From a Daughter’s Perspective Once I learned that this book was being dedicated to me, I insisted that I have something to say about the author, my dad. I would like to introduce his work simply by way of experience and by what I feel has contributed to its making. I am an avid dance person and he has always referred to me as his “poetry in motion,” a well-known phrase for dance, but I had never really read much of his poetry until lately. He was not very open with his writings because he thought his children would not be interested. He would often use phrases that seemed to have a poetic flare. That, to me, was just dad’s way. He would sometimes say a line and then stop and take note of your reaction. This was what he termed as a “hang line.” I later saw these lines in his poems with the dot, dot, dot at the ends. I later learned that dad had his own theory about poetry writing and was not easily taken to trends or reading the works of others who would be looked upon as setting the standard. In his own way, he was insistent with some degree or order or structure citing that it makes poetry more readable and understandable. He totally rejected the idea that structure hinders the creative process but saw it as a tool to preserve it. I remember how displeased he was when I used a stanza of verse that he had helped me with to do an “on stage response” during a pageant. The response was marked down because it was too structured. With dad, poetry was not only dance but it was also music as well. He once related to me how the mechanics of music and poetry paralleled. I’ve concluded that his “theory of poetry writing” relates to his current teaching background as a math professor and his former physics teaching background, especially as I remember the way he tutored me when I was pursing my engineering degree. He perceived that poetry has volume and pitch that is controlled by use of stanza, line-length, and other structural devices that need to be worked with just as music. Rhyme gives a sense of rhythm to poetry as beat does to music. This is the “body and soul connection,” he would say. “I don’t like the trend in avoiding rhyme.” With this insistence comes POETRHYME, a work totally dedicated to rhyme in whatever he experienced. In his way of writing poetry, he was always kindred to nature, a partaker of love, a friend of wisdom, a caretaker of gardens and vineyards that always captured his smiles and personification in a most practical and simple style. Courtney Dockery

This Companion represents the myriad ways of thinking about the remarkable achievement of Shakespeare’s sonnets. An authoritative reference guide and extended introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Contains more than 20 newly-commissioned essays by both established and younger scholars. Considers the form, sequence, content, literary context, editing and printing of the sonnets. Shows how the sonnets provide a mirror in which cultures can read their own critical biases. Informed by the latest theoretical, cultural and archival work.

The Saltwater Poet Poetry Collection is the lifetime work of James M. Rankin. James has written five volumes of poetry dating back thirty-five years. The titles are, The Poems from the Spirit of Hope, Inner Renaissance Rediscovered, The Philosopher Poet, Dawning of the Day, and Sand, Sun and Saltwater. The collection is his favorite, meaningful and dynamic poetic rhymes. The book is divided into six categories: Nature, Love, Developmental, Philosophical, Creative and Spiritual. There are over 100 poems that will move stimulate your senses, intrigue your mind and warm your spirit.

This book houses a collection of poems that gives the reader an insiders view of the moods, feelings, and thoughts that envelope the author as he bravely traverses through matters of the heart.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1889.

An autobiographical collaboration of subsequent journal entries of a poet delves behind the scenes of solitary tedium and introspection when a spark catches between the heart and brain and transforms into a pulsing literary song on the printed page. Based in Brooklyn, New York in the twentieth century, the written word comes alive through a city dweller that gives his life for his art in the all-too-often darkness of poverty and the clash with social expectations. While a friendly narrative of a life story threads into a likeable character, the poetic expressions, observations, and essays surpass politics, social issues of the day, and religion and exposes the richness of beauty and the limitations of being human. Melancholic in tone, the writing dares to challenge the astute reader to explore the deeper and unspoken aspects of the human condition.