Daily Dose

Denizens, or Netizens, of the Poetry Daily site (poets.com) will recognize the components of this massive culling. The site has published more than 2,000 poems over the past five years. Two of the founding editors, Diane Boller and Don Selby, along with Santa Barbara Independent book critic Chryss Yost, have selected a poem for every day of the year in Poetry Daily: Poems from the Most Popular Poetry Website, with advisory editors Rita Dove and Dana Gioia. With work from everyone from Adrienne Rich to César Vallejo, from Marge Piercy to Michelangelo to James Merrill, John Ashbery and Natasha Trethewey, there's something for just about everyone. (Sourcebooks, $14.95 paper 496p ISBN 1-4022-0151-6; Dec.)

New and Reclaimed This Month

With at least three more full manuscripts apparently still remaining in the trunk Charles Bukowski left at his death in 1994, the appearance of this second installment of posthumous work will only whet fans appetites for more. The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain collects 140 of Bukowski's oft-imitated short lyrics on love, loss and the effect of alcohol on both. (Ecco, $27.50 320p ISBN 0-06-057701-0)

For readers who have had considered ordering the U.K. edition, The Collected Poems of Basil Bunting's appearance on these shores will be most welcome. Bunting (1900—1985) is the author of the long poem "Briggflatts" (included here), considered by many to be the greatest poem of the mid-20th century written by a person born a British subject. (New Directions, $16.95 paper 256p ISBN 0-8112-1563-6)

Page is the first posthumous work published from among those left by Hannah Weiner (1928-1997), whose Clairvoyant Journal and We Speak Silent remain uncategoraizable classics of the last quarter century. Page revolves around the figure of "Sis," something of a Weiner stand-in, whose processings of her own past, and those of her family, surface in a tangle of feelings and iconic text: "boy is it beautiful from the hills/ boys energy flash by power alone." (Roof [SPD, dist.], $12.95 144p ISBN 1-931824-06-1)

First published in a small press edition in 1958, Robert Duncan's Letters: Poems 1953—1956 has been lovingly brought back into print, "a fair land, a life, a language." Editor Robert J. Berthoff, who introduces the book, also includes a fascinating set of "memos" that Duncan sent the original printer regarding the manuscript's setting that Berthoff himself has attempted to take into account. (Flood Editions, $16.95 paper 96p ISBN 0-9710059-6-6)

For those who only know The Sonnets, Ted Berrigan's So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958—1979 will be a revelation. The poem "Redshift" ("I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them") alone is worth the price of admission here, but the book, assembled by Berrigan and first published a few years before his death in 1983, includes a wide selection from among more than 14 separate projects—more than 200 poems in all, including the classic '60s-isms of "Bean Spasms." (Blue Wind [www.bluewind.com], $34.95 paper 416p ISBN 0-912652-61-6)

Two Firsts in Full

Untranslated since 1966, 62-year-old Slovenian poet Tomašalamun's first book, Poker, here comes completely into English for the first time in a collaborative translation with Joshua Beckman (Something I Expected to Be Different) and a tiny Brooklyn upstart "presse." For those who value alamun's grand (while still trouble-making), neo-modernist persona, the publication of A Ballad for Metka Krašovec (2001) gave some insight into the wilder side of earlier work. This beautifully printed book, going back 15 more years, is perhaps even further out, tracking a "son of David/ and a squirrel how it falls to the earth/ but I scream rabbits/ thinking they were really rabbits because of bad eyes" and "see[ing] hell where my angel used to stand." (Ugly Duckling Presse [SPD, dist], $10 paper 88p ISBN 0-9727684-2-4; Dec.)

"I didn't go out looking to write poems," writes Lorenzo Thomas in a new introduction to Chances Are Few, his first collection, first published in 1979, "Poems simply appeared when it was necessary to write them." This expanded second edition of that first book includes outtakes from the era, and arrives "with dreams of songs just waking." (Blue Wind, $19.95 paper 144p ISBN 0-912652-77-2; Dec)