Book of Hours

Book of Hours PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375711880
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

Book of Hours

Book of Hours PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375711880
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

Rilke's Book of Hours

Rilke's Book of Hours PDF Author: Anita Barrows
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440628327
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text. While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written. Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

Different Hours: Poems

Different Hours: Poems PDF Author: Stephen Dunn
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393322323
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Different Hours: Poems

Different Hours: Poems PDF Author: Stephen Dunn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393340287
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Hours in the Garden and Other Poems

Hours in the Garden and Other Poems PDF Author: Hermann Hesse
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux
ISBN: 9780374514235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
Written during the same period as The Glass Bead Game, these poems reflect the book's mysticism and help to illuminate Hesse's physical and metaphysical search for a "sublime alchemy" that would go beyond all images

Human Hours

Human Hours PDF Author: Catherine Barnett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555978665
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Winner of the Believer Book Award The triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award Catherine Barnett’s tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.

Winter Hours

Winter Hours PDF Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395850879
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
What good company Mary Oliver is the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by The Best Amer

New and Selected Poems 1974-1994

New and Selected Poems 1974-1994 PDF Author: Stephen Dunn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039331300X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

Varamo

Varamo PDF Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811219550
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
The surprising, magnificent story of a Panamanian government employee who, one day, after a series of troubles, writes the celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry. Unmistakably the work of César Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo “hadn’t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one.” Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet’s vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game.

Blue Hour

Blue Hour PDF Author: Carolyn Forche
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062004239
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted. "The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence." -- Robert Boyers