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Winner of the 4th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry PrizeEqual parts church hymnal and outlaw country album, Carrie's Jerrell's After the Revival exudes a reverence for all things run down and wrecked. From abandoned coal mines to overgrown cemeteries; from rivers full of leeches to tornados; from demolition derbies to weddings gone wrong: the places and events explored in this dazzling debut collection give rise to playful, poignant meditations on the shifty limits of language, memory, faith and love."Carrie Jerrell, a worthy winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize, deftly introduces hereself in her first title, 'The Poet Prays to Her Radio for a Country Song'. She has a simple, but startlingly effective strategy: the set the taut rhythms and shapely stanzas won from formal education against the language of a rich, rough earlier life... She can send sensuous energy racing through a sonnet's close: 'blood rush, the touch, the bliss of skin on skin'... This is a poet with a future."Alison Brackenbury, PNR"What do you call this? Sprezzatura? Panache? Neither sounds very Country. Both the book's introduction, by the poet Alan Shapiro, and one of its blurbs, use the word sass to refer to this quality, and that sounds about right: Sass, raised to the level of Art."Contemporary Poetry Review"Carrie Jerrell is a poised, mature and brilliant poet. Her distinctive genius, what makes her unlike anybody else I know, is her ability to bring together such a heterogeneous mix of worlds and influences – to be open to everything formal and informal, profane and sacred, foreign and home grown." Alan Shapiro"Jerrell's work has a Larkinian honesty and awareness of the powers of self-deception; yet it has a [Dolly] Partonesque openness to optimism as well as to pain, too. These poems are full of unease and energy, of humour and formal grace, anguish and allusion. The sources of her epigraphs range from Donne to Dottie West, from Tom Petty to the Book of Deuteronomy and that range is emblematic of her work. She handles traditional forms splendidly - she deserves a place in any modern anthology of sonnets and she writes a pretty mean sestina too... Assured, accomplished, zestful, wry - this is an impressive and attractive collection."Acumen"The poems in this book are full of idiosyncratic wit, keen social intelligence and a kind of sass that makes great use of both the honey and the sting. That's pleasure enough to encounter, but add to this Jerrell's enviable formal assuredness and you have a book that announces a bright new voice to contemporary American poetry."Erin Belieu"After the Revival carefully mourns the vulnerability of rural America, from its people and their ways, to its small towns, to the land itself. There's a bell of desperation quietly ringing throughout this original and finely-observed book. Carrie Jerrell's poems are loaded with longing and anguish; they hit the page as homemade creations, gritty systems of memory and transformation, rough-hewn and vital."Maurice ManningCarrie Jerrell was born in Petersburg, Indiana, in 1976. She received her MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from Texas Tech University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, as well as the anthologies Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, Cadence of Hooves, and Best New Poets 2005. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky and serves as the poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

“In Usable Truths, Irving Feldman joins Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Blake, Emerson and a handful of other epigrammatists who alert us, with their laconic wit and wisdom, to the mansions that the mind can build in and from the smallest rooms of incisive thought. These nuggets contain a trove of riches.” —Willard Spiegelman, Hughes Professor of English, Emeritus, at Southern Methodist University

Late Montale presents a generous selection of the intimate, elusive, and trenchant poems that the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last several years of his life. Translated by the prize-winning poet George Bradley (Yale Younger Poet, 1985), the work chosen for this volume includes fifty-six poems that were previously unavailable in English and now form an important addition to the Montale œuvre. Bradley’s idiomatic, accurate, and graceful versions bring Montale’s Italian to the anglophone audience with a new immediacy, and the extensive notes he provides offer valuable information, much of it newly uncovered, regarding the many people and places referenced. Both readers coming to Montale for the first time and those familiar with his earlier work will find these translations compelling, and anyone interested in world-class literature will find Late Montale a fascinating volume.

"One of the most accomplished poets of our time - winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a former US Poet Laureate. It is a consolation to read through sixty years of Richard Wilbur's poetry. He should be read in the company of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens." Harold BloomOver the course of his distinguished sixty-year career, Richard Wilbur has written numerous collections of poetry, five children's books, and several works of prose and translation. This "handsome and in every sense weighty volume", as the critic William Pritchard called it, presents a comprehensive collection of Wilbur's work, including complete texts of Mayflies (2000), New and Collected Poems (1987), The Mind-Reader (1976), Walking to Sleep (1969), Advice to a Prophet (1961), Things of This World (1956), Ceremony (1950), and The Beautiful Changes (1947). To these have been added thirteen poems written since Mayflies original appearance, some of Wilbur's show lyrics, and his Poems for Children and Others: 'Opposites', 'More Opposites', 'A Few Differences', 'The Disappearing Alphabet' and 'The Pig in the Spigot'. As well as containing an introduction by the author, the UK edition of the Collected Poems comes complete with an index of Titles and First Lines. In addition there are more than 60 black and white line drawings by the author. "No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possible exception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean felicity in the writing of verse..." Adam Kirsch, New YorkerRichard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921, and is one of the most accomplished poets of our time. Among his many honours are the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Academiques and is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, he lives in Cummington, Massachusetts, and in Key West, Florida.

This volume brings together eight decades of work by a writer described in the Dictionary of National Biography as “a man of letters, attaining equal distinction as poet, historian, and political commentator.” Robert Conquest’s many honours include the PEN Brazil Prize (for the best long poem about the Second World War), a Festival of Britain verse prize, and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. His poems cover an astonishing range: Clive James praised his “fastidiously chiselled poems which proved his point that cool reason was not necessarily lyricism’s enemy”, while Philip Larkin, applauding Conquest’s virtuosity with the limerick form, inscribed a copy of High Windows “To Bob, Il Miglior Fabbro (or whatever it was) – at least over five lines.” Conquest neatly skewered pretension wherever he found it, but throughout his long life also wrote eloquent poems of love, longing, and loss. As the poet and critic David Mason observed, “These are poems by a man of the world who has seen and studied much and has apparently lived with gusto. It is good to be in his company.”

“Alan Shapiro has written some of the most piercing anti-elegiac elegies of our time. He’s addressed social issues with a rare linguistic inventiveness that makes him a citizen of the world of language, free of cant, attitudinizing, or moral hand wringing. The recursive nature of his syntax can capture every self-contradictory flicker of consciousness as it grapples with how love turns to lovelessness, and how we connive at our own misfortunes even as we suffer them. In his new book, By and By, however dark his subject matter might seem—extinction of self and species, the inevitable hypocrisies and double-binds of mismatched lovers, the fact of age and aging as a moment by moment process of physical debilitation and slow disappearance from the world—the utter joyousness that he takes in every line he writes makes every poem feel like a triumph of poetic consciousness. But it’s not so much a triumph over anything, as it is a sense of being continuous with everything. In poem after poem, his language finds unique ways to dignify and uplift whatever his imagination lights on. There is nothing too small or too large for the radical inclusiveness of his attention.” — Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch

'D’Agostino’s poetry is inexhaustible in the most seductive way, and I say that with confidence after rereadings that left me boggled, dazzled, smitten, amazed, wowed, charmed … Though I can’t adequately express the book’s dissonant beauty, I can say it was thrilling to discover poems packed with infinite resonance that are infinitely fun to read … Like the greatest lyric poetry, his poems … keep … exceeding their bounds and creating revelation. What a surprise. What a find. What a cool poet. What a feast.'— from Alice Fulton’s foreword 'This book is a heroic feat of observational meteorology, a rallying cry, and the now definitive handbook on Midwestern punk zazen. These poems move like David Byrne dances: they’re jittery, funny, and deeply soulful all at the same time. They perfectly demonstrate the wild beauty and strangeness of our predicament. ‘Just wait a minute and the bang / keeps getting bigger.’ This book, too, resounds' — Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet 'I’m not suggesting that D’Agostino is a seer, though he may be; I’m just saying that his poems run roughshod over the rules of our language—and in so doing they slam us headlong into genuine discovery: Instead of the epiphany of recognition, D’Agostino’s book offers experiences that couldn’t exist outside of their language, which makes our encounter with them not a recognition but a revelatio' — Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet

Julia Hungry is a communion and reckoning with form—a female poet’s apprenticeship to the male-dominated canon of twentieth century verse, part love-affair and part fencing match with its forebears. Inherited forms are intact almost to a fault but flooded with femininity as if in an attempt to rinse them out; in kind, the poems are laced with uneasy domesticity—a current of tension which begins inside the home and expands over the course of the book, eventually reaching a global scale. There, fully haunted by the music of the past, Julia Hungry peers into the future, asking questions about reclamation and survival.