A list of new poetry releases from major publishers for May 2006, compiled from Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble.com – Late Wife: Poems – Claudia Emerson – Hardcover
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker”s rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples” respective losses.

The most personal of Claudia Emerson”s poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Dreaming the End of War Benjamin Saenz

From the Publisher:
“If war is hell,” wirtes poet and novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz, then the matter of overcoming the very idea of war is another kind of hell… Dreaming the End of War is about the impulse to speak, to say enough.”
This gripping suite of twelve dreams, emanating from the borderland between Mexico and the United States, traces humanity”s addiction to violence–from boys stepping on ants to men shooting animals, menshooting women, men shooting enemies. The dreams begin in a desert landscape where poverty and wealth grate against each other, and the ever-present war becomes “as invisible as the desert sands we trample on.” The dreams move toward a greater peace, with Sáenz providing glimpses of a peace that is possible in this world.

Dark Familiar: Poems Aleda Shirley

From the Publisher
There is a noir glamour to Shirley’s work—it satisfies our hunger for the sensual texture of existence. But there is also something new, here, where the objects of our desire seem suspended in a hushed emptiness . . . Parts of a story float up: there is a lover, long gone—the lovers met once on this bank, in this season, and no other—and though the love was historical, the affair is blurred, emblematic of our investment in the flickering life of the flesh. Immanence and transcendence switch on and off continuously, occupying the same ground, as if we view the textbook illusion of a woman’s face in profile, which in the next moment becomes the outline of a chalice.

These are poems for grownups who believe in life and death. The poems (and we, in the reading) are chastened by the press of the second part of life, which leads to both beauty and to brute statement: ” . . . what we called the death of God// was only the silence necessary for Him/ to become meaningful again (too late for you,/ too late for me).” Reading these poems is like walking through a museum of priceless artifacts—at night, alone, in silence—our heels echoing down marble corridors. Gradually we come to see that even these language exhibits, these brilliantly made dioramas, are fading. We know it. The poet knows it. But the fact that she has made them anyway, against that knowledge, means everything.

We Speak Your Names: A Celebration Pearl Cleage
From the Publisher
For centuries, African American women have been remaking the world, giving testament to the power of hope, courage, and resilience. But it took the inspired generosity of Oprah Winfrey to honor fully the many gifts of sisterhood. For three amazing days–from May 13 to 15, 2005–a distinguished group of women was invited to celebrate the enduring achievements of twenty-five of their mentors and role models–and in the process pay tribute to the long, glorious tradition of African American accomplishment.

The brilliant centerpiece of the weekend was the reading aloud of Pearl Cleage’s poem “We Speak Your Names,” written especially for the occasion and appearing here for the first time in this beautiful keepsake book. As deeply moving in print as it was during that weekend of love and praise, the poem names each of the women honored: Dr. Maya Angelou, Coretta Scott King, Diahann Carroll, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Parks, Katherine Dunham, and other legends of the brightest magnitude. With heartfelt eloquence, Pearl Cleage (herself a luminary of the younger generation) celebrates her distinguished elders’ strength, their magic, their sensuality, their loving kindness, their faith in themselves, and the priceless example of their lives. In her introduction, the poet shares: “My sisters, here, there, and everywhere, this poem is for you. Use it, adapt it, pass it on. . . .”

Destined to become a classic, We Speak Your Names is a treasure to keep forever and a precious, inspiring gift for the ones you love.

My Sentence Was A Thousand Years of Joy Robert Bly
From the Publisher:
Readers have found Robert Bly”s ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality. The ghazal form is well known in Islamic culture but is only now making its way into the literary culture of the West. Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. “God crouches at night over a single pistachio./ The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming/ Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.” The ghazal”s compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite.

My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly”s second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, and leaps even more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War “Call and Answer”: “Tell me why it is we don”t life our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed/ The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?”

Manthology: Poems of the Male Experience

From the Publisher:
Why focus an anthology of poems on the male experience when, for centuries, men have pretty much dominated everything from politics to the literary canon? Hasn”t everything that can be said about the male experience already been said? This collection proves that the answer is a resounding no. Each of the anthology”s ninety-three poems spotlights an individual experience that nonetheless becomes universal. Together poems from ninety-three poets–twenty-six of them female–take on self-doubt, fatherhood, sex, death, relationships, work, war, peace, and a diversity of other topics to form a perceptive and insightful collection. “The idea isn”t so much that the poems celebrate men as that they challenge the reader to discover for him or herself what is male about the poem,” says Billy Collins about the collection. Humorous, sad, celebratory, and thoughtful, Manthology gathers a surprising group of poems focused on the almost poignant intensity of the male experience, with its attendant urgencies, confusions, and hilarities.

Belonging: Poems Sandra M. Gilbert
From the Publisher:
An ambitious, intricately wrought corona of sonnets ponders the nature of belonging in every sense of the word.

Belongings as possessions, as the history and furnishings of a life, and as the places in which life itself happens are the preoccupations at the heart of this affecting collection. Moving from memories of a childhood apartment to mourning for the poet”s mother, Belongings explores the question: “Where, how, and to what do you belong?”

Author Biography: Sandra M. Gilbert, author of six previous poetry collections, won an American Book Award. She lives in Berkeley, California.