This is the only monograph to consider the entire thirty-year career, publications, and influence of Britain's first female poet laureate. It outlines her impact on trends in contemporary poetry and establishes what we mean by ‘Duffyesque’ concerns and techniques. Discussions of her writing and activities prove how she has championed the relevance of poetry to all areas of contemporary culture and to the life of every human being. Individual chapters discuss the lyrics of ‘love, loss, and longing’; the socially motivated poems about the 1980s; the female-centred volumes and poems; the relationship between poetry and public life; and poetry and childhood and written for children. The book should whet the appetite of readers who know little of Duffy’s work to find out more, while providing students and scholars with an in-depth analysis of the poems in their contexts. It draws on a wide range of critical works and includes an extensive list of further reading.

A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.

A landmark anthology envisioned by Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States American Journal presents fifty contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith has gathered a remarkable chorus of voices that ring up and down the registers of American poetry. In the elegant arrangement of this anthology, we hear stories from rural communities and urban centers, laments of loss in war and in grief, experiences of immigrants, outcries at injustices, and poems that honor elders, evoke history, and praise our efforts to see and understand one another. Taking its title from a poem by Robert Hayden, the first African American appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, American Journal investigates our time with curiosity, wonder, and compassion. Among the fifty poets included are: Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Límon, Layli Long Soldier, Erika L. Sánchez, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, Susan Stewart, Mary Szybist, Natasha Trethewey, Brian Turner, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young.

Hughes's last collection of poems commemorates the experience of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear—the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time. “Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America's acknowledged poet of color. Here, Hughes's voice—sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful—is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as "Prime," "Motto," "Dream Deferred," "Frederick Douglas: 1817-1895," "Still Here," "Birmingham Sunday." " History," "Slave," "Warning," and "Daybreak in Alabama."

“Nye at her engaging, insightful best.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Acclaimed poet and Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye shines a spotlight on the things we cast away, from plastic water bottles to those less fortunate, in this collection of more than eighty original and never-before-published poems. A deeply moving, sometimes funny, and always provocative poetry collection for all ages. “How much have you thrown away in your lifetime already? Do you ever think about it? Where does this plethora of leavings come from? How long does it take you, even one little you, to fill the can by your desk?” ?Naomi Shihab Nye National Book Award Finalist, Young People’s Poet Laureate, and devoted trash-picker-upper Naomi Shihab Nye explores these questions and more in this original collection of poetry that features more than eighty new poems. “I couldn’t save the world, but I could pick up trash,” she says in her introduction to this stunning volume. With poems about food wrappers, lost mittens, plastic straws, refugee children, trashy talk, the environment, connection, community, responsibility to the planet, politics, immigration, time, junk mail, trash collectors, garbage trucks, all that we carry and all that we discard, this is a rich, engaging, moving, and sometimes humorous collection for readers ages twelve to adult. Includes ideas for writing, recycling, and reclaiming, and an index.

"First published in a slight different form in Great Britain in 2019 by Profile Books Ltd."--Title page verso.

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.