This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death – completed weeks before Harold Bloom died – shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called "a universe of death". Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of li...

Equal parts dramatic and symphonic, the poetry of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen provides acute insight into the European consciousness of the first half of the twentieth century. With energetic innovation and imaginative depth, Dadelsen extols the somber bea...

The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. In his foreword to the collection, award-winning poet Carl Phillips notes, "Ce...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work – over the centuries countless thousands of poems h...

This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, of unabashed eroticism; at the same time it is a work of integral imagination, steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet's heritage and imbued with an intuitive sense of dramatic confli...

Richard Siken's "Crush", selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional,...

The winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, present sensations, and the impingements of th...

The Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Its winners include some of the most influential voices in American poetry, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Forche, and Robert Hass...

Considered among the most important collections of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance, For My People is a series of ballad poems with memorable characters, including the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a t...

The poems in "Gathering the Tribes" recount experiences from the author's adolescence and young?adult life, closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body's functioning. Many deal with uprootedness – hasty emigrations...