Copper Canyon Press,U.S. – förlag

One of the best-selling English-language translations of the Taoteching.

“A refreshing new translation. . . . Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

“With its clarity and scholarly range, this version of the Taoteching works as both a readable text and a valuable resource of Taoist interpretation.”—Publishers Weekly

“Read it in confidence that it comes as close as possible to expressing the Chinese text in English.”—Victor Mair, professor of Chinese studies, University of Pennsylvania

Lao-tzu’s Taoteching is an essential volume of world literature, and Red Pine’s nuanced and authoritative English translation—reissued and published with the Chinese text en face—is one of the best-selling versions. Features that set this volume apart from other translations are its commentaries by scores of Taoist scholars, poets, monks, recluses, adepts, and emperors spanning more than two thousand years. “I envisioned this book,” Red Pine notes in his introduction, “as a discussion between Lao-tzu and a group of people who have thought deeply about his text.”

Sages have no mind of their owntheir mind is the mind of the peopleto the good they are goodto the bad they are gooduntil they become goodto the true they are trueto the false they are trueuntil they become true . . .

Lao-tzu (ca. 600 BCE) was a Chinese sage who Confucius called “a dragon among men.” He served as Keeper of the Royal Archives and authored the Taoteching.

Red Pine is one of the world’s foremost translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His books include The Heart Sutra, Poems of the Masters, and a collection of all the known poems by the mountain hermit Han Shan, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain.

A Zen-Taoist poetry classic, in a handsome Chinese-English format

This definitive translation of Han Shan's poetry appears in a bilingual Chinese-English format. Included are extensive notes, a preface by renowned translator Red Pine, a findings list, and photographs of the cave and surrounding area where Han Shan (“Cold Mountain") lived.

Cold Mountain is one of the most revered poets in China. He was a Taoist/Buddhist hermit who begged for food at temples, often sang and drank with cowherds, and became an immortal figure in the history of Chinese literature and Zen. His poems were written twelve-hundred years ago on the rocks, trees, and temple walls of China's Tientai Mountains. This revised edition also includes poems by Han Shan's colleagues, Pickup (Shih-te) and Big Stick (Feng-kan), translated here for the first time.

As Red Pine begins his Preface, “If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."

Reviews of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain:

"The translator's preface describes his rendition of the life of Cold Mountain, offering an excellent historical and philosophical context for the simple yet profound poems attributed to the poet."—Library Journal

“These are poems one must taste fully and drink whole... The poems of Han-shan read like a journal or memoir, and they often work as Zen koans, challenging the mind to go beyond the words and reason."—Parabola

“Red Pine... has given us the first full collection of Han Shan's songs in an idiom that is clear, graceful, and neutral enough to last... His translations are accurate and mirror the music of the originals... The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain is a considerable performance and a truly valuable book. Thanks to Copper Canyon's high standards of bookmaking, it is beautiful to hold and behold; thanks to Red Pine's care, it will survive as the definitive text of Han Shan in English for many years. It belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in poetry and... should be opened often."—The Bloomsbury Review

“An exquisite publication that captures the Taoist practice of passionate attention, of being still inside and relaxed in the comforts and discomforts around you, going nowhere else... We discover this in the poet's vision and spirit, in the precision and balance of the translator's scholarship and heart, and in the elegant wilderness of the bookmaker's art around them. On every level this is a beautiful book."—Judges' comments on awarding the WESTAF Award in Translation

“Cold Mountain's colloquial poetry...sound like inspired raps—marvelously direct, with skips, jumps, verbal nudges and abrupt revelations... The volume is beautifully produced, with a long and careful introduction... This is an indispensable book."—The Berkeley Monthly

“More than anyone else, Red Pine has made [Han Shan's] spontaneous poems accessible to Western readers... In this new, expanded edition, invaluable notes and an extensive new critical preface provide a contextual awareness, not just for the poems, but for their sources in Buddhist and Confucian culture."—Inquiring Mind

Red Pine is one of the world's leading translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His other translations include Lao-tzu's Taoteching (isbn 9781556592904) and Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (isbn 97815

It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

"There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."-New York Times

“From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."—New Yorker

"Extraordinary."—Los Angeles Times

"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."—Boston Globe

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant."

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night—sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— Waiting.

One of the best-selling English-language translations of the Taoteching.

“A refreshing new translation. . . . Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

“With its clarity and scholarly range, this version of the Taoteching works as both a readable text and a valuable resource of Taoist interpretation.”—Publishers Weekly

“Read it in confidence that it comes as close as possible to expressing the Chinese text in English.”—Victor Mair, professor of Chinese studies, University of Pennsylvania

Lao-tzu’s Taoteching is an essential volume of world literature, and Red Pine’s nuanced and authoritative English translation—reissued and published with the Chinese text en face—is one of the best-selling versions. Features that set this volume apart from other translations are its commentaries by scores of Taoist scholars, poets, monks, recluses, adepts, and emperors spanning more than two thousand years. “I envisioned this book,” Red Pine notes in his introduction, “as a discussion between Lao-tzu and a group of people who have thought deeply about his text.”

Sages have no mind of their owntheir mind is the mind of the peopleto the good they are goodto the bad they are gooduntil they become goodto the true they are trueto the false they are trueuntil they become true . . .

Lao-tzu (ca. 600 BCE) was a Chinese sage who Confucius called “a dragon among men.” He served as Keeper of the Royal Archives and authored the Taoteching.

Red Pine is one of the world’s foremost translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His books include The Heart Sutra, Poems of the Masters, and a collection of all the known poems by the mountain hermit Han Shan, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain.

"...spare, psalmlike poems....Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection...provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it." —Publishers Weekly

"(Hauge's) poetry is miniaturist, pictorial, and ruminative; personal in that his experience, cognitive and sensual observations, and intentions are everywhere in it. Yet it isn't at all confessional or self-assertive....He is a man who knows where he is and helps us feel that we can know where we are, too."—Booklist

“If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples.”—Robert Bly, from the introduction

Olav H. Hauge, one of Norway's most beloved poets, is a major figure of twentieth-century European poetry. This generous bilingual edition—introduced by Robert Bly—includes the best poems from each of Hauge's seven books, as well as a gathering of his last poems.

Ever sage and plainspoken—and bearing resemblance to Chinese poetry—Hauge's compact and classically restrained poems are rooted in his training as an orchardist, his deep reading in world literatures, and a lifetime of careful attention to the beauties and rigors of the western fjordland. His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous, an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand.

The rose has been sung about.I want to sing of the thorns,and the root—how it gripsthe rock hard, hardas a thin girl's hand.

During a writing career that spanned nearly fifty years, Olav H. Hauge produced seven books of poetry, numerous translations, and several volumes of correspondence. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot in the fjord region of western Norway.

A Zen-Taoist poetry classic, in a handsome Chinese-English format

This definitive translation of Han Shan's poetry appears in a bilingual Chinese-English format. Included are extensive notes, a preface by renowned translator Red Pine, a findings list, and photographs of the cave and surrounding area where Han Shan (“Cold Mountain") lived.

Cold Mountain is one of the most revered poets in China. He was a Taoist/Buddhist hermit who begged for food at temples, often sang and drank with cowherds, and became an immortal figure in the history of Chinese literature and Zen. His poems were written twelve-hundred years ago on the rocks, trees, and temple walls of China's Tientai Mountains. This revised edition also includes poems by Han Shan's colleagues, Pickup (Shih-te) and Big Stick (Feng-kan), translated here for the first time.

As Red Pine begins his Preface, “If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."

Reviews of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain:

"The translator's preface describes his rendition of the life of Cold Mountain, offering an excellent historical and philosophical context for the simple yet profound poems attributed to the poet."—Library Journal

“These are poems one must taste fully and drink whole... The poems of Han-shan read like a journal or memoir, and they often work as Zen koans, challenging the mind to go beyond the words and reason."—Parabola

“Red Pine... has given us the first full collection of Han Shan's songs in an idiom that is clear, graceful, and neutral enough to last... His translations are accurate and mirror the music of the originals... The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain is a considerable performance and a truly valuable book. Thanks to Copper Canyon's high standards of bookmaking, it is beautiful to hold and behold; thanks to Red Pine's care, it will survive as the definitive text of Han Shan in English for many years. It belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in poetry and... should be opened often."—The Bloomsbury Review

“An exquisite publication that captures the Taoist practice of passionate attention, of being still inside and relaxed in the comforts and discomforts around you, going nowhere else... We discover this in the poet's vision and spirit, in the precision and balance of the translator's scholarship and heart, and in the elegant wilderness of the bookmaker's art around them. On every level this is a beautiful book."—Judges' comments on awarding the WESTAF Award in Translation

“Cold Mountain's colloquial poetry...sound like inspired raps—marvelously direct, with skips, jumps, verbal nudges and abrupt revelations... The volume is beautifully produced, with a long and careful introduction... This is an indispensable book."—The Berkeley Monthly

“More than anyone else, Red Pine has made [Han Shan's] spontaneous poems accessible to Western readers... In this new, expanded edition, invaluable notes and an extensive new critical preface provide a contextual awareness, not just for the poems, but for their sources in Buddhist and Confucian culture."—Inquiring Mind

Red Pine is one of the world's leading translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His other translations include Lao-tzu's Taoteching (isbn 9781556592904) and Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (isbn 97815

An eccentric classic of Zen poetry

When Zen master Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) was appointed headmaster of the great temple at Kyoto, he lasted nine days before denouncing the rampant hypocrisy he saw among the monks there. He in turn invited them to look for him in the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters. A Zen monk-poet-calligrapher-musician, he dared to write about the joys of erotic love, along with more traditional Zen themes. He was an eccentric and genius who dared to defy authority and despised corruption. Although he lived during times plagued by war, famine, rioting, and religious upheaval, his writing and music prevailed, influencing Japanese culture to this day.

"Ikkyu scandalized the Zen community of his day and is likely to scandalize some readers even now—his short poems are simultaneously bawdy, abrupt, vulgar, and reverential... It is impossible not to love the velocity and variety of his verse."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Stephen Berg is exactly the right poet to have translated these poems."—Hayden Carruth, The Hudson Review

"A deeply sensual man, Ikkyu had little patience for the fussiness of monastic life and ritual... What is especially appealing about Ikkyu's poetry is the way his sensuality infuses his Zen sensibility."—American Book Review

Stephen Berg (1934-2014) was the founder and editor of American Poetry Review.Also available by Stephen BergSteel CricketPB $16.00, 1-55659-075-X • CUSANew & Selected PoemsPB $12.00, 1-55659-043-1 • CUSA

[To] The Last [Be] Human collects fourextraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—byPulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:

The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts permillion; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. Thebody of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of thoseeighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, writtenfrom within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rifewith hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerfulto experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-timefuture, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Butthey are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they arevery far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: topreserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when‘the future / takes shape / too quickly,’ when we are entering ‘a time / beyondbelief.’ They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form….Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeinglanguage; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping giftof the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ‘whirling robehumming with firstness,’ there to ‘greet you if you eye-up.’

I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry forpresentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ‘Wind would benice but / it’s only us shaking.’ … To read these four twenty-first-centurybooks together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patternsforming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing withinthemselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song thatjoins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of thelast book:

   The earth said

   remember me.

   The earth said

   don’t let go,

   said it one day

   when I was

   accidentally

   listening…

New York Times Bestselling Author of Solito

"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."-Jamaal May

"Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." —Glappitnova

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."

From "Let Me Try Again":

He knew we weren't Mexican.He must've remembered his familycoming over the border, or the bordercoming over them, because he drove usto the border and told us next time, restat least five days, don't trust anyone callingthemselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines,Alhambra. He knew we would try again.And again—like everyone does.

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

"[A] rare occurrence in the poetry world."—American Book Review

As a child, Ghassan Zaqtan lived in a refugee camp near the River Jordan. While that painful experience deeply influenced his poetry, when Zaqtan was awarded the prestigious Griffin International Prize, the judges noted: "His words turn dark into light, hatred into love, death into life. His magic leads us to the clearing where hope becomes possible, where healing begins across individuals, countries, races."

When interviewed by PBS for their special on Palestinian poets, Zaqtan said, "I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse."

This generous volume represents two decades of incandescent creativity.

Handkerchief

Nothing's left to say between useverything wentinto the train that hid its whistlein the smoke that didn't become a cloudin the departure that gathered your limbsNothing's left to say between usso let your death bethe insight of dazzling silverand let the sun of those citiesbe a rose on your shoulders

Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and fiction, and has edited the poetry journal Al-Soua'ra and the literary magazine of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Bayader. He lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he is the Founding Director of The House of Poetry.

For many years, Song Dynasty Ci poetry has seemed eclipsed by the incandescence of Tang Poetry in the English-speaking world. In Study of Sorrows, Shangyang Fang aims to bridge this gap, translating the works of twenty-nine Song Dynasty poets, many of whom are introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Collated into seven parts, these poems move through grief, love, and longing, exploring the tension and connection between the material and immaterial world. Unlike traditional scholarly translations, these renditions represent the translator’s endeavor to breathe contemporary life into ancient poems, including revisions of the original text, experimentations, and even rewrites. A beautiful conversation between these poets and their translator unfolds. Shangyang masterfully navigates the irregularity of the lines, the elusiveness of the descriptions, the indirect approach to subjects, the precise musicality, the twisting language, and the unspeakable tenderness. As investigated here, “sorrow” is transformed from a mere individual sadness to a collective experience that spans time, people, and place.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twombly’s work in conversation.

In 2018, just a few weeks after his father’s death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008. The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book — from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle reaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility.

Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twombly’s drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twombly’s infinite scrawls as “saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl.” Even as Rader searches for proximity, examining the gaps between symbols and what they signify, the collection remains unmistakably autobiographical. From the wheatfields of his Western Oklahoma upbringing to questions of loss—first his father and then his mother, who passed only weeks after Rader finished the manuscript for this book—the poems in Before the Borderless are both elegy and prayer, for Rader’s parents, for his children, for the world.

Blurring the distinction between canvas and page, Twombly’s work often includes lines of poetry from many of the authors who shaped Rader’s work — John Keats, Sappho, Federico García Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rader’s poems are paired with 50 color images of Twombly’s paintings and drawings, the line between looking and reading is blurred. Before the Borderless awakens in the space between language and silence to pose provocative questions about art and its power to heal.