Bøger i New Directions Poetry Pamphlets serien

A four-pack of our Spring 2014 Poetry Pamphlets, featuring:The Albertine Workout, by Anne CarsonDerangements of my Contemporaries, by Li ShangyinThe Iceland, by Sakutaro HagiwaraThe Poems of Osip Mandelstam

the people, the boats completely gone with the tsunami / tonight you would not be able to sleep -from Sea, Land, ShadowSea, Land, Shadow, the fourth collection by Kazuko Shiraishi to be published by New Directions, comprises work written over sixty-years, from 1951 to 2015. Shiraishi, described by Donald Keene as "the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan," sees the world in a grain of rice and finds poetry in a mountain-road traffic jam. In the haunting title poem, she visits Iwanuma not long after the disastrous tsunami hit in 2011 and finds "no houses but a place where houses had been." This pamphlet also includes a long, lyrical homage to Yukio Mishima, as well as playful and profound meditations on a Roman condom, lizard god, god of war, and an ear.

The Objectivist Press published George Oppen's first book Discrete Series, a collection of thirty-one short poems with a preface by Ezra Pound, in 1934. Four years earlier, the twenty-one-year-old poet had sent an unbound sheaf of typewritten poems with the title 21 Poems  hand-written in pencil on the first page to the poet Louis Zukofsky, who forwarded them on to Pound in Paris. These poems, suffused with Oppen's love for his young bride Mary, as well as his love of sailing, are strikingly different from what they'd eventually become in Discrete Series. The scholar David B. Hobbs recently found 21 Poems buried in Ezra Pound's papers at Yale's Beinecke Library, and they appear here as a collection of their own for the first time.

What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison's Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it's pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin-Harrison's poems voyage forth with visible breath, "as snow falls    as light is in paper."

In Will Alexander's work, "Every poem reads like a subversive, alchemical wonder. It is tempting to label Alexander a surrealist or experimentalist, but he is truly a singular voice" (Jackson Poetry Prize citation).Composed and collected by slow accretion over the span of thirty years, Across the Vapour Gulf opens with a note by the poet: "When I first laid eyes on the writing of Cioran I was smitten by the form. The aphorism seemed cleansed of detritus-in Cioran's hands, it seemed to spontaneously ignite. Poetry, history, philosophy, the essay, medicinally combined, appearing on the other side of itself as insight. Reading Cioran opened an unexpected neural pathway, opening the way for the composition of the compilation at hand. Each entry was instantaneous. They welled up and appeared with such astonishing alacrity, that they seemed to compose themselves practically fully formed."

Considered the greatest long poem in 20th century Brazilian poetry, Ferreira's Gullar's Dirty Poem was written as a response to the Brazilian dictatorship that put him in exile and murdered thousands.

Three medium-length poems by America's forgotten hermit poet and master of concrete minimalism.

The second set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, which includes Vale Ave by H. D.; Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander; A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik; The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn.

Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", Sorting Facts is Susan Howe's masterful meditation on the filmmaker Chris Marker, whose film stills are interspersed throughout.An excerpt:Sorting word-facts I only know an apparition. Scribble grammarhas no neighbor. In the name of reason I need to record somethingbecause I am a survivor in this ocean.

The first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S., poetry at the edge of impossibility.

Poet Forrest Gander's mesmerizing series of poems - hinging around a dance schematic - that captures and extends Eiko & Koma's performance with lyrical intensity and vividness

This bundle of four Poetry Pamphlets (9-12 in the series) includes:Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts Cries LaughterOsama Alomar's Fullblood ArabianOliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a StreetcarFifteen Iraqi Poets (edited by Dunya Mikhail)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast, published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914-15 that helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. In these fearless new poems, Ferlinghetti, America's everyman bard, speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed.

Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Girondo is one of the pioneers of Latin American literature. This selection offers a glimpse of a precise and playful writer who insisted that a poem "should be constructed like a watch and sold like a sausage."

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic "very short story" (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar's poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad's police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar's strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion using striking imagery and effervescent language.