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As the title The Bones of the Earth implies, Carol Jane Bangs' concerns are basic, archetypal: birth, death, ancestry, child-bearing, love, work. In contradistinction to a poetry of urban alienation, The Bones of the Earth evokes a poignant, yet no less uneasy awareness of nature's influence. The book opens with poems describing the Pacific Northwest, where the poet's family has lived for four generations: oyster strings dangling in icy rows, their scaffolding propped by booms of thick fir and western cedar, a meadow shimmering and unearthly in the winter solstice. Part II charts an inner geography of human intimacy--"I give my body to the compass of your hands/reveal in a voice cracked as the raven's/that wilderness under my skin"--and the third section moves more deeply inward, exploring the distinctly feminine experience, its cycles, myths, initiations. Included here is "Neahkahnie, '82," a compelling six-part journal about a woman stricken with cancer. "No one told me/the body, too, gets out of bounds like/children or lovers/who don't understand." Haunting all these poems is a sense of limits--the delicate, sculptural limiting of utterance that is the poet's art, the limits of the individual self never entirely erased in human love or language, and, most strongly in the last section of the book, the ultimately "lonely duet with the earth/each body dances toward death."

Thank a Bored Angel: Selected Poems by Samuel Hazo brings together the poetry of twenty-two years, drawn from eight previous volumes. Assembled here are selections from Discovery (1959), The Quiet Wars (1962), Listen with the Eye (1964), My Sons in God (1965), Blood Rights (1968), Once for the Last Bandit (1972), Quartered (1974), and To Paris (New Directions, 1981). In his preface, Hazo affirms that "each of these poems touches on themes that are still alive in me--alive in that they seem inexhaustible"; all are rendered in the poet's own voice, not "in what is irritatingly called a 'persona,'" and none, he says, either when originally composed or now, could be expressed differently. Casting back to the adventures and attachments of half a century, Thank a Bored Angel presents varied, colorful portraits from the poet's life--as father, son, brother, husband, traveler, army lieutenant, university professor, writer. It is emotion, fancy, speculation--the reflections cast in his mind by events and "accidents of place"--that give them weight. Likewise, Hazo's considerable passion and stylistic range are not flaunted but, measured by conscience and intent, constitute the poems' inimitable, penetrating lyricism.

The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues, and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years immediately following World War I. "In my own world," he explains in his pre-face to That Dada Strain, "the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on." For Rothenberg, the Dada connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as it does a "strain" that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work, whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling of innovative anthologies.Following the title section is "Imaginal Geographies," a group of poems that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded associations between images for which no key was readily available. In the third and final section, "Altar Pieces," Rothenberg attempts, as he says, "to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the loss of bread & words."Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces & Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.

Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned "father of the Symbolists." Mallarmé's major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue "Hériodiade," are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem "Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance" and the drama "Igitur," as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these "Mardis," and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, "The Afternoon of a Faun," inspired Claude Debussy's famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé's oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

This book (originally published in 1972 by The Seabury Press as The Orchid Boat) is the first representative collection of the poetry of Chinese women to appear in English. Unlike Japan with its long tradition of women writers, poetry by women did not become fashionable in China until the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), although poems from earlier centuries that do in fact survive will quickly dispel any stereotyped views. Included here are samplings from the legendary earliest poetry of courtesans, palace women, and Tao priestesses to works by contemporary Chinese women living in both the East and West. Appendixes include notes on the poems, an introductory essay on Chinese women and literature, a table of historical periods, and a bibliography.

"A person who dislikes Ronald Firbank," quipped W. H. Auden, "may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality, but I do not wish ever to see him again." Edmund Wilson pronounced him "one of the finest writers of his period." Part high camp comedy of manners and part fairy tale, Five Novels by Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) is introduced by Osbert Sitwell. Firbank lived a life of exquisite, if lonely, leisure. He composed all his novels on postcards in his countless hotel rooms, always lavish with flowers. His moves were impulsive--"Tomorrow I go to Haiti. They say the President is a Perfect Dear!" ran one telegram to a surprised friend. At a dinner party given in his honor, the pathologically shy author refused to consume anything more than a single pea. His no less eccentric creations, Parvula de Panzoust and her guest Eulalia Thoroughfare of Valmouth, dine on "salmis of cocks'-combs saignant with Béchamel sauce." In The Artificial Princess, a queen with a passion for motoring roars about her realm for hours with her crown on. The Flower Beneath the Foot, Prancing Nigger, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli are also included in this volume. "If only," concludes Sitwell, "we might have the joy of reading a new book from his pen, a book that would be so deliciously unlike any others in the world save his own." It is hoped that this collection will bring more readers that extraordinary experience.

In 1944, New Directions brought out Thomas Merton's first book of verse. By the time of his tragic, untimely death in 1968, Father Louis (as he was known at the Trappist monastery where he lived for twenty-seven years) had published upwards of fifty books and pamphlets, including several more collections of poetry. All of these poems have been assembled in a single, definitive volume (first published by New Directions in 1977) which includes much additional unpublished or uncollected material drawn from the archive of the Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, or supplied by the poet's friends and associates. Brought together in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton are: Early Poems (1940-42, published posthumously in 1971), Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), The Tear of the Blind Lions (1949), The Strange Islands (1957), Original Child Bomb (1962), Emblems of a Season of Fun (1963), Cables to Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (completed in 1968 and published posthumously). These are followed by Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems, a book which Merton completed shortly before his death. There are also sections of uncollected poems, humorous verse, poems written in French, with some English translations, Merton's translations of poetry from various languages, drafts and fragments, and a selection of concrete poems. With the availability of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton as a New Directions paperbook, an ever wider audience may more fully appreciate the impressive range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Starting from two poignant and prophetic lines by the martyred Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, "Look at his spent body / blackened with shadows and wolves," William Herrick's novel evokes a contemporary Spain where the fraternal clash of loyalists and fascists has given way to the conflict between conservatives and revolutionaries--fathers and sons. In portraits of the punctilious General Luis Alfara Fernandez, who never questioned the wishes of his General, and his terrorist son Rodolfo, who always questioned his father's arbitrary authority, Herrick's narrative is as stark and mercilessly lighted as the Andalucian landscape.

Vienna Blood & Other Poems is in some ways the most synthesizing of Jerome Rothenberg's recent collections, pulling together work from the 1970s that stands apart from Poland/1931 (1974) and A Seneca Journal (1978) yet at the same time continuing the enactment of past and present begun in those books. But where before he chose to restrict his exploration to ancestral Jewish and Amerindian poetries, Rothenberg now takes us on a series of broader journeys through the collapsed landscape of what he calls the 'new wilderness," evoked as place, as structure, as mind. Written both to be read quietly on the printed page and aloud in performance, the poems in Vienna Blood, though experimental and language-centered, are nevertheless the work of a poet who, by his own admission, is "crazy for content, make no mistake about it." As if to underscore this point, he has appended brief comments to most of the major sections of the book, in order, as he says, "to give it some context in the way of 'oral tradition' usually reserved for poetry readings, etc., a little of which I now commit to writing."

Denise Levertov's Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 brings under one cover the first published works of a poet who, though born and raised in Great Britain, has long held a distinctive place in postwar American letters. Initiating a major literary undertaking, the volume includes a group of hitherto ungathered poems, selections from Ms. Levertov's earliest book, The Double Image (1946), published in London, and her three following collections in their entirety: Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960). Living in the United States since the late 1940s, Ms. Levertov has often been associated with the Black Mountain poets, while from the mid- 1960s onward she has been one of the foremost activists in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. Yet even in her more "political" poems, her dominant perception has continued to be of the intricate beauty, the mystery of life as it is lived. In announcing Ms. Levertov the winner of the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Hayden Carruth said of her: "For twenty-five years Denise Levertov has been one of our most prominent poets... Today she is a woman at the crest of her maturity, acute in perceptions, wise in responses, and an artist, moreover, whose technique has kept pace with her personal development." With Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, readers have the opportunity of following Ms. Levertov's remarkable poetic development from its very beginnings.

Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G. Peters.A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to "civilized" behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the field. Faced with certain execution, his mood swings from abject terror to high-minded exultation as first he challenges, and then accepts, the rule of law and subservience to the state. The action moves relentlessly in the near-frenzied pace characteristic of Kleist. Intended as a paean to a Prussia triumphant in the Napoleonic wars. the play was, ironically, censured and never produced in Kleist's lifetime. In our own day, Prince Friedrich of Homburg has been both denounced as a protofascist work and lauded as a supreme metaphysical disquisition. Whatever the merits of such intellectualization, it remains one of the most moving and performable plays available for the modern stage.

"If in every mind burns a flame of the Buddha's Enlightenment," Christmas Humphreys writes in his foreword to The Wisdom of the Zen Masters, "there is nothing to seek and nothing to acquire. We are enlightened, and all the words in the world will not give us what we already have. The man of Zen, therefore, is concerned with one thing only, to become aware of what he already is..." The task of the Japanese Zen master has been to guide his pupils in their awakening. The means used vary--from severe physical discipline to the proposition of enigmatic riddles, or koans--but always to the same end, Enlightenment: experiencing the Great Death of the worldly "I."

Although it first appeared after his death in 1968, he had arranged for its publication, written a foreword for it, and was delighted with the prospect of its at last becoming a part of his published works. My Argument with the Gestapo tells of the adventures of a young man, clearly identified by the name Thomas Merton, who travels from America to Europe to report on the war with Germany from the viewpoint of a poet. He hates the war, yet is driven to come to terms with it. There is a pervading sense of dreamworld or hallucination, heightened by the device of passages written in a macaronic language, invented from multilingual roots, to satirize and parody political propaganda speeches dealing with the war. A work of imagination (Merton did not in fact return to England after the start of World War II in Europe), it nevertheless contains much that is autobiographical and revealing of the young Merton. Most clearly visible are the seeds of his never-forsaken concern with peace and nonviolence and his abhorrence of war. Indeed, his outspoken criticism of Britain at a time when all the emphasis was on 'the brave little island standing alone' foreshadows his devotion to truth as he saw it, no matter what the cost. And students of Merton will find scenes in the book that are straight autobiography, amplifying and perhaps filling in gaps in what later was to be the beginning of Merton's great literary success, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948).

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: "I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large." The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his "Structures of Rime," the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before the War (1983), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). "Structures of Rime" affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in "The Structure of Rime I" he declares: "O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be."

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

The contents, lively and varied as always, of this year's New Directions Annual, the twenty-second in the series which began in 1936, range from the topical, in an impressive new poem by Ferlinghetti on The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh's Funeral, to one of the important source texts of the modern literary movement, a translation by David Harris of Gottfried Benn's "play of ideas," The Voice behind the Curtain. Once again, the Annual is international: Stephen Stepanchev has translated a group of poems by the Yugoslavian poet Vasko Popa; Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura present the Japanese poet Ryuichi Tamura; Dennis Silk (Israel) blends parody and fantasy in the prose "journey," Montefiore; there is a scene from the play Sunday They'll Make Me a Saint by the Greek-American writer Demetrius Toteras; and from Britain we have Stuart Montgomery's verse sequence, Circe, a section of photographs of the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland) and a group of drawings by the poet Charles Tomlinson. Three of the young American poets in ND22 are active in the Black movement: Ed Roberson, Quincy Troupe and Al Young. Richard Meyers is a promising discovery, and we welcome Robert Lowry again with a fine poem. Of exceptional interest this year are the stories of Paul Breslow, Carol Emshwiller, Paul Friedman, James B. Hall and Mark Jay Mirsky.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House. In these books, Dr. Williams perfected his "variable foot" metric and achieved full mastery of the "American idiom" which was his lifelong first concern. Among the poems of this period is the long "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" which W. H. Auden has called "one of the most beautiful love poems in the language." Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry only two months after William Carlos Williams' death on March 4, 1963.

Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York's famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba's Children, written three years before Arthur Miller's Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting - the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950's. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.

This anthology is Ezra Pound's own choice of the poetry of various ages and cultures-ranging from his translations of the Confucian Odes up to E. E. Cummings-which he considered the finest of its type. It is a statement by example of the "Pound critical canon" and, as such, a short course in the history of world poetry, useful alike for the student and the general reader. Nearly a hundred poets are represented, a number of them in Pound's own translations, with emphasis on the Greek and Latin, Chinese, Troubadour, Renaissance, and Elizabethan. Of particular interest are the notes on certain of the poems and poets which Pound supplied in comment on his selections.