Disparate Anthologies

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky (Jersey Rain) founded the Favorite Poem Project during his tenure, resulting in an anthology (Americans' Favorite Poems) and other disseminations. Again with Project director Maggie Dietz, Pinsky follows up with another collection of poems selected by readers across the country. Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology features works by a wide selection of well-known, mostly American and European writers from throughout the ages: Henry King, Rabindranath Tagore, Gwendolyn Brooks, J.W. von Goethe, Issa, Jorie Graham, Robert Herrick, Dionisio Martínez and Frank O'Hara are just a few of them. Arranged in quote-based categories like "I Made My Song a Coat" and "In Durance Soundly Caged," most pieces are preceded by brief comments from Poem Project participants—engineers, doctors, consultants, police officers, human resource managers, high school students and others who share what the poems mean to them. (Norton, $27.95 416p ISBN 0-393-01074-0; June)

"Rumbling thundering darkness breaks loose/ Rumbling thundering darkness breaks loose/ Water crashing breaks away downward," begins "Toyakaiternnan Nahupia" (or "Thunder Song"), collected in Newe Hupia: Shoshoni Poetry Songs, a bilingual anthology of traditional chants of the Shoshoni, Native Americans of the Great Basin region. Editors Beverly and Earl Crum, native speakers and teachers of Shoshone, and Jon P. Dayley, Boise State University linguistics professor, have included a glossary, pronunciation guide, full poetic translations, word-by-word literal translations and sheet music, along with a CD recording of the Crums performing the songs—a rigorously produced and engaging package overall. (Utah State Univ., $49.95 276p ISBN 0-87421-433-5; $24.95 paper -413-0; Mar.)

In time for opening day, Line Drive: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems honors the boys of summer, whether they're the overworked young fathers playing in a local field in Yusef Komunyakaa's "Glory" or the greats who died penniless and obscure, commemorated in Charles Bukowski's "Betting on the Muse." Edited by Kent State University English professor and poet Brooke Horvath (In a Neighborhood of Dying Light) and National Baseball Hall of Fame research director Tim Wiles, the title is part of Southern Illinois University Press's Writing Baseball series. The contributions, generally suffused with a gentle nostalgia, include pieces by poets Michael S. Harper, Wyatt Prunty and Mary Kennan Herbert, and by the late Kansas City Royal pitcher, Dan Quisenbery, among others. (Southern Illinois, $40 244p ISBN 0-8093-240-7; $16 paper -2439-3; Apr. 1)

Columbine and Oklahoma City are among the subjects in Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, but so are smaller-scale encounters with violence. In "Lithium," Marcus Carfagna's narrator describes visiting his bank-robbing brother in jail: "I ask him/ how he could do something that stupid/ He confesses through the food slot/ that he wanted some fast cash to fix the crushed/ white door of his Dodge Dart so his date/ wouldn't have to squeeze behind the wheel and scootch herself across the seat." Editors Virgil Suarez and Ryan G. Van Cleave, who also co-edited American Diaspora, have gathered works by 120 writers including Maxine Chernoff, Sherman Alexie and Campbell McGrath. (Univ. of Iowa, $44.95 cloth 240p ISBN 0-87745-791-3; $19.95 paper -792-1; Mar.)

From Last Century

Even after his plays made him a celebrity, Tennessee Williams "identified himself, privately, as a lone and tortured poet," reveal editors Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel (co-editor, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes) in their introduction to The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams. Williams (1911—1983) wrote verse throughout his life, which is fully collected for the first time in this anthology. In the Winter of Cities and Androgyne, Mon Amour, the two collections Williams published in his lifetime, are here, as are uncollected pieces, verse from his plays and fiction, early works from the 1930s indebted to his hero Hart Crane, and even juvenilia by "Thos. Williams, 9th gr." (New Directions, $29.95 320p ISBN 0-8112-1508-3; Apr. 24)

A great modernist finally gets a full tribute with the publication of Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works. A lifetime resident of Wisconsin, Niedecker (1903—1970) was a sort of satellite member of Zukofsky's Objectivist circle, though currents of surrealism, folk poetry and haiku run through her work. Edited by Capilano College English professor Jenny Penberthy (Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet), this comprehensive collection of all of Niedecker's surviving verse includes her well-known New Goose folk poems, as well as early poetry that Niedecker had omitted from the collected works published in her lifetime. It is an indispensable book for anyone interested in modernist writing: "What a scandal Christmas/ What a scandle Christmas is,/ a red stick-up/ to a lily." (Univ. of California, $45 472p ISBN 0-520-22433-7; Apr.)

"China, land where one meditated upon the tracings of a calligrapher as, in other countries, one would meditate upon a mantra," writes Henri Michaux (1899—1984) in Ideograms in China, his prose poem about Chinese orthography. Michaux offers an impressionistic history of Chinese characters, tracing the evolution of "the oldest living language in the world" as he contemplates its unique capacity to convey poetic expression. Originally published as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise and previously only available as a limited addition, the poem is translated from the French by American expatriate poet Gustaf Sobin and illustrated with Chinese calligraphy. (New Directions, $9.95 paper 64p ISBN 0-8112-1490-7; Feb. 27)

A collection of poetry translated by Mark Strand, Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua includes (though twice-removed, via Andrade's Portuguese and Alberti's Spanish) the incantatory verse of the Quechua Indians, who live in Peru and Bolivia. Andrade (1902—1987), a Brazilian-born modernist who began writing in the 1920s, remains one of the best-known Portuguese-language poets. Alberti (1902—1999), a Spaniard exiled to Argentina during the Civil War, elaborates the twin themes of nostalgia and displacement. (Knopf, $19 paper 240p ISBN 0-375-70988-6; Mar. 7)

Knopf is simultaneously publishing Strand's The Story of Our Lives, which contains the eponymous 1973 collection plus two of his other previously out-of-print books, the prose work The Monument and the verse The Late Hour, both from 1978. ($18 paper 160p ISBN 0-375-70975-4; Mar. 7)

Duty-Free Items

Born in 1968 to anti-Communist dissidents, Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku found her youthful work suppressed until the early '90s. Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku, edited and translated by poet Henry Israeli and introduced by Peter Constantine, presents to American readers one of the youngest and most prominent contemporary poets of her country, still emerging from the Stalinist grip of Enver Hoxha. Lleshanaku avoids overtly political content, though winter seems often to be approaching in her poems, and overcast skies and moody nighttime landscapes create a sense of resignation and timeless melancholy. One might say this was emblematic of the post-Communist mood, but Lleshanaku would probably say it runs deeper: "There is no prophecy, only memory./ What happens tomorrow/ has happened a thousand years ago/ the same way, to the same end...." (New Directions, $12.95 96p ISBN 0-8112-1511-3; Apr. 30)

Berlin-based poet Oskar Pastior says translation is simply not possible—"the wrong word for a process that does not exist," as he puts it in the introduction to Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poems. Nonetheless, translators Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton and Rosmarie Waldrop have gamely tried to recreate the mad, witty wordplay of Pastior's German poetry in this volume. Palindromes, anagrams, puns, "sonnetburgers" and exuberant nonsense—"abracadabra as was/ tartar as was kandahar-/ cardan (tack that man and gal/ flat as washrags!) as was cash"—prevail as Pastior, who is the only German member of Oulipo and who will be 75 this year, tinkers with the smallest units of language and the oldest of lyric forms. (Burning Deck [SPD, dist.], $10 paper 120p ISBN 1-886224-44-7; Mar.)

Championed by Kenneth Rexroth, who inspired her early work, poet Kazuko Shiraishi has won numerous awards in Japan since she began publishing in the 1950s. Let Those Who Appear is the first English-language volume of her work to appear in over 25 years. Translated by Yumiko Tsumura and Samuel Grolmes, professors of Japanese at California's Foothill College and the College of San Mateo, respectively, the book contains selections from several of Shiraishi's recent books. Born in Canada but moving to Japan in childhood, the now septuagenarian Shiraishi writes loose, whimsical, often witty verse ("The antibiotic of the Amazon bee has the smell of hashish/ It's a good smell!"), but many of the poems have serious undertones as she addresses environmental destruction, poverty and social injustice. (New Directions, $12.95 paper 64p ISBN 0-8112-1510-5; Apr. 29)

Born in Mexico City in 1952, Pura López-Colomé has translated such writers as Seamus Heaney, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, and has been translated into English by poet Forrest Gander (Torn Awake). The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé features recent work in a variety of forms, from prose poetry to more abstract lyrics that center on love, religion, memory—and their subversion. The English versions of these seven longish poems are followed by the Spanish. One section of "Aurora" ends: "My hand melts/ there,/ where nothing/ is missing./ Your skin has been cauterized/ sweetly./ And you're still alive." (Graywolf, $15 paper 106p ISBN 1-55597-360-4; Apr.)