Search

Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book's equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray's poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. The poems describe quilt patterns with sinister shapes: “a snake's tongue is a trigger finger/Man's tongue pleases no one.” Animals proliferate: “One cat became five/five became nine. /Then a flood and ebb/as each moon brought its tide/below the trailer floor…” A grandfather plays drunk, solitary Russian Roulette. A cousin lives in a closet. Duarte's poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.

Mary Matilda Betham, more usually known as Matilda Betham was born on 16th November 1776, the eldest of fourteen children to the Rev. William Betham and Mary Damant. Matilda was and raised in Stonham Aspal and had a very happy childhood although she was dogged by poor health. She was mainly self-taught, using her father's library, but with help from him on history and literature.Her appetite, from a young age, for poetry, plays and history was balanced by being sent out for sewing lessons ‘to prevent my too strict application to books.'In 1797, Matilda wrote ‘Elegies & Other Small Poems', which included Italian poems translated into English and ‘Arthur & Albina', a Druid ballad. She received a poetic tribute from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote ‘To Matilda from a Stranger'in 1802, comparing her to Sappho and encouraging her to continue writing poetry.Her painting career also moved forward and on to a larger public stage. Matilda painted delicate miniature portraits, which she exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1804 to 1816.In 1804, after six years of research, she published ‘A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country'. Four years later she published her second book of poetry: ‘Poems'.Matilda was close to many poets including Robert Southey and his wife, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her husband, Charles Lamb and his sister Mary as well as Hannah More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Matilda also took to publishing anonymously in magazines and to public Shakespeare readings. Both life and career were good.Her poem ‘Lay of Marie'(1816), was based upon the story of Marie de France, the medieval poet, written in couplets, and commended by Southey as'likely to be the best poetess of her age.'However, fate now played different cards. Matilda returned to the country after a rapid flurry of problems involving her publications, health problems and family circumstances. She lost her income and attempts to gain employment painting portraits were difficult because of now her dishevelled state.On 17th June 1819, Matilda was placed in a mental asylum by her family after suffering a breakdown. By the following year she seemed to be back to normal.Matilda said she had suffered a'nervous fever'after the hard work and stress of ensuring that ‘Lay of Marie'was published. She felt harshly treated at being put into an institution without examination or treatment.After her release she moved to London but kept her address a secret. A successful application for financial assistance was obtained from the Royal Literary Fund, which had been set up in 1790.Matilda now embarked on a passion for social reform. She called for women's rights, demanded greater participation of women in parliament, and wrote ‘Challenge to Women, Being an Intended Address from Ladies of Different Parts of the Kingdom, Collectively to Caroline, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland'to address charges levelled against Queen Carolina during her difficult marriage to King George IV, calling for women to support her against state persecution and to sign a petition on her behalf.Sadly, in 1822, her family once more placed her into an asylum.Writing and painting now became occasional pursuits. By the 1830s she was living with her parents in Islington. In the mid-1830's she published ‘Sonnets & Verses'within which are several moving poems expressing sorrow at the passing of several siblings.Despite her decline she maintained, as best she could, her friendships, love of literature, wit, and her entertaining conversation. However, it was hard for her to make a living. Her work ‘Crow-quill Flights', an account of her life, failed to find a backer.Mary Matilda Betham died on 30th September 1852 at 52 Burton Street in London. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

John Milton was a great English poet who served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. With epic poems such as Paradise Lose and Paradise Regained, Milton remains one of the most famous writers in English literature. This edition of Elegies includes a table of contents.

Jim Lawry's poems memorialize the losses we all suffer as Earth's crowding compresses our living spaces to interrupt the subtle biological webs holding our lives together.These two books of poems honor, praise and eulogize the lives of sea slugs and other denizens going extinct as we pay tribute to thousands of species that our children will never see and will never return to our planet.

Translated in the original metres'by Edgar Alfred Bowring. According to Wikipedia:'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832) was a German writer. George Eliot called him'Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth.'

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK OF 2012IRISH TIMES BOOK-TO-READ FOR 2012ATLANTIC BOOK AWARD WINNERFINALIST FOR THE GILLER PRIZE AND THE FRANK O'CONNOR AWARDA GLOBE & MAIL, QUILL & QUIRE, AND AMAZON.CA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR'Engrossing, thrilling and ultimately satisfying: each story has the weight of a novel.'—The EconomistThis was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history – not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center – not up at that level. This was something much lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow color and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world-record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield's ear, that cut right through the everyday clutter. —from'Miracle Mile'Two runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drugstore bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshold in an attempt to save a life and a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she's caught in far more dangerous currents. An auto-worker who loses his family in a car accident is forced to reconsider his relationship with the internal combustion engine.Alexander MacLeod is a writer of'ferocious intelligence'and'ferocious physicality'(CTV). Light Lifting, his celebrated first collection, offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies that explore the depths of the psyche and channel the subconscious hopes and terrors that motivate us all. These are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty, love and fragile understanding.

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers a new explanation of its significance in relation to history.In critical readings of the limits and also the heretofore untapped possibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of injustice while examining the place of mourning, the bad conscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as they appear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyond Levinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positions to calculate the necessary function of the'memory of injustice'in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society. In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.

A rich anthology of memorial tributes that offers a welcome reminder that, although words cannot necessarily assuage grief, they can provide tremendous comfort and perspective during our times of loss. The likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Benjamin Franklin, W.H. Auden and Diana, Princess of Wales, as well as ordinary folk from the seventeenth century to the present are mourned and celebrated in the memorable eulogies, condolence letters, poems and epitaphs collected in these pages.