From the Poetry Foundation.
Robert Frost by
This volume brings together a variety of critical perspectives on Frost's life and works. Four original essays provide valuable context for understanding and assessing his work. They outline the work's historical and cultural contexts, survey the major pieces of Frost criticism, examine Frost's relationship with modernist poetics, and consider how his use of paradox and contradiction participate in and differ from the use established by Whitman and Emerson. Previously published essays deepen readers' understanding and offer a sampling of the key concerns of contemporary Frost critics.
T. S. Eliot by
Essay selections offer detailed analyses of Eliot's most important works, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," TheWaste Land, AshWednesday, Four Quartets, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Murder in the Cathedral, and The Cocktail Party. These essays examine Eliot's poetry and critical writings through the lens of his relations to romanticism and modernism; analyze the psychic dramas contained in his early and unpublished poems; investigate the biographical details informing Eliot's work; assess the Eliot canon and his contributions to poststructuralism; and explore the gothic elements pervading the writer's plays.
The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson by
A canonical collection, splendidly and sensitively edited by Rudolph Byrd. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the leading voices of the Harlem Resaissance and a crucial literary figure of his time, James Weldon Johnson was also an editor, songwriter, founding member and leader of the NAACP, and the first African American to hold a diplomatic post as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
The Surrender Tree by
It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.Black, white, Cuban, Spanish - Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba. The Surrender Treeis a 2009 Newbery Honor Book, the winner of the 2009 Pura Belpre Medal for Narrative and the 2009 Bank Street - Claudia Lewis Award, and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Warhorses by
This powerful new collection of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry delves into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Tabooand Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like "The Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted, desperate prophet. Warhorsesis the stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize - winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
From the Poetry Foundation.
