J. D. McClatchy

Capturing the diverse sights, sounds, metaphors, and meanings of the seasons of the year, a compilation of poetry ranges from the medieval period to the modern day in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Keats, Blake, Thoreau, Frost, Merwin, and many others. 10,000 first printing.

Poems

The Four Seasons

A collection of gay and lesbian love poems spans the centuries with contributions from Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Sappho, Timothy Liu, and Federico Garcâia Lorca.

Gay and Lesbian Love Poems

Love Speaks Its Name

A collection of old and new classics celebrates poems of the sea with the work of Tennyson, Poe, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Homer, Plath, and many others.

Poems of the Sea

A comprehensive collection of poems by America's greatest contemporary poets features works by such authors as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Rita Dove.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind’s nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea–pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis–have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed. This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson’s seductive sea-fairies next to Poe’s beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge’s darkly brooding “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare’s “Full Fathom Five.” And here is Masefield’s “I must go down to the seas again” alongside Cavafy’s “Ithaka” and Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In the wide variety of lyrics collected here–sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers–we feel the encompassing power of our planet’s restless waters as metaphor, mystery, and muse.

Gathers selected modern poems from around the world

The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Selected poems, novels, and essays are included in a collection of the nineteenth-century American poet's works.

Poems and Other Writings

The Rest of the Way

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (Voice of the Poet)

Writers on both sides of the American Civil War “brought to the crisis” (in editor J. D. McClatchys’ words) “poetry’s unique ability to stir the emotions, to freeze the moment, to sweep the scene with a panoramic lens and suddenly swoop in for a close-up of suffering or courage.” This vibrant collection brings together the most memorable and enduring work inspired by the conflict: the masterpieces of Whitman and Melville, Sidney Lanier on the death of Stonewall Jackson, the anti-slavery poems of Longfellow and Whittier, the front-line narratives of Henry Howard Brownell and John W. De Forest, the anthems of Julia Ward Howe and James Ryder Randall. Grief, indignation, pride, courage, patriotic fervor, ultimately reconciliation and healing: the poetry of the Civil War evokes unforgettably the emotions that roiled America in its darkest hour. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

(American Poets Project #15)

Poets of the Civil War

An anthology of essays by such notables as W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and W.H. Auden offer their views on painting and works by such great painters as Picasso, Van Gogh, and Matisse

Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets

Poets on Painters

Centuries ago, when books were rare, those who owned them would lend them to friends, who in turn would copy out passages they especially liked before returning the precious book to its owner. These anthologies came to be known as Commonplace Books, and modern writers as different as W. H. Auden and Alec Guinness have kept them as well, recording phrases or passages that struck them as wise or witty or quirky. The result is as much the self–portrait of a sensibility as it is a collection of miscellaneous delights. Renowned poet J. D. McClatchy has been keeping such a book for three decades now. This selection from it offers a unique look into what strange facts, what turns of mind or phrase, what glorious feats of language and nature can attract the attention of a poet. The great and the obscure are gathered around the same table, exchanging remarkable opinions. Henry James is speaking of Venice: "The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give." At the other end of the table, Groucho Marx is playing drama critic: "I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse circumstances—the curtain was up." Nietzsche and Flaubert, Dizzy Gillespie and Marianne Moore—dozens of unexpected and timeless aphorisms and anecdotes that pierce and provoke. Many of McClatchy's own observations about the art and prowess of writing are included as well. This is a book meant to be sipped, not gulped; meant to be read at leisure and pondered on at length.

A Poet's Commonplace Book

Sweet Theft

From Emily Dickinson's reflections on the jay to Seamus Heaney's celebration of the turkey, a collection of avian poems pays tribute to the amazing world of birds in works by Gertrude Stein, Chaucer, Tennyson, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, John Updike, Po ChuI, W. B. Yeats, Virgil, Edward Lear, Sylvia Plath, and other poets from around the world. 12,500 first printing.

Poems about Birds

On Wings of Song

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

Karen Wilkin

The first comprehensive survey of Cornelia Foss’s landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, an artist in the style and tradition of Fairfield Porter. ﻿The American artist Cornelia Foss is part of a loosely knit group of artists commonly described as “painterly realists,” many of whom are associated with Long Island’s scenic Hamptons region, including Eric Fischl and Fairfield Porter. This is the first such survey of this artist’s work to be published. Long considered a quintessential Long Island artist, Foss has painted Wainscott Pond for over half a century. Foss’s work mirrors her protected environment—pastel drawings of her own garden and nearby ponds; oil portraits of her granddaughters and pets; landscapes featuring beach scenes and still-life paintings showing flowers on a windowsill. Thus, the art conveys a nurturing perspective that also acknowledges the outside world. Beautifully designed, this volume provides deep insight into the breadth and range of the artist’s practice over the past fifty years.

A Retrospective

Cornelia Foss

Thornton Wilder

A volume of approximately three dozen plays includes The Alcestiad, Our Town, and a previously unpublished Alfred Hitchcock screenplay, Shadow of a Doubt, in a collection that also restores to print a key selection of Wilder's theatrical essays.

Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater (LOA #172)

At last, a definitive selection of the elegant work by a poet at the forefront of American poetry for more than three decades. With his first several books, J. D. McClatchy established himself as a poet of urbanity, intellect, and prismatic emotion, in the tradition of James Merrill, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop––one who balances an exploration of the underworld of desire with a mastery of poetic form, and whose artistry reveals the riches and ruins of our “plundered hearts.” Now, opening with exquisite new poems––including the stunning “My Hand Collection,” a catalogue of art objects that steals up on the complexity of human touch, and a witty and profound poem entitled “My Robotic Prostatectomy”––this selection is a glorious full tour of McClatchy’s career. It includes excerpts from the powerful book-length sequence Ten Commandments (1998) and his more recent works Hazmat (2002) and Mercury Dressing (2009)—books that explored the body’s melodrama, as well as the heart’s treacheries, grievances, and boundless capacities. All of his poems present a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling. He has been rightly hailed as a poet of “ferocious alertness,” one who elicits (says The New Leader) “the kind of wonder and joy we experience when the curtain comes down on a dazzling performance.”

New and Selected Poems

Plundered Hearts

In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical -- and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere -- J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind. McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet and as a man, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility -- from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenious reader to accomplished poet-critic. Later sections range through poetry past and present -- from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin -- with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount" is interwoven with compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the tradition of light verse. The questions McClatchy poses of poems prompt a fresh look and the last word. Free of scholarly pretension, elegantly and movingly written, Twenty Questions is a bright, open window onto a public and private experience of poetry, to be appreciated by poets, readers, and critics alike.

(posed by Poems)

Twenty Questions

Poems consider ruins of the past, memories, our relationship to the natural world, and poses that are real despite their self-consciousness

J. D. McClatchy

Books

Your next favorite book is out there