Durling's edition of Petrarch's poems has become the standard. Readers have praised the translation of the authoritative text as graceful and accurate, conveying a real understanding of what this difficult poet is saying. The literalness of the prose translation makes this book especially useful to students who lack a full command of Italian.

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself. In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

"Katie Ford's is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc." —Poetry I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree: our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes, paperclips, teaspoons of sugar, this child of grams for which the good nurse laid out her studies as a coin purse into which our tiny wealth clinked, our daughter spilling almost to the floor. —from "Of a Child Early Born" In Katie Ford's third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world's dangers. Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

This collection of poems by the rock lyricist Robert Hunter, best known for his songwriting contributions to legendary performers such as Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead, features rhythmic, philosophical meditations on art, authenticity, public perception, and love. Hunter delivers his lines with effective and deceptively simple language, the ideal vehicle for his timeless, wide-ranging observations about the relationships we have with our expectations, our mythology, and each other as we navigate modern life and ephemera.

A vibrant new collection of poems—that also double as rock songs—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet In his new book of rock lyrics, Paul Muldoon goes back to the essential meaning of the term "lyric"—a short poem sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. These words are written for music most assuredly, with half an ear to Yeats's ballad-singing porter drinkers and half to Cole Porter—and indeed, many of them double as rock songs, performed by Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based music collective of which Muldoon is a member. Their themes are the classic themes of song: lost love, lost wars, Charlton Heston, barbed wire, pole dancers, cellulite, Hegel, elephants, Oedipus, more barbed wire, Buddy Holly, Jersey peaches, Julius Caesar, Trenton, cockatoos, and the Youngers (Bob and John and Jim and Cole). The Word on the Street is a lively addition to this Pulitzer Prize–winning poet's masterful body of work. It demonstrates, once again, that, as Richard Eder has written in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, "Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does."

Everything I've ever doneEverything I ever doEvery place I've ever beenEverywhere I'm going toOver a career that spans four decades and thirteen studio albums with Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant has consistently proved himself to be one of the most elegant and stylish of contemporary lyricists. Arranged alphabetically, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem presents an overview of Neil Tennant's considerable achievement as a chronicler of modern life: the romance, the break-ups, the aspirations, the changing attitudes, the history, the politics, the pain. The landscape of Tennant's lyrics is recognisably British in character - restrained and preoccupied with the mundane, occasionally satirical, yet also yearning for escape and theatrical release. Often surprisingly revealing, this volume is contextualised by a personal commentary on each lyric and a fascinating introduction by the author which gives an insight into the process and genesis of writing. Flamboyant, understated, celebratory and elegiac, Neil Tennant's lyrics are a document of our times.