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 ›
Pablo Neruda loved the rural, claiming that his poetry “gathers up earth and rain and fruit.” Yet he also loved the energy of cities, the music of busy marketplaces. He was loyal to his people of Chile even as their… Read More ›
Emerging in France in the 1930s and 1940s, the Negritude Movement comprised French-speaking Caribbean and African writers who sought to challenge European dominance and create Black consciousness. Its principal founders include Aimé Césaire of Martinique, who coined the term négritude… Read More ›
Pasternak said that the 50 poems that My Sister, Life comprises should be read and understood as a whole. The book describes a time both in the life of the poetic speaker and in the life of his country. The… Read More ›
Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 is one of Constantine Cavafy’s longest and most dramatic poems, centered around the elusive character of Myres, whose appropriation by different systems of signification—the pagan-cultivated, homosexual hedonism of Alexandria and the emerging, puritanical austerity of Christianity—is… Read More ›
This poem from his best-known collection, written shortly before his death in 1975, depicts “a / freshly washed pair of / black tights” hanging on a wire “between two / bare trees.” The poem exemplifies many of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s… Read More ›
The consequence of history—erasure—is a common theme in Ivan Lalić’s oeuvre. But instead of wallowing in what is lost, he focuses on the remains, which most often take the form of memory. As such, it is fitting that of all… Read More ›
This poem is made up of five movements, each with a subtitle. It was published in 1968 in the collection Al-Masrah wa’l-Maraya (Theater and Mirrors), in which the poet attempts polyphonic lyricism. Adonis has always been preoccupied with the relationship… Read More ›
In several respects Le Météore du 13 août is typical of char’s work, particularly of the collection Furor and Mystery, in which it appeared in 1947. In general terms, the poem is a series of images that must be understood… Read More ›
Although Nicanor Parra characterizes his later works as “ecopoetry” (see Ecopoetics), his first volumes belong to an earlier movement, which he termed “antipoetry.” While the title of Parra’s second volume (Poemas y antipoemas) announced Parra’s new concept of the antipoem… Read More ›
Marvellous Grass There you were in your purple vestments half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest under your linen alb and chasuble and stole: and when you saw my face in the crowd for Holy Communion the consecrated host fell… Read More ›
The long poem marsyas, umkreist (marsyas, encircled) from Anja Utler’s volume münden—entzüngeln (merging—untonguing, 2004) evokes and reinvents a mythological protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. According to classical Greek mythology, the satyr and flute player Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to… Read More ›
During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry… Read More ›
“Life-Hook” (“Vida-garfio”), called “Clinging to Life” in another translation, from Juana de Ibarbourou’s first poetry collection, Las lenguas de diamante (1919), shows themes and modes of expression that recur in her popular early work. The playful, almost flirtatious attitude of… Read More ›
One of Kurghinian’s famous poems calling women to solidarity in their struggle against oppression, Let Us Unite was first published in the volume Ringing of the Dawn. In this poem, Kurghinian tries to raise women’s self-consciousness to defy the patriarchal… Read More ›
Many readers have called Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet life-altering, and many writers of all ages have felt as moved as the original recipient must have been by reading these letters. The 10 letters have been called… Read More ›
Leda And when the god possessed the swan, from need, and found it beautiful, that terrified him. Wholly shocked, he disappeared inside it, but his trickery drove him toward his deed before he could explore what that life must have… Read More ›
Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst… Read More ›
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, considered Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece, describes the tragic death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a famous bullfighter and García Lorca’s close friend. A professional torero who loved literature and music and wrote poetry, Sánchez Mejías retired… Read More ›
I Want To Meet … Armed, upright and shielded in armourI went forth –but from fear was the coat of mail castand from shame. I want to throw down my weapons,sword and shield.All the stark hostilitywas my coldness. I have… Read More ›
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