Prose Sketches and Poems; Written in the Western Country

Czeslaw Milosz

Selected Poems 1931-2004

"One of the century's most important poets." --San Francisco Chronicle "One of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." --Joseph Brodsky "Nobody tells the story of this age better than Czeslaw Milosz." --New Republic Commemorating the centenary year of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems 1934 - 2004 is a sterling collection of some of the finest works of one the most revered poets of our time--including more than forty later poems new to this edition and never before published in English. Selected and Last Poems is a perfect introduction for poetry readers who might still be unfamiliar with this literary giant's monumental body of work.

Charles Bukowski

The People Look Like Flowers at Last: New Poems

"if you read this after I am dead It means I made it" -"The Creation Coffin" The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski. In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death. He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein. He writes about war and fatherhood and cats and women. Free from the pressure to present a consistent persona, these poems present less of an aggressively disruptive character, and more a world-weary and empathetic person.

Carolyn Forche

Blue Hour

" 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