Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that a Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his...

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the ora...

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his vers...

In a series of ninety-five poems we listen to "the Reasoner", a voice that is by turns ardent, despairing and comic. Petty obsessions rub against attempts at philosophical seriousness; vernacular expression vies with an intent deliberation. Above all...

"The only end of writing", Dr Johnson said, "is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it". Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-...

Djibouti, a hot, impoverished little country on the Horn of Africa, is a place of great strategic importance, for off its coast lies a crucial passage for the world's oil. In this novel by Abdourahman A. Waberi, Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntaril...

In this companion to Urs Widmer's novel "My Mother's Lover", the narrator is again the son who pieces together the fragments of his parents' stories. Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life i...

Clive Wilmer's "New and Collected Poems" begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's "Hagia Sophia", where the great Byzantine basilica is described in te...

In 1936, twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction. Yale University Press here reintroduces Edward Weismiller-...

It's Switzerland in the 1920s when the two lovers first meet. She is young, beautiful, and rich. In contrast, he can barely support himself and is interested only in music. By the end of their lives, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in th...