Drawing on a range of visual archives and personal collections, the book casts Rabindranath Tagore as the 'Dancing Poet' - in whom the contours of a pan-Indian diversity seek to merge, albeit selectively, with that of the world, eschewing most emphatically the territorial borders of the nation-state while reiterating 'civilizational' strands. The book outlines the contradictions and possibilities in such aspirations, central to the new cultural texts that Tagore seeks to produce in lyric, song, dance, image and sangeet. These are strategic juxtapositions that may yet yield new insights into our old debates on modernity. The locus of this work continues to be the performing woman and the creation of new publics. Dance is the great signifier in this exercise. In the idiom of performance-dance, attempts are made to resolve anxieties about the erotic, to sublimate sexuality, and new dimensions explored in multiple modes of physical culture. Masculinities, whose other need not be femininity, figure prominently in these narratives. Focusing on the first three decades of the twentieth century, the book evokes an international backdrop - of Europe, Asia and the Americas between the world wars - and movements, revolutionary and reactionary, whose thrust was on putting 'the people' centre stage. It takes as a comparative frame cultural fronts emerging in locations as disparate as Russia, Japan and Germany alongside movements in colonial India. Overall, it marks a period when experiments were being made to weave together the hitherto exclusive discourses of education, art and entertainment in self-consciously alternative locales, often with a founding guru at the centre of activities. --

The only book of its kind, this anthology of poems about dance puts forward several interrelated ideas: that poetry is itself a form that resembles dance, that the difficulties of writing about dance in prose are avoided in poetry, and that dance is a "language" that crosses cultures and centuries. Selections include Leonard Cohen's "Last Dance at the Four Penny," Babette Deutsche's "Ballet School," Li-Po's "Dancing Girl," Howard Nemerov's "The Dancer's Reply," Arthur Rimbaud's "Gibbet Dance," Anne Sexton's "How We Danced," and Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Doing the Twist on Nails." Short profiles of the poets and sources for their poems are also included.

In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange’s ability to blend movement with words when her acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf made its way to Broadway in 1976, eventually winning an Obie Award the following year. But before she found fame as a writer, poet, performer, dancer, and storyteller, she was an untrained student who found her footing in others’ classrooms. Dance We Do is a tribute to those who taught her and her passion for rhythm, movement, and dance. After 20 years of research, writing, and devotion, Ntozake Shange tells her history of Black dance through a series of portraits of the dancers who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her to share the power of the Black body with her audience. Shange celebrates and honors the contributions of the often unrecognized pioneers who continued the path Katherine Dunham paved through the twentieth century. Dance We Do features a stunning photo insert along with personal interviews with Mickey Davidson, Halifu Osumare, Camille Brown, and Dianne McIntyre. In what is now one of her final works, Ntozake Shange welcomes the reader into the world she loved best.

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is Tishani Doshi's third collection, following two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Belongs Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for best first collection. Poetry Book Society Recommendation shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize.

In his collection Risking Everything, Housden addressed love’s many aspects. Now, in Dancing with Joy, he assembles 99 poems from 69 poets that celebrate the many colors of joy. Anything can be a catalyst for joy, these poems reveal. For Wislawa Szymborska, the catalyst is a dream; for Robert Bly, being in the company of his ten-year-old son; for Gerald Stern, it is a grapefruit at breakfast; for Billy Collins, a cigarette. Dancing with Joy includes English and Italian classical and romantic works; early Chinese and Persian verse; and poets from Chile, France, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and India, plus a range of contemporary American and English poets. Whether inspiration is what you need, or an affirmation of what is already joyful in life, Dancing with Joy is a welcome treat for Housden’s numerous fans, as well as anyone looking for sheer happiness, marvelously expressed.

Collects a variety of articles on dance by influential New York journalist and master critic Edwin Denby which he wrote for Dance Magazine, Modern Music journal, and the Herald Tribune

A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert looks back at the passions of a life—the women, and his memories of all the stages of love; the places (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself. We get illuminating glimpses of the poet’s background and childhood, in poems like “Going Home” (his mother the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a family of rich Virginia merchants) and “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” a classic scene of pulling water from the well, sounding the depths. The title of the collection is drawn from the startling “Ovid in Tears,” in which the poet figure has fallen and is carried out, muttering faintly: “White stone in the white sunlight . . . Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.” Gilbert reminds us that there is beauty to be celebrated in the imperfect—“a worth / to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on”—and at the same time there is “the harrowing by mortality.” Yet, without fail, he embraces the state of grief and loss as part of the dance. The culmination of a career spanning more than half a century of American poetry, The Dance Most of All is a book to celebrate and to read again and again.