“S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka’s own evolution as a poet-activist” (The Washington Post). Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century (The New York Times). Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka’s rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history. A New York Times Editors’ Choice “A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka’s poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure.” —William J. Harris, Boston Review “The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work.” —Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review

Represented in all modern anthologies by his great poem on Irish history A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Derek Mahon is regarded with Heaney and Longley as the leader of the resurgence of Irish poetry from the late `60s onwards. He writes lyric poetry of enormous wit, elegance and scepticism. Penguin published his first Selected Poemsin 1990 - this new, expanded edition revisits the older work but also contains important new work from his most recent volume, Harbour Lights.

Michael Hartnett (1941-1999) had a distinguished and highly respected career in his native Ireland. Even before the publication of his 1968 collection with the Dolmen Press, Anatomy of a Cliche, his poems earned critical esteem and, in time, they were recognized by the Irish Poetry Prize in 1980, a Poetry Ireland Choice in 1987, and awards from the Irish-American Cultural Institute and the American Ireland Fund. He was a member of Ireland's distinguished arts academy, Aosdana. From brief early lyrics to more extended meditations, and including a number of unpublished gems, this collection represents forty years of coruscating art.

Collection of poetry by Rochelle Owens. Introduction by Susan Smith Nash.

"Thirty writers selected a poem by Derek Mahon and provide an essay on their choice"--Page 4 of cover.

Derek Mahon (1941–2020) is widely recognized as one of the most important Irish poets of his generation. This collection of new critical essays offers an important retrospective assessment of the nature of his poetic achievement. Bringing together many leading scholars of modern and contemporary Irish poetry, including a notable number of accomplished poet-critics, its contributors range widely across Mahon’s body of work. Their essays offer fresh considerations of the biographical, geographical and literary contexts that shaped his poetic voice. This includes paying attention not only to more familiar influences but also to previously little considered interlocutors. The stylistic and formal achievement of his voice is re-evaluated in ways that range from attentive close readings to considerations of his controversial practice of self-revision, and his engagements with music and experiments in translation. The politics of a poet often misleadingly considered apolitical are also reframed to take in the engagements of his early work through to the ecocritical commitment of his later poetry. Indeed, a notable aspect of this book is the consideration it gives to all the phases of Mahon’s career. As a whole, the collection opens up many new ways of reading and understanding Mahon’s important body of work.