Pitt Poetry Series

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.

Praise for Burkard’s first poetry collection, In a White Light“Burkard’s poetics will be considered new and strange to many readers, though Stevens, Zufosky, and Ashbery were scouts to this light-laden terrain. [His] book is a blessing.”—James Cervantes

Trying to Surprise God is Peter Meinke’s second book of poetry, and is characterized by an unusual and masterful range of effects, and by Meinke’s unique wit and compassion.

The publication of Ted Kooser’s Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accessible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds’ Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as “a daring and elegant first book. This is a poetry which affirms and redeems the art.”

In Shelton’s fourth collection of poems, he writes of the desert Southwest, and through it gives his unique view of the world. The poems speak of landscape, marriage, freedom, and death.

Although The Night Train and the Golden Bird is Peter Meinke’s first poetry collection, it is a seasoned performance—the result of careful deliberation and mature judgment—yet impetuous and exciting. It’s full of wit and humor tempered with the sadness of approaching middle-age, anguish over political and social injustice, and of the very failings of everyday people and their lives.

Etai-Eken is a legend told in a series, a cycle of poems, which is to say, told in different languages. The action of the poems in the poem is their moving in and out of the legend by the changes of access to the larger legend; an access of the present in the ancient, of the present’s knowledge and experience of it.

The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis’s work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The “autobiographical” elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.

An International Poetry Forum Selection, translated from the Swedish by May Swenson with Leif Sjoberg.

Tomas Transtromer 2011 Nobel Laureate in Literature

“Tomas Transtromer, who is today one of Sweden’s most distinguished poets . . . can compare Lake Malar at dawn with a blue lamp, the islands creeping over the grass like nocturnal butterflies.”—New York Times

In this collection, Shelton’s first, he moves backward and forward through time but always in the same landscape, the desert-mountains of southern Arizona, which foster his surrealistic view of his interior conflict. He is followed by peculiarly insistent voices from the past.

C.D. Wright has described Roberson’s work as “lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance,” comparing its musical qualities to the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.