poetry studies

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 140 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 64 pages, facsimile reprint of a pamphlet, an early feminist document in the form of a poem with a 14 page introduction by Gae Holladay. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Charlestown MA, Printed and Sold By Samuel Etheridge, Revised Ed., 1810, Book: Very Good, Hardcovers, two volumes complete, 432 and 448 pages. bound in 3/4 calf, with red leather spine labels intact, bindings tight. New corrected edition. A collection of biographical studies on the life of important poets in the cannon of English literature, including: Cowley, Milton, Blackmore, Granville, Somerville, Thomson, Mallet, and Lyttelton. Written by Samuel Johnson, an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. With the original advertisement to the first edition. originally published in 1779-81. Light edgewear to covers, mild water stain to first 4 pages of Vol. 2, otherwise clean, mild foxing, very good set overall.

Hardcover. NY, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly soiled dust jacket with tanning to spine,name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 217 pages. Includes essays on William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Nathaniel Tarn, Thom Gunn and more. Notes, bibliography. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 310 pages. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century. Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time. Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smiths searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 536 pages. Illustrated in color and black-and-white. A landmark study of California's visual arts and poetry, 1925 to 1975, Utopia and Dissent demonstrates the profound influence this regional culture had on American art and thought. Bookselle's label on rear cover, wrinkle to page 513, otherwise clean, very good.

Softcover. Detroit, Broadside Press, 2nd pr., 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in stapled wrappers, 71 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, G.K.Hall, rep, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 206 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Reproduced from works originally published in the early 1900s, Intro. by P. Jane Splawn. Clean, tight copy.