“On the Threshold” (“In Limine”) was originally published in Eugenio Montale’s first volume of verse, Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia, 1925). It is a short poem in four stanzas: the first and third stanzas have five lines each; the second… Read More ›
“On the State of the Union” is indicative of how Aimé Césaire’s vision of négritude had evolved from the concerns of being a Martinican struggling for racial equality with white Europeans into a universal view of civil rights for Blacks…. Read More ›
At the same time that Zionism was crystallizing as a political movement, Hayim Bialik’s poetic output was coming into the limelight. Many of his readers believe that Bialik reached his artistic apex with his Poems of Wrath series, a shockingly… Read More ›
This poem, Nur eine Rose als Stütze, appeared in 1959 in a revised version as the title poem of Hilde Domin’s first collection. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. The first two stanzas speak of the… Read More ›
First published in The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, “On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone” is an example of Syl Cheney-Coker’s self-referential—one might almost say egocentric—style. This 34-line free-verse poem—which contains minimal punctuation (only two exclamation points and six commas)—is… Read More ›
“On a Red Steed” (Na krasnom kone) first appeared in Tsvetaeva’s Remeslo (Craft) in 1923. In this poem, the female speaker traces the development of a woman poet, explores her source of inspiration, and identifies the sacrifices she has to… Read More ›
Omeros is Derek Walcott’s longest and most ambitious poem, evoking the tradition of epic poetry through its stylistic features. The title is a variation on the modern Greek pronunciation of “Homer.” Various characters have Homeric names: Helen, Achille, and Hector…. Read More ›
Like many of Joseph Brodsky’s poems, Odysseus to Telemachus examines the corruptive effects of empire on the individual. In Torso (1977), the subject is the Roman Empire, described as “the end of things,” a place where a person finds the… Read More ›
A speaker praises his loved one, yet finds he is unable to satisfy her: this is not an unfamiliar trope in Neruda’s work. But in Ode with a Lament, from the second volume of Neruda’s somber Residencia en la Tierra… Read More ›
The central poem of the Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) cycle, “Ode to Walt Whitman” is one of Federico García Lorca’s lyric landmarks in which the poet uses avant-garde form (including free verse and surrealist imagery) to… Read More ›
Andrei Voznesensky first published Ode to Gossips in his second collection of verse, Parabola, published in Moscow (1960); he then slightly altered the poem when he republished it in Antimiry (Antiworlds, 1964). Stanley Moss’s excellent translation preserves the work’s eclectic… Read More ›
Composed as a prose poem and narrated from an omniscient point of view, this piece by Sakutarō gives an account of the sad life of an octopus neglected for a long time in “a certain aquarium” (281). The poet delicately… Read More ›
The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the… Read More ›
Imtiaz Dharker calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist and writes in English. Her No-man’s Land first appeared in her second volume of poetry, Postcards from God. This poem begins with a stark visual image and a hair-raising auditory one: “A… Read More ›
The fifth independent collection of poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nocturnes was published in 1961, the year after Senghor became president of Senegal, and it was awarded the International Grand Prize for Poetry from the Poets and Artists of France…. Read More ›
“Nocturno” (Nocturne), from the collection Diario de un poeta recién casado (Diary of a Newlywed Poet), is an excellent example of Jiménez’s “naked poetry.” Employing simple language and rhythmic free verse, “Nocturno” is a meditation on the traveler’s longing for… Read More ›
Nazim Hikmet’s series of 32 free-verse poems addressed to his wife, Piraye, from Bursa Prison in Turkey in 1945 constitutes a significant contribution to the tradition of the love lyric as it powerfully synthesizes authentic expressions of love, longing, and… Read More ›
This is one of the earliest poems of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo and has been widely anthologized. One of the most successful of his poems, it was first published in Poems (1962) and reprinted in A Reed in the Tide (1965)…. Read More ›
Perhaps the most frequently anthologized of Nissim Ezekiel’s vast oeuvre of poetic works in English, “Night of the Scorpion” is also most evocative of the cultural traditions of India, the country of his birth. The poem presents a scary scenario… Read More ›
New Hieroglyphics is representative of Les Murray’s later creative works. In the preface to The Paperbark Tree (1992), in which this poem first appears, Murray writes: “Poetry is the principle that controls reality.” The pronouncement is significant in suggesting the… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.