This book of poetry is inspired by the many emotions and thoughts we fail to express. It will definitely allow you to relate with its contents so that you can understand that you are not alone with the sometimes crazy ways your heart and mind operate.

This volume contains a selection of the Australian poet Michael Sharkey’s uncollected essays and occasional writings on poetics and poets, chiefly Australian and New Zealand. Reviews and conversations with other poets highlight Sharkey’s concern with preserving and interrogating cultural memory and his engagement with the practice and championing of poetry. Poets discussed range from Lord Byron to colonial-era and early-twentieth-century poets (Francis Adams, David McKee Wright, and Zora Cross), under-represented Australian women poets of World War I, traditionalists and experimentalists, including several ‘New Australian Poetry’ activists of the 1970s, and contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets. Writings on poetics address form and tradition, the teaching and reception of poetry, and canon-formation. The collection is culled from commissioned and occasional contributions to anthologies of practical poetics, journals devoted to literary and cultural history and book reviewing, as well as newspaper and small-magazine features from the 1980s to the present. The writing reflects Sharkey’s poetic practice and pedagogy relating to the teaching of literature, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and writing in universities, schools, and cultural organizations in Australia, New Zealand, China, and Germany. It also evidences Sharkey’s familiarity with literatures written in English and his wider career in publishing, editing, free-lance journalism, and the promotion of Australian and New Zealand literature, especially poetry.

A critical monograph of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, informed by much archival material.

The Lion of Africa An elderly story teller tells a tale of how Hannibal leads an expeditionary force of 60,000 men and 37 war elephants across the Alpine heights into Italy. Hannibal descends into Italy, bringing the war to the surprised Romans. Here he recruits the Celtic tribes that have been warring with Rome and with tactical wizardry destroys one army after another. At the battle of Cannae Hannibal kills some 70,000 Romans in a single afternoon and brings the Roman republic to its knees. It is only the consul FABIUS and his young pupil SCIPIO who save the republic. With indomitable determination the two are able to help Rome recover from great loss. Alone in Italy, Hannibal has to conduct a war of attrition with no help from home, betrayed by his own government. Scipio, having witnessed Hannibal's brilliance on the battlefield and having learned from his rival, takes the war to Africa where he ravages the Carthaginian countryside in an attempt to draw Hannibal from Italy. The lion-hearted Hannibal returns to the defense of his homeland and engages Scipio at Zama where he is soon transformed from predator to prey.

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin). Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.