A Year in Poetry: A Treasury of Classic and Modern Verses for Every Date on the Calendar - Softcover

Foster, Thomas E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0517888505 ISBN 13: 9780517888506

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 1999

Synopsis

A poetry anthology featuring a different poem for every date on the calendar.

Including poems by:
Joseph Brodsky, e.e. cummings, Charlotte Brontë, Virgil, Henry David Thoreau, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Federico García Lorca, Marianne Moore, Dante Alighieri, Anthony Hecht, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Bishop, Christopher Marlowe, Ezra Pound, Rita Dove, Ovid, Geoffrey Chauce, Sonia Sanchez, Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Joyce Carol Oates, William Carlos Williams, and many more

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the Foreward
A simple magic happens when poems are framed in the days of our cal-endar. The poems of far places are brought so into our lives, and we are reminded that the day is world-wide or world-round.  More magical still is the way that poets of whatever century are made contemporaries of us and of each other, with Corbiere and Thomas More cheek by jowl, and Horace seeming as present-day as this year's Easter or the Fourth of July. Though the assembled poets of this fine volume have no topic that is common to them all, it is easy to think of them as engaged in--timeless conversation.
--Richard Wilbur
January 2
Six Years Later
By Joseph Brodsky (translated by Richard Wilbur)

So long had life together been that now
The second of January fell again
On Tuesday, making her astonished brow
Lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
   So that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
   A cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
The snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
That, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
   Not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
   Would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
That sleep's entanglements would put to shame
Whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
That when my lips blew out the candle flame,
   Her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
   To join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
That tattered brood of papered roses went,
And a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
And we had money, by some accident,
   And tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
   The sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
Books, chairs, utensils--only that ancient bed--
That the triangle, before it came about,
Had been a perpendicular, the head
   Of some acquaintance hovering above
   Two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
And I, with our joint shadows, had composed
A double door, a door which even if we
Were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
   Somehow, it would appear, we drifted right
   On through it into the future, into the night.

May 25
Having Arrived by Bike at Battery Park
By Grace Paley

I thought I would
sit down at one of those park department tables
and write a poem honoring
the occasion which is May 25th        
Evelyn my best friend's birthday
and Willy Langbauer's birthday
Day! I love you for your delicacy
in appearing after so many years
as an afternoon in Battery Park right
on the curved water
where Manhattan was beached

At once arrows
straight as Broadway were driven
into the great Indian heart

Then we came from the east
seasick and safe the
white tormented people
grew fat in the
blood of that wound
August 14
Too Much Heat, Too Much Work
By Tu Fu (translated by Carolyn Kizer)

It's the fourteenth of August, and I'm too hot
To endure food, or bed. Steam and the fear of scorpions
Keep me awake. I'm told the heat won't fade with Autumn.

Swarms of flies arrive. I'm roped into my clothes.
In another moment I'll scream down the office
As the paper mountains rise higher on my desk.

O those real mountains to the south of here!
I gaze at the ravines kept cool by pines.
If I could walk on ice, with my feet bare!

October 16
October 16: The Raid
By Langston Hughes

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.

John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet

And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another--
And died
For your sake.

Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground--
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town--

Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.

Edition details

• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0517888505
• ISBN 13: 9780517888506
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 512