Product Description
Uniting the voices of thirty master poets, To a Nightingale traces the presence of literature's most celebrated bird from Sappho's fragments to the verse of Borges.

The collection reveals a time-honored, poetic discussion of grief, solitude, beauty, song, and artistic expression—a discussion that moved history's greatest literary minds to create their greatest works.

As Keats writes in his famous ode: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird...The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days." His sentiment resounds throughout this book, echoing through the words of Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil, and other luminaries whose work directed the course of world literature. Bound by a common reverence for the nightingale's unchanging music, each author seems to speak intimately to the other, their sentiments resonating beautifully despite the passage of centuries.

To a Nightingale is a powerful homage that inspires appreciation not only for the nightingale herself, but also for the poets who collectively made her song sacred to us. This book will appeal to anyone seeking a glimpse into the world of celebrated poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An image both verbal and visually is enduringly impressive
Kameda Bosai is a Japanese poet and master of the 'ehon' (art-book) literary and artistic tradition of his country. The poetry and paintings of Kameda Bosai as compiled in the pages of this superbly presented edition of "Mountains of The Heart" elegantly portray the relationship between human beings and their environment. This poet/artist depicts homes lost in the mists of immense foothills, small figures wandering through rolling valleys, the transience of roads and buildings with the permanence of their natural surroundings. This is a book to be browsed through with an inevitable appreciation for a master storyteller and keen observer whose ability to inspire through a brush stroke and inform through an image both verbal and visually is enduringly impressive. "Mountains Of The Heart" is strongly recommended for personal, academic, and community library Japanese Culture & Art collections and supplemental reading lists. ... Read more

Product Description
"The Living Fire" brings together a rich selection of the poetry of Edward Hirsch, from seven books of poetry spanning thirty-five years of writing. A poet who is also a passionate advocate of poetry, and a voracious reader, Hirsch infuses his poetry with a powerful blend of formal skill and emotional intensity, exploring his inner life, which is also a reading life, from childhood to middle age. In poems of grace and passion, "The Living Fire" struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, with the power of art to redeem human transience, the complexity of relationships. In the poem which gives this book its title, Hirsch writes with tender observation of his cat, recalling the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart's cat Jeffrey, in an affirmation of the continuing meaning of poetry. 'It is Jeoffrey-and every creature like him - who can teach us how to praise - Wreathing themselves in the living fire.' ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Computer Science in Russia, CSR 2006, held in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 2006.

The 35 revised full theory papers and 29 revised application papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 279 submissions. All major areas in computer science are addressed; the theory track deals with algorithms, protocols, and data structures; complexity and cryptography; formal languages, automata and their applications to computer science; computational models and concepts; proof theory and applications of logic to computer science. The application part comprises programming and languages; computer architecture and hardware design; symbolic computing and numerical applications; application software; artificial intelligence and robotics.

Product Description
Reading the Water is the winner of the 1997 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

great poetry
I was in the middle of reading this book of poems and accidentally left it on a plane. Suffice it to say that I couldn't rest until I secured another copy. Really, it's that good. I couldn't say it better than Edward Hirsch who wrote the introduction to this compilation, "Charles Harper Webb has a wild inventive energy, a quirky, at times even manic wit, and a deep sense of wonder at the world"... "As a poet, he's a wiseacre, a trouble maker - part stand up comic, part anthropologist, part visionary."

well worth checking out
I found this one in the Dartmouth Bookstore Basement for $1 and what with it being National Poetry Month (April) and the cover blurb declaring it the winner of the 1997 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize (no I've never heard of it either), I figured I'd give it a shot.It was four quarters well spent.

Using traditional poetry forms and the incidents of everyday life, Webb crafts some really witty and wonderful little poems.Whether he's writing about a Cristo art project (Umbrellas) or The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Twenty Years Too Late to See The Rocky Horror...), he uncovers the amazing in the mundane.Several have a pretty sharp edge to them, like Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72--suffice it to say, the mugger hopes the prayer doesn't come to pass.And a couple are just really funny, like Broken Toe, where the title occurrence at least snaps him out of his middle aged complacency.And I found one image that for me really captures what poetry can do at its best, the clever use of words to paint an indelible image.It's from the poem Spiders:

Their webs, transparent fielders' gloves,
pluck flies out of mid-air.

The baseball analogy alone is enough to get my attention, but the play on the word flies exemplifies the cleverness on display throughout this collection.

The poems of Charles Harper Webb are well worth checking out.I found a bunch of his poems on-line and linked to them below--give them a try and if you see the book for $1, grab it.

GRADE: A

Reading Charles Harper Webb
Probably one of the best and most clever books of poetry written in the last ten years.Webb is a member of the "stand-up" school of West Coast poetry, a movement that seeks to inject comedy and surprise into the otherwise staid and dull world of poetry.He's Billy Collins, but with a much darker--and smarter--edge. ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, CSR 2008, held in Moscow, Russia, June 7-12, 2008.

The 33 revised papers presented together with 5 invited papers and one opening lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. All major areas in computer science are addressed. The theory track deals with algorithms, protocols, and data structures; complexity and cryptography; formal languages, automata and their applications to computer science; computational models and concepts; proof theory and applications of logic to computer science. The application part comprises programming and languages; computer architecture and hardware design; symbolic computing and numerical applications; application software; artificial intelligence and robotics.

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Customer Reviews (1)

The cold solitude of formidable, isolated places
Lavinia Greenlaw's third book of poems, Minsk, is her American poetry debut.Picked as a "Next Generation" poet in 1994, Greenlaw has become a major voice in British letters.Minsk, however, is disappointing.Harcourt could have easily produced a selected poems, as they did for "Next Generation" poet Simon Armitage, with a dozen major poems from Night Photograph, a dozen from A World Where News Travelled Slowly, and a dozen from Minsk.Such a volume would have better presented Greenlaw's remarkable skills, her icy gaze, and her geological imagination to her new American audience.Instead, in Minsk, we have a poet in transition, trying out some new modes, not all of which fit (and a supremely inept introduction by Edward Hirsch).

Greenlaw's early poems are full of careful observations--of the night sky and the earth, of those who study the earth and sky.When they do turn personal, Greenlaw creates enough distance to show she is working a theme rather than just telling us about the tribulations of last Thursday.This is not always the case in Minsk, where she too often recounts some childhood moment as if we had asked:

The piano years . . . Too young to drive
I played pedal to the metal
full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,
a collision course bending Chopsticks
into hairpins, trilling the hell
out of cheesy Für Elise.

Thus begins "Essex Rag," and while it has charm, Greenlaw cannot make something from nothing much.The contemporary post-confessional confessional mode is not her strong suit, and neither, it seems, are lists: "Picture this:/an estuary, where the eye can't tell/sea from river, hill from valley,/near from far, first from last, in from out/--any one thing, in fact, from any other" ("Blackwater"); or, "It has no tissue, nothing/to touch or taste or bring to mind/a memory, no iris or artery, no gentian, aconite or anemone,/no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,/no titanium or turquoise,/no mercury or magnesium,/no phosphorous, sapphire, or silver foil,/no duck egg or milk jug,/no chambray, denim, or navy,/no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,/no element" ("Blue Field").The only interest here is guessing how quickly she will run out of possibilities.

Other experiments also go awry: "A Strange Barn," for example, with the conceit that historical events were occurring during the construction of sections in the British Zoo.There may be a scholarly interest in noting (as in "Spin") that Ralph Waldo Emerson was peddling Transcendentalism, the Arc de Triomphe was being constructed, and Arkansas was becoming a state in the Union while the Giraffe House was being built in 1836, but it doesn't make much of a poem.If these smell too much of the lamp, others smell too much of the TV tube, like "The Sun Sessions (after Otis Blackwell)," where Greenlaw's attempt to dig that groovy Memphis vibe is as irritating as her compatriot Paul Farley's attempt to be an American hepcat.

However, when Greenlaw's talent matches her materials, she is as good as any living poet and better than most.Minsk's first eight poems--dealing with Greenlaw's parents and childhood malaise--are undistinguished, but having gotten those out of the way, the next four are masterful."Clownfish" moves rapidly, and everything counts: "So bored we made a film of our lives/and played ourselves--botched reincarnations/of doctors, madmen, evangelists and spies."Her listing here inspired; her diction nearly Lowellian:

Adolescents drowning in our own soup,
we crooned their baggy truths . . .
Only we knew how to dance The Hoe,
how to unrhyme slang, the rules, the angle,
the camber in the mini-snooker's baize,
the warp and dimples of the ping-pong table,
the laws of croquet on a scuffed, erupting lawn.

Greenlaw captures seething adolescent boredom and the ignorance of teenage rebellion; meanwhile her mother engages in real revolt: "Taxes for Peace, telegrams for Amnesty,/lifts for strangers, the communist vote./She left Protest and Survive by the phone."But, Greenlaw recalls, "Neither ever occurred to us."Instead, "We lived smack dab in the village eye,/bubbling up to mouth obscene charms."In "Zombies," Greenlaw returns to these "fields of our years of boredom," and asks:

Did we not remember the curse of this place?
How Sundays drank our blood as we watched
dry paint or the dust on the television screen.
How people died bursting out of a quiet life,
or from being written into a small world's stories.
Who can see such things and live to tell?

In "Battersea Dojo" Greenlaw connects karate lessons, her crew cut that gets her thrown out of ladies' rooms and kissed by gay boys, and I.R.A. bomb threats.She even pulls off an opening that flopped earlier:"The hardcore years./Towers emptied on the strength of a rumour./For all that, the skyline boomed like a graph./Inside the walls, money grew on trees."

Many of the poems in the middle of Minsk seem to deal with a separation or break-up with a lover who is "like the dream which, early that morning,/had flicked its magnificent tail then was gone."In "Faith," the lover metamorphosizes:

Watching you walk off among rock pools,
your gaze, a rapid adjustment of angles
as jittery and acute as a blackbird's,
I see how your black linen suit
makes you a preacher, or a preacher's son.

Makes him, indeed, Edmund Gosse--mediocre poet, translator, and critic, son of a famous father Gosse spent a lifetime trying to escape.The failed relationship is also cryptically chronicled in "Mephisto," "Lachesis," "High Summer Weir," "Ergot," "The Last Postcard," and "What Makes for the Fullness and Perfection of Life."One of the book's strongest poems, "Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603," continues to jab, as she responds to a fictive letter composed by Hugo von Hofmannstal, recently published in a new translation, about Chandos' abandonment of poetry and being "out of rhyme."The last poems find Greenlaw away from all that, off the coast of Norway in the Lofton Islands or in Polar Regions, where the only real question, as in "A Drink of Glass," is, "how to keep warm?"These reports from the field evoke the cold solitude of formidable, isolated places and show how one can see oneself anew in the brutal elements apart from the trappings of one's past.Overall, however, Minsk lacks much of the power and authoritative tone of Greenlaw's earlier poems.As she tries out new modes, she remains what other reviewers have said about her: a poet of remarkable talent but inconsistent; a poet of great if unfulfilled promise. ... Read more

Product Description
All 64 sonnets of one of the greatest English poets, John Keats, are collected here, from the first, which he wrote at age 18, to the last, written just five years later. Presented with an introduction and explanatory notes, the sonnets combine sensuous imagery with an eager voice full of passionate yearning. Keats's strongest feelings and his refined appreciation of nature and the rich world of his imagination find words and fulfillment in the abiding form of the sonnet. Some of the sonnets are written in play, some in seriousness; in some he experiments with form; and in others he is completely free within the form. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

beautiful book
This edition of Keats' sonnets is published beautifully; each poem is perfectly placed on the page with just the right amount of information to help the reader understand it.

Each poem is accompanied by a commentary
With an informative introduction by Edward Hirsh, this edition of John Keats' The 64 Sonnets will well serve to introduce a new generation of readers to the poetic genius of John Keats. It would also be an excellent replacement for shelf worn copies in personal, academic, and public library collections. Each poem is accompanied by a commentary providing context and background information on the sonnet. Nature withheld Cassandra in the Skies: Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies/For meet adornment a full thousand years;/She took their cream of beauty, fairest dyes,/And shaped and tinted her above all peers./Love meanwhile held her dearly with his wings,/And underneath their shadow charm'd her eyes/To such a richness, that the cloudy kings/Of high Olympus utter'd slavish sighs./When I beheld her on the earth descend,/My heart began to burn--and only pains,/They were my pleasures,/ they my sad life's end;/Love pour'd her beauty into my warm veins.
... Read more

Product Description
An enlightening, celebratory anthology of the most classic and enduring of forms edited by twomajorpoets.This illuminating anthology follows the sonnet through its various moments andmakers over fiveand a halfcenturies. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, two of our foremost poets, focus onvicissitudes, payingparticular attention to how individual poets—from Shakespeare toStrand—have claimedthesefourteen lines: lengthened them, shortenedthem, elaborated on them, and, in turn,beendefined by them. Three sections—"The Sonnetin the Mirror," "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," and "The Sonnet extraordinary durability and itsreinventions. The collectionopens with personal introductions by the editors, and, in the appendix, they provide "Ten Questions for aSonnet Workshop" tojump-start a conversationbetween students and teachers. With more than three hundred poems, TheMaking of aSonnet guides readers through a vigorousadventures in craft and practice,right up to its extraordinary resurgence incontemporary poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

A Handsome Anthology, and a Strong Idea
A long term admirer of the authors, I bought this book when it first appeared, and am glad I did, the commentary alone, for me, anyway, being well worth the price. The idea of placing individual sonnets within the context of the development of the form was ingenious, and will be of enormous help to poetry lovers and aspiring sonneteers. The clever arrangement of this book in part inspired some elements in my own recent anthology, Sonnets for Sinners: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love, in that I arranged the poems to illustrate the emotional journey of illicit love, and also added a facing page of insight into each sonnet (and sonneteer). So then, to these anthologists, Hat's Off!--and Thanks.

A Norton Anthology: In all the best and worst ways
If you go by the number of pages devoted to the various incarnations of the sonnet in this anthology, you'd come to the conclusion that the 20th century English language sonnet is the highpoint in the history of the form with some minor attention given to international sonneteers such as Neruda or Rilke. The layout of the book was also problematic as you are given a detailed breakdown of sonnet mechanics at the very end of the volume, if the breakdown was at the start of the anthology I would have a better appreciation for the intent of the poems outside of my normal aesthetics.

If you are interested in a deeper look at the history of the English language sonnets, I'd recommend The Sonnet: A Comprehensive Anthology of British and American Sonnets from the Renaissance to the Present, Edited by Robert M. Bender and Charles L. Squier.

Breadth more than depth
I own only two books of sonnets, Hirsch & Boland and Levin's The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. I do like the commentary in Hirsh & Boland better; Boland's essay "Discovering the Sonnet" is especially wonderful. But for a book to pick up and browse I prefer the Levin. It has much more depth for many of the genre's most accomplished practitioners, e.g. over 30 from Shakespeare vs. ten in Hirsh & Boland. So if you want to learn about sonnets, get H&B. If you want to read them, get Levin. Or better, get both.

Rated this way for the twentieth century.
There has been a revival in the sonnet in English-language poetry in recent years, but you'd never guess that from this book, which tends to give the impression that sonnets written after World War II were essentially a curiosity, something one does once or twice. The Levin anthology is far, far, superior.

Great gift for a talented poet
I gave this book as a present to a friend after hearing the authors on the NPR's (WBUR) "On Point", my favorite talk show. She really enjoyed it. I had to test it to make sure that I didn't lose her opinion - whatever it is - of my critical acumen. After sampling it for an hour before presenting it, I found the writers to be bright, engaging, and erudite, and just the list of all the sonnets cited to be worth the price of admission. I will be getting my own copy soon. ... Read more

Product Description
Gerhard Richter's abstractions are profound and beautiful, though perplexing. After all these years, they still present a curious challenge: what, exactly, are they? RICHTER 858 explores this question by focusing on one suite of extraordinary pictures painted in 1999, soon after his return to work after a silence caused by a stroke. Both investigation and celebration, this book brings together image, music and text in a uniquely compelling way: contributors include the great guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, two sharp-eyed critics, and a baker's dozen of prominent, award-winning poets. Housed in an aluminum slipcase, this lavish, oversized volume features the largest, most sumptuous, and most accurate reproductions of any Richter work. The eight paintings of the suite are shown at more than half-scale, and also, quite untraditionally, presented unbound on heavy paper in a pocket at the back of the book--allowing readers to mix, match, and re-present the work for themselves outside the confines of the printed volume. Forty details from the paintings are also reproduced in large-format, accompanied by the poems and texts. These brilliant passages--rich in incident and intervention, and ranging from the coolly sublime to the loudly riotous--make fascinating pictures in their own right. Additionally, a double gatefold opens to show all eight paintings in panoramic view. In essence, RICHTER 858 presents an elegant, if raucous, meeting ground for our most important contemporary artist and a diverse chorus of American music, poetry, and criticism.

Includes poetry by Richard Howard, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Ann Lauterbach, Dean Young, Brenda Hillman, James McManus, Michael Palmer, Connie Deanovich, David Breskin, Paul Hoover, Edward Hirsch andW.S. Di Piero.

Edited by David Breskin.
Essays by Dave Hickey and Klaus Kertess.
An Audio CD of music by Bill Frisell.

Aluminum slipcase with white, black and red corrugated box and music CD, 120 pages, 68 color

Publisher: The Shifting Foundation in association with SFMOMA ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A plethora of pleasures
You don't have to be an afficionado of contemporary poetry, or an art lover, to appreciate the many delights housed within the aluminum slip case of this work. But if you happen to be either, or both, this book is a must.

The "book" has, in this case, evolved well beyond the concept of an art tome.The joiningof music, poetry and lovingly accurate reproductions under one cover makes the circumnavigation of this opus is a particularly rich eexperience.Which is not to say that listening to the music , or dipping into one poem, is not an entirely satisfying moment by itself.

Be prepared, however: this gesamtwerk is big, and will not fit into an ordinary bookcase! The paintings being reproduced to scale has dictated the extra large format, but the extraordinarily accurate pictorial results are worth the extra weight.

Just when you thought realism was dead
This is a gorgeous book by a man who in the future will be credited with debunking all the art critics who since the 1950s have been shouting to themselves that Realism is dead, or the ones that still shout "painting is dead." Gerhard Richter breaks all the rules of "being an artist." He has worked in a variety of styles, refusing to produce a "style" as often artists are supposed to do. In his ealy photorealistic -paintings Richter copied ordinary, found images onto canvas, but gave them an indistinct appearance. Again, by working directly from photographs, he manages to debunk all the criticism that such techniques often bring. This subversive realism is now more evident than ever, in these later, almost fuzzy works that still manage to knock the visual senses as if shouting: "Long Live Painting - Long Live Realism!"

A Feast for Eyes and Ears
I've only recently become acquainted with the range of Gerhard Richter's work, but the series of eight abstract paintings which are being celebrated here are enough to justify his reputation for me, and the sheer richness and resolution of their presentation in this book is of a standard I've never come across anywhere. Elegant, sensuous and gorgeous, this is more than a `typical' art book in manners large and small; includes insightful essays by writers like Dave Hickey, poetry, and a CD by Bill Frisell with a string trio that's a lot more quirky and edgy than his recent stuff, in a good way (no banjos).The book's editor, David Breskin, has done an amazing job - the aluminum slipcase is a pretty sharp touch, too.

Much more than another coffee table book
Unfortunately I haven't yet made it to SFMOMA to see the Gerhard Richter exhibit. However, my much anticipated copy of Richter 858 arrived in the mail today, and to say that it didn't disappoint is an understatement. I had initially been a little wary about getting it. It comes with an aluminum slipcase and poetry and an audio CD with music composed by the brilliant Bill Frisell, and while some might find this sort of presentation lush, I, being somewhat of a purist, was afraid these inclusions would be nothing more than bells and whistles-basically a lot of noise to give voice to a suite of paintings that, according to any good Kantian, should be able to stand on its own. Boy was I wrong. People who know me know that I don't like fuss, but even the worry about scratching the aluminum slipcase, or maneuvering the book's awkward size and bulk, or the guilt for not using gloves to turn these impeccably produced pages, couldn't dampen the sheer transport I felt as I drunk in art and text and Bill's passionate and daring compositions with equal abandon. I've been reluctant to embrace anything multimedia, but Richter 858 may have just pushed me into the 21st century. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Edward Hirsch, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2646 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description

“West's Encyclopedia of American Law” is 13 volumes and 5,000 entries of comprehensive information on the fascinating American Legal System and its components. Covering historical and current terms, concepts, events, movements, cases, and persons significant to U.S law, West’s has been written, updated, and reviewed by lawyers and professors with the everyday user in mind.Everyone from the layperson hooked on the weekly TV courtroom procedural to the serious student can find such valuable information as brief definitions of legal jargon, exhaustive examinations of courtroom procedure, explanations of complex topics such as civil rights, biographies of standout attorneys, analyses of controversial issues, and transcripts of crucial Supreme Court decisions.