Star Apocrypha

Frederick Rebsamen

Beowulf: An Updated Verse Translation

The acclaimed verse translation of the timeless epic tale of bravery and battle--the enduring saga of the hero Beowulf and the monster Grendel--the first true masterpiece of English literature. "There are lots of translations of Beowulf floating around, some prose, some poetry, but none manages to capture the feel and tone of the original as well as this one." -- Dick Ringler, Professor of English and Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison "No self-respecting college professor will want his students to be without it. . . . Renditions in modern English haven't taken the poetry of the original very seriously--but what a shock now that someone has! With the subtle rules of alliteration, stress, and pause in place--and with a translator bold enough to invent his own vigorous and imaginative compound nouns--the poem suddenly takes flight and carries us to the highest mountains of achievement." ( Booklist)

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

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.