LITMIR.BIZ

Emily Dickinson is an unlikely patron saint for all who seek or wrestle with God. Looking closely at twenty-five poems, this intimate portrait and personal reflection shows how Dickinson can guide us, through belief and doubt alike, toward God.
Many have thought that Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, rejected religion. Yet the poems that unfold her soul can inspire ours, offering fresh answers to ultimate questions about life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus and God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay traces the dimensions of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells the story of her own search for God between the lines of the poems that Dickinson called «hymns.»
Praise for I Told My Soul to Sing “Exuberant and captivating. A shimmering jewel of a book.” –Dinty W. Moore
“Through her deep engagement with Dickinson’s poems—by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs—LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson’s words, ‘the Heart’s portrait – every Page a Pulse,’ every page a kind of faith.” – Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story
“Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson’s inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet’s heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet’s astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet.” – Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review
“LeMay’s implied reader is someone attracted to religious faith, but even an atheist can enjoy this book’s provocative illuminations of spiritual longing, fear, and anger, in which questions cut deeper than answers.” – Mark Halliday, poet, author of Keep This Forever and Stevens and the Interpersonal
“A brilliant analysis of the bond between life and poetry, written with sensitivity and talent.” – François Bovon, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School

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If left alone, what might a place say? If we must leave it, what must we leave behind? Guru Road, Dooby Lane. It was in this place where, nearly twenty years ago, Gary Snyder discovered, considered, and chronicled such latitudinal ruminations by way of one man, DeWayne “Dooby” Williams, and the coalesced stories and tributes which Williams faithfully etched upon granite, his elected canvas. When Snyder and his wife, Carole, were camping along the Black Rock playa, northwest of the Great Basin and northeast of the town of Gerlach, they deviated from their journey down a paved path to explore a little dirt road that glinted with intrigue. This spontaneous decision led Snyder to “this remarkable text of life and spirit” and to Williams who, retired and living with cancer, was creating the testament of a lifetime—that which would transcend corporeal measures and touch the lives of countless people in endless moments for many years to come.DeWayne Williams created this work of Earth Art in the Black Rock desert, near the current site of the Burning Man gathering. This full-color book presents a series of photographs by Peter Goin, accompanied by the prose and poetry of Gary Snyder.

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"This present moment That lives on To become Long ago."For his first collection of new poems since his celebrated Danger on Peaks, published in 2004, Gary Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. Journeys to the Dolomites, to the north shore of Lake Tahoe, from Paris and Tuscany to the shrine at Delphi, from Santa Fe to Sella Pass, Snyder lays out these poems as a map of the last decade. Placed side-by-side, they become a path and a trail of complexity and lyrical regard, a sort of riprap of the poet’s eighth decade. And in the mix are some of the most beautiful domestic poems of his great career, poems about his work as a homesteader and householder, as a father and husband, as a friend and neighbor. A centerpiece in this collection is a long poem about the death of his beloved, Carole Koda, a rich poem of grief and sorrow, rare in its steady resolved focus on a dying wife, of a power unequaled in American poetry.As a friend is quoted in one of these new poems: «I met the other lately in the far back of a bar, musicians playing near the window and he sweetly told me “listen to that music. The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.”»Gary Snyder is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and This Present Moment shows his command, his broad range, and his remarkable courage.

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In 1997, Mark Gonnerman organized a yearlong research workshop on Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End at the Stanford Humanities Center. Members of what came to be known among faculty, students, and diverse community members as the Mountains & Rivers Workshop met regularly to read and discuss Snyder’s epic poem. Here the poem served as a commons that turned the multiversity into a university once again, if only for a moment.The Workshop invited writers, teachers and scholars from Northern California and Japan to speak on various aspects of Snyder’s great accomplishment. This book captures the excitement of these gatherings and invites readers to enter the poem through essays and talks by David Abram, Wendell Berry, Carl Bielefeldt, Tim Dean, Jim Dodge, Robert Hass, Stephanie Kaza, Julia Martin, Michael McClure, Nanao Sakaki, and Katsunori Yamazato. It includes an interview with Gary Snyder, appendices, and other resources for further study.Snyder once introduced a reading of this work with reference to whitewater rapids, saying most of his writing is like a Class III run where you will do just fine on your own, but that Mountains and Rivers is more like Class V: if you’re going to make it to take-out, you need a guide. As a collection of commentaries and background readings, this companion volume enhances each reader’s ability to find their way into and through an adventurous and engaging work of art.

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We are proud to continue our project of publishing Deluxe Audio Editions of the poems of Gary Snyder, read by him. When first published in 2004, it was the poet’s first new collection of poems in twenty years. Perhaps his most personal, autobiographical collection, it begins with the young poet ascending Mt. St. Helens in 1945, a climb accidentally timed with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was 15 years old. Almost sixty years later, after the great Buddhas at Bamiyan Valley were bombed and with the victims of the World Trade Center also “turned to dust,” the poet composed a prayer while at Short Grass Temple in Senso-ji, a pilgrim on the path of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy.This remarkable collection was greeted with broad praise, and as Julia Martin proclaimed, “Moving between relative and absolute ways of seeing, [Snyder] responds to the experience of global conflict and personal pain by reminding readers of the continuity of wildness, affirming the value of art, and invoking an ancient practice of wisdom and compassion.”

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In 1953, Gary Snyder returned to the Bay Area and, at age 23, enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian languages and culture. He intensified his study of Chinese and Japanese, and taking up the challenge of one of his professors, Chen Shih-hsiang, he began to work on translating a largely unknown poet by the name of Han Shan, a writer with whom the professor thought Snyder might feel a special affinity. The results were magical. As Patrick Murphy noted, «These poems are something more than translations precisely because Snyder renders them as a melding of Han Shan's Chinese Ch'an Buddhist mountain spirit trickster mentality and Snyder's own mountain wilderness meditation and labor activities.» The suite of 24 poems was published in the 1958 issue of The Evergreen Review, and the career of one of America's greatest poets was launched.In 1972, Press-22 issued a beautiful edition of these poems written out by hand in italic by Michael McPherson. We are doing a new augments edition based on the old, with a new design, a preface by Lu Ch'iu-yin, and an afterword by Mr. Snyder where he discusses how he came to this work and what it meant to his development as a writer and Buddhist.On May 11, 2012, for the Stronach Memorial Lecture at The University of California, more than fifty years after his days there as a student, Snyder offered a public lecture reflecting on Chinese poetry, Han Shan, and his continuing work as a poet and translator. This remarkable occasion was recorded and we are including a CD of it in our edition, making this the most definitive edition of Cold Mountain Poems ever published.

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Praise for Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel“A unique tour de force” —The New York Times Book Review“One of the most remarkable books that I have read in a long time.” —Kenneth Rexroth“Mr. Connell’s NOTES are what one intelligent, sensitive artist has been able to salvage from all experience as testimony to the rather pathetic integrity of the human species in the face of extinction. The book is no manual or tract, however, although its political meaning is unmistakable, but a work of art, even a work of high art.” —Hayden Carruth

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“We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls ‘the nerve for excellence.’ He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience…“Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note-taker’s [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread—any thread—follow it, and lo, it traces a pattern… you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they ‘expression:’ they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect…“These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible… their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery.”—Annie Dillard, Harper

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Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems , which The New York Times Book Review described as “a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.” In New Collected Poems , Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems , along with the poems from his most recent collections— Entries , Given , and Leavings —to create an expanded collection, showcasing the work of a man heralded by The Baltimore Sun as “a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . a major poet of our time.” Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that «Berry has become ever more prophetic,» clearly standing up to the test of time.

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By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, has been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking book that is celebrated with this new edition. A small press reprint of that book included Snyder’s translations of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, perhaps the finest translations of that remarkable poet ever made into English. For the 50th anniversary, this completely redesigned edition of Riprap is accompanied by a CD of Snyder reading all the poems in this collection, with introductions and asides. The recording, made in the poet’s home by Jack Loeffler, marks the first time a complete reading has ever been available in a commercial edition. One of the finest collections of poems published in the 20th century, this edition will please those already familiar with this work and excite a new generation of readers with its profound simplicity and spare elegance.

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