The Important Thing Is... Card Game

The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations

The astonishing collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than fifty years, introducing foreign poets to American readers for the first time. Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Bly introduced Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, Jimenez, Trastromer, and Rumi. His most recent translations include Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, and the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two renowned and lesser-known poets from around the world are brought together. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly "is one of the leaders of a poetic revival that has returned American literature to the world community."

Charles Bukowski

Come on In!: New Poems

another comeback climbing back up out of the ooze, out of the thick black tar, rising up again, a modern Lazarus. you're amazed at your good fortune. somehow you've had more than your share of second chances. hell, accept it. what you have, you have. you walk and look in the bathroom mirror at an idiot's smile. you know your luck. some go down and never climb back up. something is being kind to you. you turn from the mirror and walk into the world. you find a chair, sit down, light a cigar. back from a thousand wars you look out from an open door into the silent night. Sibelius plays on the radio. nothing has been lost or destroyed. you blow smoke into the night, tug at your right ear. baby, right now, you've got it all.

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)