Bøger i Essential Poets (Ecco) serien

In What If Zen Gardens, Henry Beissel, often considered the master of the long poem, turns to the time-honoured tradition of the haiku to help bring to light what he calls "the world's hidden affairs." Included in the collection are a series of black-and-white illustrations by Arlette Franci?re, themselves polished gems that highlight, reflect and enhance the poems.

"The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) is an existential meditation on grief-the kind of grief which pins you down and minimizes you. The first half of the collection, The Vanishing Act, captures the ruminations of a mind which feels trapped physically and spiritually. The imagery in this section blends magic and violence as the speaker confronts systemic issues as a middle-class woman, a person of colour, and a survivor of abuse. The second section, (& The Miracle After), offers a fresh perspective on recovery. As the speaker revisits images of bodily harm, objects previously used for violence are brought back to a state of benign normalcy. With the arrival of spring, the speaker contemplates renewal and the paradoxical nature of taking agency of her life, while knowing the act of survival is made possible only because of miraculous intervention"--

In Zanzibar, in 2008, George Elliott Clarke began to write his "Canticles," an epic poem treating the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperial and colonial conquest, and the resistance to all these evils. That is the subject of Canticles I (MMXVI) and (MMXVII). In Canticles II (MMXIX) and (MMXX), Clarke rewrites significant scriptures from an oral and "African" or "Africadian" perspective. Now, in Canticles III (MMXXII) and (MMXXIII), Clarke shifts focus--from world history and theology -- to the specific history and bios associated with the creation of the African ("Africadian") Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. By so doing, he concludes the most remarkable epic ever essayed in Canadian letters -- an amalgam of Pound and Walcott -- but entirely and inimitably his own.

Frenetic, fervent and musical, Songs of My Surrenders is the follow up to Marc di Saverio's highly acclaimed epic poem Crito Di Volta. Following in the footsteps of great Modernist and Romantic poets, and yet paving a path that is unmistakably his own, contemporary rebel-poet di Saverio offers a deeply romantic and darkly spiritual array of masterful sonnets, senryu and haiku, alongside select translations from Émile Nelligan, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Giacomo Leopardi. At its heart, Songs of My Surrenders offers an overpowering vision of a decaying civilisation, insisting that the cure is found in passionate and unconditional love, and in urgent spiritual renewal. A wind of dust blows my tearsInto the daisies of the jetty where I waitFor you continuously; is it trueWhat they say, that you no longer loveMe? I will wait here, still. I will not move.

A Blueprint for Survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, "Seeds," which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, "the beautiful cell."

Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor's poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child's visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.