Describes the historical background of the poem and poses questions about Chinese mythology and the nature of the universe.

In this work, Hazo casts his eye back upon a career devoted to poetry. With works that are arranged loosely under the themes of love, family, and aging, this volume affirms Hazo’s status as one of the most compelling and enduring poets of his generation. Poems appearing in this collection include works which have appeared in the Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review.

From his first book, through the National Book Award finalist Once for the Last Bandit, to his newest poems, Samuel Hazo has written poetry that celebrates and solemnly honors art and mortality in the midst of vibrant living and the value of love in all our relations.

Hazo, National Book Award finalist and former State Poet of Pennsylva­nia, transports the reader with poems of both lament and celebration in his sensual new collection. Like a Man Gone Mad features much of the spare yet precise imagery of his earlier work. Searing portraits, a deft use of allegorical language, and a wry sense of humor are all signatures of Hazo’s unique voice. Taking up the theme of time, the poems carry the reader back and forth through personal and historical time, offering glimpses of a wide range of figures, from Pascal and Heraclitus to John F. Kennedy and Clark Gable. From each vantage point, Hazo meditates on themes of vitality and longevity, legacy and oblivion, and the enduring folly of both the individual and society. Accessible and eminently readable, the po­ems in Like a Man Gone Mad embody a rich intellectual and emotional curiosity.

A hybrid of history and biography, Maurice Collis's The Land of the Great Image concerns a little-known Portuguese friar abroad in early seventeenth-century Asia. The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique's career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the "great image" of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma. And all along Manrique's way the author waits at every turn with another curiosity, another historical tidbit for the reader to relish. Collis notes how trials of the Inquisition were run (which too had set up shop in Goa); the luxury enjoyed by Europeans in the East; what was served for dinner at court; how elephant warfare was waged; and what went into a potion magically brewed to bring glory to King Thiri-thu-dhamina (the hearts of 2,000 white doves, 4,000 white cows, and 6,000 of his subjects).

Lists over 5,200 titles of books published by American poets between 1973 and 1983.

A stunning selection of poems from the great twentieth-century Dutch poet.