Five Great Odes (Cinq Grandes Odes) comprises five confessional poems composed by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel between 1901 and 1908. They were collected and published in book form in 1910. The first poem, The Muses (Les Muses),… Read More ›
On the surface, Vasko Popa’s fifth poetry collection, Wolf Salt (1975), appears to be one of his most hermetic works since it revolves around a wolf motif without many points of reference outside of the apparent symbolic. But once the… Read More ›
Farmers’ Dance is the title poem of Shin Kyeong-nim’s first collection of poetry, Farmers’ Dance, and an example of his minjung (folksong) poetry. In this collection, Shin presents us with a heartfelt vision of displaced farmers in South Korea who… Read More ›
This 10-stanza poem was written in 1971 when Gu Cheng was only 15; it is a poem from among the ones he “wrote on the riverbank with twigs” (Gu xii). However, its publication and warm acceptance by the public in… Read More ›
“The Faithless Wife” (“La casada infiel”) is part of Gypsy Ballads (Romancero gitano), Federico García Lorca’s most famous poetry cycle (1921–27), which pays tribute to the verve of Spain’s legendary outsiders whose freedom-loving spirit, wild passions, and uncompromising ways had… Read More ›
One week before its first publication in Germany’s leading weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, in November 1962, Johannes Bobrowski recited Erfahrung at a literary meeting of the legendary Gruppe 47, an informal alliance of German postwar authors that included the novelists… Read More ›
The poem Exile appears in the Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin It expresses the emotional pain of this exiled writer and her yearning for her homeland. Exposing her innermost vulnerability and loneliness, the poet addresses her country as would a pining… Read More ›
Enough For Me Enough for me to die on her earth be buried in her to melt and vanish into her soil then sprout forth as a flower played with by a child from my country. Enough for me to… Read More ›
Encounter We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago…. Read More ›
In Elited Prose, from his collection Yokes (1979), we see an example of Édouard Glissant’s broader creative view. Whereas in Gorée, his condemnation of slavery is clear and direct, Glissant does not repeat a militant Négritude sensibility in all his… Read More ›
Christopher Okigbo’s “Elegy for Slit-Drum,” a poem in the unfinished sequence Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War, is emblematic of his late work, in which the escalating political crisis in Nigeria plays a crucial role. In the mid-1960s, ethnic tensions… Read More ›
The slim surrealistic volume of prose poetry ¿Águila o sol? (1951) takes its title from a Mexican coin with an eagle and the sun on opposing sides. The phrase, equivalent to the English “heads or tails,” underscores a characteristic theme… Read More ›
Many readers consider Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), which Rilke completed in 1922, not only his most accomplished poetry, but also, plausibly, the most perfect lyrical sequence of the 20th century. So well crafted are the 10 poems… Read More ›
Yvan Goll’s Dream Grass (Traumkraut) celebrates the poet’s love for his wife, Claire. The emotional pitch of the collection, published a year after his death, reflects the trauma of the poet’s struggle with leukemia, which took his life in 1950…. Read More ›
This most famous poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat) appears in his collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (The Picture of a Dissenter), published in 1941, the year that Faiz married Alys George, an English journalist and human rights campaigner… Read More ›
One of Chris Abani’s several books of poetry, Dog Woman is a series of persona poems (poems voiced through characters other than the poet) employing the conventions of language poetry and elegy to explore the intersection of race, gender, and… Read More ›
Dis Nigeria Sef is the longest poem in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Songs in a Time of War. This poem does not belong among the war poems; the writer acknowledges in one of his memoirs that it was written in 1977, long… Read More ›
In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is… Read More ›
The Desert includes selections from the poetic diary of Adonis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the siege of Beirut. The poem is dated “June 4, 1982–Jan. 1, 1983.” It is made up of 35 numbered… Read More ›
One of the few poems by Hafez Ibrahim available in English translation, Describing a Suit is an excellent illustration of Ibrahim’s famed use of irony and sarcastic humor to call attention to social issues. A leader of the neoclassical movement… Read More ›
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