Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as "riding on dragons." Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of "leaping" as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Transtromer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.

A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.

Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardener, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Thus begins “Phenomenal Woman,” just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou’s third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh—and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it. “It is true poetry she is writing,” M.F.K. Fisher has observed, “not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity. . . . It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night . . . it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes.”

John Glowney's debut poetry collection constitutes a report on the trials of contemporary life, a document of "visitation" in both senses. "Honesty is what we demand," John Glowney declares in the poem"Proof of Life," and throughout his debut collection Visitation it is honesty that he delivers, hard truths about contemporary life that arrive in burning, burnished words. At the outset he defines visitation as "a special dispensation of divine favor or wrath / a severe trial / an official visit for inspection or supervision", and his poems indeed constitute an inspection and document of wrath and trials (and even some moments of favor), of a universe broken from the beginning that nevertheless gives us life, the "total stranger" to which we owe everything. In the title poem that closes the volume, Glowney observes his neighbor taking out the garbage at night, a "working-class / Santa" in underwear and flip-flops who is a "great and unknowable and terrible" god for the creatures who depend on his trash for sustenance, who has "risen anyway / from his tv and his bag of potato chips / as if he understood the role of a god / is to atone for his long absences." There are glimpse of such atonement throughout these poems, and they are sustenance indeed. Poetry.

Robert Bly

Written with both passion and precision, God's Spies is a work that will be welcomed by anyone interested in the vital interplay between poetry and religion. The authors represented, including poets such as Michelangelo, St Francis of Assisi, Charles Péguy, Dante and Shakespeare, all possess one great and surprising quality in common: audacity. All of them in their work offer fresh and unforeseen perspectives on life and literature. Some of these authors are religious in the strict meaning of the word, their work indicating a devout turning away from the distractions of the world to focus on God. Others, in contrast, are poets whose work is distinguished by a remarkable visionary focus on the many small and great dramas of life, attending with bright, imaginative genius to what Shakespeare calls 'the mystery of things'.