Böcker i New Directions Bibelot-serien

Despite having written many acclaimed non-fiction books on the region, he has always considered those writings to be footnotes to the poems. From the long work "Mutra," written in 1952 and accompanied here by a new commentary by the author, to the celebrated poems of East Slope, and his recent adaptations from the classical Sanskrit, Paz scripts his India with a mixture of deft sensualism and hands-on politics.

Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, Kora and Ka and Mira-Mare, are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual brand of modernist story-telling, pushed beyond personality. The men and women who haunt these tales are wraiths in spiritual exile, wanderers in a Europe still recovering from the devastations of World War I. Her descriptions of the beaches at Monte Carlo are triumphs of vivid detail - bright watercolors set against brooding psychological portraits. In its exploration of the broken dualities of self and civilization, Kora and Ka looks forward to H. D.'s masterpieces, Tribute to Freud and Trilogy.

The stage-struck daughter of an English rural dean runs off with the family plate to London and a theatrical career-only to die tragically by the bite of a mousetrap in her moment of triumph as a sensational Juliet.

The devil in Henry Miller's Big Sur paradise is Conrad Moricand: "A friend of his Paris days, who, having been financed and brought over from Europe as an act of mercy by Mr. Miller, turns out as exacting, sponging, evil, cunning and ungrateful a guest as can be found in contemporary literature. Mr. Miller has always been a remarkable creator of character. Conrad Moricand is probably his masterpiece. . . .A Devil in Paradise is the work of a great novelist manqué, a novelist who has no stricter sense of form than the divine creator. . . .Fresh and intoxicating, funny and moving. . ." -The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Created in the aftermath of World War I, the poems ironically consider the place of the artist in "a botched civilization." "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1917) is a free translation from the Latin, an homage to the Roman poet; praising its "enormous freedom and range of tone," Hugh Kenner remarked that "few more original poems exist in English." "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" (1920) is described in A. Walton Litz's clear and helpful introduction as a "master document of literary modernism." It was also T.S. Eliot's favorite Pound poem: "I am quite certain of 'Mauberley,' whatever else I am certain of... a great poem, a document of an epoch."

"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," first published when William Carlos Williams was seventy-two, forms the heart of this new selection of his love poems. Robert Lowell praised "Asphodel" for delivering "to us what was impossible, something that was poetry and beyond poetry." Lyrical and moving, elegant and supple, it is charged with sheer musical pleasure. In addition to "Asphodel," eleven other important love poems have been chosen from the whole range of Williams' writing life--a life whose history of love is reviewed by Herbert Leibowitz in his incisive introduction. Leibowitz, editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review magazine and author of forthcoming critical biography of William Carlos Williams, considers "Asphodel" in the context of Williams' singularly non-traditional love poetry, and distinguishes it as his "most eloquent and unorthodox love poem, a quest for 'abiding love' in the gathering shadows of death."

Unified by Merton's belief that East and West share "a unity of outlook and purpose, a common spiritual climate," this eclectic selection also offers a fascinating introduction by the late George Woodcock, author of the acclaimed critical study, Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet.

In 1936, Pablo Neruda was Chile's consul in Madrid, and so horrified by the civil war and the murder of his friend, Federico Garcia Lorca, that he started writing what became his most politically passionate series of poems, Spain in Our Hearts. The collection was printed by soldiers on the front lines of the war, and later incorporated into the third volume of Neruda's revolutionary collection, Residence on Earth. This bilingual New Directions Bibelot edition presents Spain in Our Hearts as a single book as it was first published, a tribute to Neruda's everlasting spirit.

Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice and one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.Denise Levertov achieved recognition as a poet at a young age, winning the admiration of such older poets as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Though she initially drew a line between her poetic works and her commitment to peace and justice, the Vietnam War inspired a change, and at the time of her death in 1997, she was acclaimed not only for her poetry, but also for her political engagement. Making Peace collects Levertov's finest poems about war and peace, subjects which she addresses with passion and nuance. Spanning the last three decades of her life, their subjects range from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War. Often brutally vividin "The Certainty" she writes, "war / means blood spilling from living bodies"Levertov's poems always have at their core her love for humanity, even as she registers her horror at what humans do to one another.Introduced by Levertov scholar Peggy Rosenthal, these poems mirror the destruction that we witness today, but they also hold within them, as Levertov writes, "a small grain of hope."