This City & Other Poems Everett Hoagland Paperback $10.00 Order now		As the title suggests, New Bedford Poet Laureate Everett Hoagland focuses his poems on the city and his experiences there. Quoting Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Hoagland explains: "This is the city and I am one of the citizens, whatever interests the rest interests me." The New Bedford Hoagland sings of is a multiethnic city of extremes, where fishing port becomes a drug port, where a black man still can die in police custody, where a Poet Laureate discovers his title targets him to panhandlers, where romance blossoms on moonlit beaches and Jazz clubs, where the wisdom of the last generation passes on to the next, and where a time capsule raises hope for the future.

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets Helen Vendler Hardcover $35.00 Order now		Vendler provides detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. She reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of importance of individual lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. Vendler presents the commentaries alongside the poems. A CD accompanies the book and features Vendler reading the sonnets, giving an aural form to Shakespeare's words to heighten our awareness of voice in lyric.

Odyssey Homer translated by Robert Fagles Introduction & notes by Bernard Knox Paperback $14.95 Order now		In the myths and legends that are retold here, Cambridge poet Robert Fagles captures the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and gives us an epic to read aloud, to savor and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb "Introduction" and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation. From the two writers' efforts, you will hear the Muse sing to you of "the man of twists and turns /driven time and time again off course, once he had plundered/the hallowed heights of Troy."

The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry Dave Kappell & Sally Steenland Foreword by Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate Hardcover $13.95 Order now		This is the only anthology to make our list. Kappell and Streeland bring you the best poems created with Magnetic Poetry to date. The authors come from diverse backgrounds. From schoolchildren to grandparents, from ex-hippies to stockbrokers, from the United States to Japan, Magnetic Poetry appeals to popualists. The game proves anyone can write poetry, but the book proves people can write good poetry using the game. To complete the book, the cover is "magnet friendly;" a vinyl pouch of 100 words is included; and you're given an address to which to send your inspired verse for the next anthology.

Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda Pablo Neruda translated by Stephen Mitchell Paperback $15.00 Order now		From the title alone, you can guess this book is filled with passion. Stephen Mitchell selects and translates the Neruda poems he loves. His choices will surprise you; he omits famed works like Twenty Poems of Love and Canto General, but he includes poems from Elemental Odes, Full Powers and other books. Mitchell explains his choices: "These are the poems of a happy man, deeply fulfilled in his sexuality, at home in the world, in love with life and its infinite particular forms, overflowing with the joy of language. They are large-hearted, generous poems, resonant with a humor that is rare in modern poetry, in any poetry." Even if you own all of Neruda's other books, the life-force present in this book revives the poet's spirit.

Long Dead City: 88 Poems Kevin Grant Paperback $5.00		Local poet Kevin Grant releases another book from his Crushed & Grinning Press. He has chosen apt names for his book and press. His poetry not only focuses on being a young man in the Greater New Bedford area, but also on being a young man who is wrestling with despair and anger. He fills his book with images of rape, murder, guns, blood, knives, chain-smoking, skin, and drugs, and the nearest he approaches to a leitmotif is when he writes about attempted (but failed) sexual-emotional intimacies with damaged girl-women. Characteristic of the collection is "Block" which reads: "for every reason/there is to sing/there's a million reasons/not to."

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems Jane Kenyon Paperback $16.00 Order now		Published posthumously, this collection features new and selected poems by Kenyon. Before her death from leukemia, she and husband/fellow-poet Donald Hall worked together to create a volume to represent her career. You'll find poems from Constance, Let Evening Come, The Boat of Quiet Hours, and From Room To Room, and, of course, you'll discover new works that never were published together before. An afterword by Hall, not only describes the poets' editing process, but it also lovingly tells us of Kenyon's life and her determination to live it even when she would soon no longer be able to.

Tales From Ovid Ovid translated by Ted Hughes Hardcover $25.00 Order now		England's Poet Laureate translates twenty-four stories in clear, emphatic unrhymed verse. The tales Hughes has chosen for his book are stories of passion, and of the profound changes passion works on the figures of classical mythology. At its extremes, passion is represented by metamorphosis, through love, death, or radical physical change. Metamorphosis, for Ovid, is a skeleton key to the workings of life itself and the workings of art as well.

Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems Charles Bukowski Paperback $15.00 Order now		The poems this volume features come from an archive of unpublished work that Bukowski left to be published after his death. The works remain true to the poet's spirit, because he forces us temporarily to live in his world and see it the way he does, through the eyes of a working-class, crass drunkard who loves to cause mischief, but who loves the turn of the word more than the turn of an ankle. If you like your poetry refined in word and spirit, then look elsewhere, but if you love self-conscious, literary bad boys, then try Bukowski.

Inferno: Divine Comedi of Dante Alighieri (Vol 1.) Edited & translated by Robert M. Durling Introduction & Notes by Ronald L.. Martinez & Robert M. Durling Paperback $13.95 Order now		The first volume of this new Divine Comedy presents the Italian text of the Inferno, and, on facing pages, Robert Durling's new prose translation, which brings a new power and accuracy to the rendering of Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell, with all its terror, pathos and sardonic humor. You will prize the directness and clarity, the rich expressiveness and the rigorous accuracy of this prose translation, which preserves the order and emphases of Dante's syntax, unhampered by any constraints of meter or rhyme.

West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems Mary Oliver Paperback $13.00 Order now		In this stunning collection of forty new poems--nineteen previously unpublished--Provincetown poet Mary Oliver writes of nature and love, and of the way they transform over time. And the way they remain constant. Read the poems first, and expect to muse on the poet's works later, like Oliver's heroine in "At Great Pond, " a poem in the collection: "Later I will consider/what I have seen--/what it could signify." In the meantime, you'll delight in Oliver's mastery of word choice and image. As poet James Dickey says, you'll be under Oliver's "true spell, unlike any other poet's, the enchantment of the true maker."

Does Your House Have Lions? Sonia Sanchez Paperback 10.00 Order now		Nominated for 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Lions is an exquisite and at times wrenching work exploring the life of Sonia Sanchez's brother--a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city's gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother's alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness, and she tells of the aftermath when a shared history of loss, separation and pain brings her family back together.

Archy & Mehitabel Don Marquis Paperback $9.95 Order now		Marquis first introduced Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat in her ninth life in his newspaper column, the Sun Dial, in 1916. In a previous incarnation, Archy was a free-verse poet, while Mehitabel claims to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra and other regal ladies. She is "toujours gai," but Archy is more philosophical. He records their experiences and observations on the boss's typewriter late at night. But since he must throw himself headfirst onto each key to operate the typewriter, he can't make capital letters.