Exploring Poetry

The Everyman's Pocket Poets series is a delightful collection of hand-sized poetry books. Some focus on a particular author, while others follow a common theme. Pick one up today!

The sonnets in this collection—whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair, or celebration—reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight, and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines. (Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service)

A vital and surprising hardcover collection of poems about, and inspired by, jazz music.
Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force--one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration. Includes: * "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" by Langston Hughes * "God Bless the Child" by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. * "Jazz Fantasia" by Carl Sandburg * "Ol' Bunk's Band" by William Carlos Williams * "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks * "Chasing the Bird" by Robert Creeley * "Victrola" by Robert Pinsky * "Pres Spoke in a Language" by Amiri Baraka * "The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara * "Art Pepper" by Edward Hirsch * "Snow" by Billy Collins   Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. (Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service)

From Homer and Virgil to Byron and Yeats, from Shelley and Whitman to Auden and Stevens, from ancient China's anonymous bards to Poland's Mickiewicz and Israel's Amichai, poets of all times, places, and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. (Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service)

Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. (Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service)

The appreciation of Zen philosophy and art has become universal, and Zen poetry, with its simple expression of direct, intuitive insight and sudden enlightenment, appeals to lovers of poetry, spirituality, and beauty everywhere. This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan, and Korea includes the work of Zen practitioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travelers, and recluses, ranging from Wang Wei, Hanshan, and Yang Wanli, to Shinkei, Basho, and Ryokan. (Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service)

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.