Gerald Murnane turns to poetry at the end of his literary career, writing frank, disarming poems that traverse the rich span of his life. I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in my throat. — Gerald Murnane, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth year, began his writing career as a poet. After many years as a writer of fiction, he only returned to poetry a few years ago when he moved to Goroke, in the Western Districts of Victoria, after the death of his wife. The forty-five poems collected here are in a strikingly different mode to his fiction — without framing or digressions, and with very few images, they speak openly to the reader of the author’s memories, beliefs and experiences. They are for this reason an important addition to his internationally recognised body of fiction, most recently Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction, published by Giramondo. The poems include tributes to his mother and father and to his family, and to places that have played a formative role in his life, like Gippsland, Bendigo, Warrnambool, the Western Districts, and of course Goroke. Especially moving are his poems dedicated to authors who have influenced him — Lesbia Harford and Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Henry Handel Richardson, Marcel Proust, and with particular force, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare, who gives the collection its title, revered ‘not only for his writings / but for his losing his reason when / he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.’ Praise for Gerald Murnane: ‘A strong case could be made for Murnane…as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.’ — New York Times ‘No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction.’ — Sydney Morning Herald

A collection of poems by Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, presented in Spanish and in English.

There was once a little brown bat who couldn't sleep days-he kept waking up and looking at the world. Before long he began to see things differently from the other bats, who from dawn to sunset never opened their eyes. The Bat-Poet is the story of how he tried to make the other bats see the world his way. Here in The Bat-Poet are the bat's own poems and the bat's own world: the owl who almost eats him; the mockingbird whose irritable genius almost overpowers him; the chipmunk who loves his poems, and the bats who can't make beads or tails of them; the cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, and sparrows who fly in and out of Randall Jarrell's funny, lovable, truthful fable. Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT) Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT)

"Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." -Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?

In ambitious and dextrous poems employing a variety of formal guises, Mary Meriam creates for us an impressionistic yet incisive vision of love and loss in her powerful new collection, My Girl's Green Jacket. Recalling the sonnets of John Donne and the religious ballads of Christina Rossetti, Meriam's assured poems pulse with a channeled intensity, leading us as readers through an emotional and intellectual landscape . . . A collection as brilliant as it is emotionally nuanced, My Girl's Green Jacket offers us a complex imaginative mirror to hold up against our current reality. -Stu Watson editor of Prelude Lush, acrobatic, heartbroken, and witty by turns, or all at once, Mary Meriam's poems pack plot, memory, landscape, and longing into firm and elegant shapes. To call this work formally accomplished isn't sufficient. Meriam's lyricism is nervous and incandescent; her poems coruscate and spin. My Girl's Green Jacket honors not only the urgency of desire but also its mercurial restlessness. Poetic forebears ranging from Sappho to Hopkins, from H.D. to Marilyn Hacker, turn out to be not only generative models but also anchors in a world of relentless change. -Rachel Hadas author of Poems for Camilla The poems in this extraordinary collection shimmer with light and color, vibrate in the imagination with almost hallucinatory effect. They reach the reader, through the intimate short-cuts of the senses, so powerfully that the gorgeous, daring language feels inevitable-just right-even as it leaves objective order behind . . . Poem after poem in a rich variety of expertly handled forms-"The Mockers," "Ars Poetica," "Dusk," for instance-reveals the nature of love: its capacity to sow guilt, regret, longing, obsessive memory, fantasy; its tendency to inhabit every thought, experience, and sensation, and not only with our permission, but at our insistence. -Rhina P. Espaillat author of And After All and Agua de dos ríos/ Water from Two Rivers Mary Meriam's My Girl's Green Jacket is rich in description, rhymes and rhythms, bedecked in vivid color and emotions undimmed by the veneer of irony that shellacs so many contemporary poems. Like the moon she describes in "It Gets Very Dark until the Moon Rises," Meriam's songs, stories, prayers, fairy tales, ghazals and love-cries shine, grow, and give the dark a dream. -Joy Ladin author of Fireworks in the Graveyard This stunning collection of verse by Mary Meriam presents a palette of poems in various hues and forms . . . a spectrum of color reflects this poet's sense of loss and longing through a synesthesia that helps us hear, taste, and feel pigmentation as thought and emotion . . . Meriam notices the world quietly, yet vibrantly, alive to its potency, and we savor it too, dazzled by the poet's keen, discerning eye. -Janice Gould author of The Force of Gratitude Awe is equal parts nightmare and pleasure. Awe, in the hands of a poet, is exquisitely and horrifyingly impassioned. Mary Meriam's My Girl's Green Jacket writes the labor of our awe. Meriam stealthily interrogates our humanity by way of near-perfect poetic form . . . Meriam writes: "Nothing normal has ever happened to me." I say: Thank God. -kathryn l. pringle author of obscenity for the advancement of poetry

"[A] man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his 'report' will lead and what secrets will be brought to light"--Amazon.com.