"Fathers", Robert Daseler


I love Daseler's sonnets, and not just because they are sonnets.It takes guts to write in a form so constrained and weighed down by tradition, but it takes skill to do it well.The verses are creative, too, another plus when writing in a traditional form, and Daseler keeps the language sounding natural, not stilted, and keeps the rhymes interesting as well: "ideas" with "azaleas", "practice" with "cactus".He uses the sonnet like John Donne used it: for contemplating deeply (as opposed to its other established uses--wooing and pining).It is a shame that, so far as I can tell, Daseler hasn't written any more recently.

Zach Hudson
[...]

This book is NOT out of print!
This book is not out of print.I do not know why you list it that way

Surprise!
I expected this collection to be maudlin, melancholy or wistfully reminiscent. WRONG!

This is a marvelous collection of sonnets (a feat in itself) that gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a man whose wifedied at an young age, leaving him with two sons to raise. His grief isobvious, but so is his love of life, of his sons and of having and sharingnew experiences. His sense of humor endures the hard times. I laughed outloud at the Classified Ad series. My favorite poem is the lighthearted"Canny Shopper".

If you love poetry, even if you don't knowthat you love poetry, buy this book.It is a beautiful little book. I havenow purchased half a dozen for dear friends. Each one has been impressedwith my (until now hidden!)literary sense of fine poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
Rehearsing Absence by Rhina P. Espaillat, recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award, is a remarkable collection of meticulously-crafted poems that take the seemingly everyday world and imbue it with startling resonance and profundity. John Frederick Nims, who chose one of the author's sonnets for The Howard Nemerov Award, accurately characterized all of the author's work when he wrote, "Her commonplace language hints at an incident of anything but common importance." This ability had not happened by accident. As Timothy Murphy explains in his comments on this "exquisite" new collection, "Rhina Espaillat writes with the measured assurance of one who has given a lifetime to the making of memorable verse." Rehearsing Absence is a truly unique and powerful collection in which Rhina P. Espaillat, with her maturity of vision, lyrical gifts, and an uncommon craftsmanship, presents poem after evocative poem that examines the world around us and helps us to see it new. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

GRANDMA MOSES
Well into her 70s, Rhina Espaillat-Moskowitz is a prodigy in that she continues to write the same sentimental poem over and over again, with the same thumping pentameters and forced rhymes.Her poems are often stories borrowed from the imagined pasts of her Morano ancestors, who fled persecution in Spain for the Dominican Republic, and then persecution in the Dominican Republic for the USA.Always, always, they are noble souls.Yes, always.

Though grandmotherish in tone, devoid of vision, and musically challenged, she does pull some of the poems off in this collection.For that I will give her one star, one which I hope she will wear proudly.

Poems that illuminate daily experience.
Rhina P. Espaillat, one of America's foremost living Formalist poets, eschews overt fireworks in her poetry. Like Vermeer--of whose paintings she has written most perceptively--Espaillat is a specialist in illuminating the quiet, everyday corners of our lives. She knows that the most quotidian things--a sign for a highway offramp, for example--can be symbolic of our deepest emotions, as in "Minefields":
Homebound past Wallingford you'll say, again,
"This is where Lenny lived; he died--let's see--
in forty-five, in Belgium; that was when
his jeep blew up. He was nineteen, like me."
Everywhere Espaillat sheds light on placid scenes and the complex life that looms just behind them."Retriever," a winsome piece of anthropomorphism, depicts a dog philosophizing about the significance of his life. The masterful sonnet "Nightline" succinctly presents the horror we feel at the news of yet another high-school massacre. "Paper," another fine sonnet, shows the poet discarding once-meaningful old documents "that will not mean a thing to anyone." Espaillat has reached that stage in life when the process of attrition becomes inexorable; against that, she upholds her bedrock belief in beauty, sanity, and civilization. Like a lamp in the window, her poetry is a welcome beacon of hope to all of us 21st-century readers.

"Now all I love is under me, I think."
Rhina Espaillat is a wonderful formal poet. I highly recommend her last book, 'Where Horizons Go.' This latest collection is easily as good. Once again she shows her mastery of meter and form (and this one is also loaded with sonnets) and she has a graceful use of language. The subject material of this collection seems to be a bit more serious.

The best I can do for this book is to briefly look at my three favorite poems. "Retriever" is a dramatic monologue where the narrator is a dog. It's a touching poem about the love and devotion of dogs towards their people. The essence is in why dogs do this: "...Why/ do I serve him? Who else would recover/treasures he�s always losing? " It's a touching and humorous poem. "Unto Each Thing" takes the topic of death, and life. Where a neighbors garden blooms more beautiful the spring their child died. We like to think that life and beauty in the face of death can help. But "too much, smell wearied, skin recoiled/from silk and velvet leaves to touch", and Rhina shows us it does not. The final stanza really sticks with you:

and mind ached with the gardener�s back
bent to the clacking of old shears
over big, heavy-breasted blossoms
gathering earthward like slow tears.

"Three Versions" is a poem where the narrator dreams her own death. It contains lines such as: "I settled in the mould, but begged them to/take word of me to those my death would wrong" and "I woke to the third day�s inhuman chill,/rank with the scent of mould. I smell it still."

This collection spends a lot of time delving into death and other more serious concerns not seen as much in her earlier collections. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection includes Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems, Things of This World, Ceremony and Other Poems, and The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. "One of the best poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur has imagined excellence, and has created it" (Richard Eberhart, New York Times Book Review).
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not entirely unforgettable
This book, with the amazingly original title, is a collection of four of Wilbur's earliest books -- The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony, Things of This World, and Advice to a Prophet.Rather counterintuitively, it begins with the latest book, Advice to a Prophet, and works its way backwards, so that if you read it front to back, you get a sort of anti-development of the young poet.

I would say that there are about fifteen good poems here, and two or three really great poems.Wilbur works with form meter and rhyme, which seems exceedingly rare in more modern poets, and when he does it well, it is a thing of beauty."Love Calls us to the Things of This World" -- a poem about waking, angels, and laundry-- is wonderful, as is a naturalistic farewell letter to a dead friend, "The Mill". But too often he is clever with form -- too clever for his own good.He can say a thing beautifully, but you still wonder if it was worth saying.

A personal theory: Regardless of style, form, content, agenda or tone, a poet's singular task to develop a unique and distinct voice.Anyone worth listening to (poet, musician, philosopher, artist) has a distinct way of seeing the world, and the point of the art is to communicate that to the rest of us in some manner.Enough theory; enough to say that what seems to be lacking most in this collection of Wilbur's poetry is this quality of voice.I cannot tell you what type of poet Wilbur is, short of a formalist, and that's not the point.The point is there is no point.And that's the problem.

To come back down to earth.This poetry is accessible (sometimes at the cost of being profound) and is a good study in form.It is average with a leaning towards above-average -- the middle book "Things of this World", won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, because it more often ascends above the average.It's not bad poetry, but maybe there's a good reason these individual books have gone out of print and are unlikely to return.Not entirely unforgettable.

Poetry that is accessable and filled with fun
Richard Wilbur will probably never be viewed as a 'great' poet. His poems seem slight and perhaps too easy to comprehend in an age that has put a premium on dense and obscure poetry. His major success as a writer has beenin his wonderful translations of Moliere's plays, but his poems offer thesame kind of appeal as his translations - a keen sense of fun in lanuage, afresh perspective and an economy of expression. I suspect that even readerswho don't normally turn to poetry would enjoy the sense of play thatunderlies so many of these poems and the elegance with which he expressesplayfulness. Even when the subject is serious, the leaness of the language,the selection of just the right word or phrase for the purpose, givesWilbur's work a kind of classical timelessness. And if one likes readingaloud, the sound of Wilbur's lines has a full pleasantness that is a joy tothe ear. Reading any of his poems a few times will leave phrases in themind just begging to be repeated.

This is not poetry to rival Milton orEliot for either thematic grandeur or emotional impact. But for the shearjoy of thought embodied in language there is no contemporary poet whosework is more satisfying. ... Read more

Product Description
Distant Blue by Thomas Carper, recipient of the 2003 Richard Wilbur Award, is a remarkable collection of carefully crafted poems and beautifully rendered translations from authors such as Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Akhmatova.The scope of the book is a powerful testimony to an author whose mind ranges from sublime metaphysical observations to unique perspectives on the minutae of everyday life.Whether Carper is ruminating on checkout lines, flypaper, or the heights of Parnassus, his skill with line and form are always in evidence, moving the reader with strength and seeming ease through the rich landscape of his imagination.In his enthusiastic praise for Distant Blue and its "extraordinary perspectives" and "gripping narratives," the poet and critic Alfred Dorn has written of Thomas Carper, "Painting with words instead of colors, he is the Corot of modern American poetry." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

disappoints
I trust the Richard Wilbur Award books. Generally they are great books (for example, books from A.E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat, and A.M. Juster). And I expected Carper's book to be another one of the great ones, after all, it is mostly sonnets, and I love sonnets. But I found that though they were technically well-written sonnets they didn't hold the magic that truly wonderful poetry contains. There were some good poems in the book, and I thought there were three great poems: "Why Did The" was hilarious; "Flypaper"; and "A Late Rembrandt Self-Portrait"--I could see it, you knew just exactly which one Carper was writing about. I wouldn't tell anyone not to buy this book, but I'm not going to recommend it either. ... Read more

Product Description
Two plays in which the entertaining character of Sganarelle appears-in The School for Husbands as a guardian, and in Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold as a duped and jealous husband. Introductions by Richard Wilbur.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

i luv this book
this book is pretty cool it definitly inspired the creation of another cuckold resource.I recommend this book[..].

great story
i greatly enjoyed this book.it was amusing and terribly funny.i could barely put it down.the characters were life-like and i found myself wrapped up in their twisted plot.i would recommend this book for anyone that wants a liesurely read. ... Read more

Product Description

Originally published in 1972 by Friends of the Earth, A Sense of Place is a remarkable look at the American continent over the past four centuries. Award-winning artist Alan Gussow presents a powerful collection of paintings that range from the earliest depiction of America by a European (John White's Indians Fishing, c.1585), to contemporary masterpieces such as Reuben Tam's White Sea.

For each picture-including works by Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Innes, Georgia O'Keeffe, Anne Poor, Albert Bierstadt, Wolf Kahn, and many others-the author provides a selection of the artist's own words that describe the painting and the scene that inspired it, along with a brief introduction to the artist and his or her work. An introduction by National Book Award and Pulitzer prize winning poet Richard Wilbur explores the complex relationship between artist and land, while a new preface by Gussow discusses the history and enduring importance of the book.

Island Press/Shearwater Books is proud to bring forth a new edition of this stunning, long out-of-print volume.

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION: "[A Sense of Place] is astonishingly successful; no careful reader should see art-or nature-in the same way again."-Time "[These] paintings, done in joy by [artists] swamped in the colors and forests of an Earth old, yet alive, convey a statement in spite of themselves on behalf of the land, the spectrum of light in the air and the full panoply of Creation." -Edward Hoagland, Life "Even the most ardent conservationist cannot match the eloquence of these paintings."-Anatole Broyard, The New York Times ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Landscape artists anthology
"A Sense of Place" is a beautifully illustrated anthology coffee table book of America's greatest living and past landscape artists covering first contact through the 1970s. Each colored reproduction is paired with a page of text about and/or by the artist.It is easy to read for those not familiar with art history jargon. There are other great scholarly works about the history of landscape painting in general such as Kenneth Clark's "Landscape into Art" which has excellent analysis and commentary but very poor b/w reproductions and Malcolm Andrew's "Landscape and Western Art" which frames European and American landscape art in a much different way and addresses it's practice from a much different philosophical perspective. But, for the money, this is my first pick.

A Sense of Place
The Book arrived quickly was in the exact condition as described. Very happy with this seller and the product.

The End of Landscape
A SENSE OF PLACE links the human with the natural: people make, and are made by, parts of our earth. Landscape artist and conservationist Alan Gussow has organized 63 well-chosen colorplates reminding us that paintings record the known landscape, the unknown frontier and what might be forgotten once nature and people meet. The book is a beautiful way to get to know the names in landscape art and see how the United States has changed over time: late 16th-century John White's "Indians fishing" in the Virginia colony organized by Sir Walter Raleigh; early 19th-century Thomas Cole's "Landscape with dead trees" and George Catlin's "Prairie meadows burning - Upper Missouri"; mid-19th century stained glass window specialist John LaFarge's "Bishop Berkeley's rock"; late 19th-century David Howard Hitchcock's glowing "Halemaumau" volcano; early 20th-century Marsden Hartley's rambunctious "Smelt Brook Falls" and Charles Sheeler's precise "Rocks at Steicher's"; mid-20th-century Edward Hopper's "Cobb's house" on comfortable Cape Cod and Georgia O'Keeffe's elegant "Sky above clouds II"; and late 20th-century Sidney Goodman's chilling "Landscape with 4 towers" and Anne Poor's delicate "Gertrude's bouquet." Readers get more specifics from William Gaunt's TURNER, Patricia Junker's JOHN STEUART CURRY, and Bernard B. Perlman's PAINTERS OF THE ASHCAN SCHOOL. It also is interesting to do comparison reading into Paul Machotka's CEZANNE and Richard Thomson's CAMILLE PISSARRO. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume brings together five of Moliere's finest and best-known plays. The three verse plays, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and The School for Wives, have been skilfully turned into sparkling English couplets by Richard Wilbur's 'brilliant rhymed translation' Sunday Telegraph; while the playwright Alan Drury has translated the two prose comedies, The Miser and The Hypochondriac ('a cherubically funny translation' Independent). ... Read more