NYRB Poets – serie

Álvaro Mutis’s fantastical, gripping, unnerving tales of the exploits and adventures of Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, an inveterate wanderer both on land and sea, are among the most beloved works of twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Like the stories of Borges, like the novels of Mutis’s great friend García Márquez, they conjure a strange world of their own which also holds up a mirror, disquieting and revelatory, to the everyday world we imagine we know. If Maqroll eventually found his way into prose, he began his career in poetry, and it was as a poet that Mutis first made his name as a writer. This selection of Mutis’s haunting verse, with its evocations, now lush, now stark, of the landscapes of South America, with its prayers to an unknown god, is the first to be published in English. Rendered by Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid, masters of the art of translation, these resonant poems offer a dazzling new entry into the imagination of one of the most original and memorable writers of modern times.This bilingual edition includes the original Spanish versions of each poem.

J. H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late-modernist poet. His work, as it has emerged since the 1960s, when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction, at once austere and playful. The White Stones is a book that is central to Prynne’s career and poetics, and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one of the most important works in classical Japanese literature. The title means “anthology of ten thousand leaves,” the anthology of anthologies from the first flowering of artistic and literary sensibility during the Asuka and Nara periods—the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern “Dialogue of the Destitute”; from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the “poems of the frontier guardsmen.” As its title suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves is a gathering of poems of many kinds, from a period unparalleled in Japanese history.This volume reproduces the first five books of the original Man'yōshū, with an introduction and notes by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, whose elegant and informative edition was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Ron Padgett is one of America's best-known and most acclaimed poets. Admired by John Ashbery, Jim Jarmusch, and Anne Waldman, his poems have moved and delighted generations of readers with their inventiveness, their gentle humor, and above all their ability to elicit wonder. These qualities are as evident as ever in Pink Dust, whose title refers to the residue from all the author's erasers, swept away or blown into the air. Like that dust, this is a book of memories rubbing up against the present. Its poignant reflections on old age shimmer with all the insouciance of youth.