“
Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
”
”
Ted Hughes (Poetry in the Making: An Anthology)
“
Gardens are poems
Where you stroll with your hands in your pockets.
(Les jardins sont des poemes
Ou l'on se promene les mains dans les poches.)
”
”
Pierre Albert-Birot (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
”
”
Kathy Acker (Eurydice in the Underworld)
“
L'union libre [Freedom of Love]"
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
”
”
André Breton (Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)
“
In the hours waking,
when we're still all still,
and you can hear the floorboards creaking,
and you can feel the shades blow in,
the night we slept with,
we'll never kiss like that again.
Our lips, will sever,
our memories, will dissipate,
and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky.
”
”
Dave Matthes (The Kaleidoscope Syndrome: An Anthology)
“
Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]
It's me
And who is the poet writing this poem?
That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles
”
”
Pierre Albert-Birot (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.
”
”
Paul Valéry (An Anthology)
“
One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
”
”
Helen Vendler (Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology)
“
They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.
”
”
J.D. Salinger
“
People are jostling at the gates of heaven or Department stores
Words are bumping into each other
("Poem")
”
”
Raymond Radiguet (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
They're not. That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.
”
”
J.D. Salinger
“
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
”
”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology)
“
I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn’t be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I’m not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
”
”
John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
“
Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.
”
”
Helen Vendler (Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology)
“
Rain"
Oh amiable rain
Washer of trees
and roofs
who has prepared them
for
the pink ray
of evening
("Poems")
”
”
Charlotte Gardelle (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
Hemingway is overrated,
Twain is even more lost at sea,
And all truths point to the mouth of a woman,
Where both her whispers and her screams,
Are born.
Pour another glass,
Beer, wine, whiskey,
I don't care,
So long as its wisdom is sharp,
And it tells lies instead of promises.
”
”
Dave Matthes (The Kaleidoscope Syndrome: An Anthology)
“
At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.
”
”
Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts (Trilogy, #1))
“
With a ring around the rosary
And a pocket full of crosses
Ashes to ashes
They'll all fall down
”
”
Matthew Fitzpatrick (Monsters & Men: An Anthology)
“
Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.
”
”
Helen Vendler (Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology)
“
[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.
(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)
”
”
Pierre Reverdy (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
They smell your breath
Lest you have said: I love you,
They smell your heart:
These are strange times, my dear.
From the poem Strange Times, My Dear, in the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Literature
”
”
Ahmad Shamlou
“
They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
“
While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem.
”
”
S.J. Rozan (Dark City Lights: New York Short Stories (Have a NYC, #4))
“
A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.
”
”
Helen Vendler (Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology)
“
Those letters under the door
A new life
The war at a distance
and my drinking glass that smokes
A brightness crowns the universe
("Two Poems")
”
”
Paul Dermée (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
This constant basso on the horizon
is it the waterfall
or the cannon
("Poem")
”
”
Paul Dermée (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
For a little while I shall be nothing and good.
”
”
William Sieghart (Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry: Selected by William Sieghart, Founder of the Forward Prizes)
“
Distance,
the dissonance insurmountable,
would be not the end,
but a magnet.
When fingertips kiss,
they imprint and cement something,
that cannot be disintegrated.
Time becomes a phantom,
the wind becomes an anchor,
and old dreams- blankets of warmth.
Lull with me, Lady,
there is no greater escape.
Love and war, even when buttered on toast,
still makes for the breakfast of champions.
”
”
Dave Matthes (The Kaleidoscope Syndrome: An Anthology)
“
You, too, were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.
But you altered the narrative, you marked your territory on my timeline o that as I look back, I find I can neatly divide my more recent past into two unequal halves: before you and after.
”
”
Rosalyn D'Mello (A Handbook For My Lover [Hardcover] Rosalyn DMello)
“
The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. As Prince Dara Shikoh says, in a Persian poem: Do you wish to be included with the Lords of Sight? From speech (then) pass on to experience. By saying 'Unity', you do not become a monotheist; The mouth does not become sweet from the word 'Sugar
”
”
Idries Shah (Sufi Thought and Action: An Anthology of Important Papers)
“
ERIC: What are you always writin' in that book anyway?
RODNEY: Poetry.
TYRONE: Poetry?
Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes.
RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our lives developed in the darkrooms of our souls."
From CENTRAL PARK SONG -- a screenplay
”
”
Zack Love (Stories and Scripts: an Anthology)
“
It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of “Baywatch.” So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of “Baywatch” for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don’t give you grief over where you get your ideas from.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors)
“
Birds will be bored
If I'd forgotten something
Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea
What we shall call pensive borage
We start by giving the solution to the contest
To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand
1. as little as possible
2. in a medium-sized hand
While I crumple this star-lit paper
And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken
possession of the mountain summits
I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse
Heart king's order
”
”
André Breton (Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)
“
Little Light
There is this little light within,
Her name is Hope,
And I know that as long as I can feel her there,
Just beneath my skin,
Sending her waves within the labyrinth of my mind,
She is snugly at peace within my heart,
And I have a chance.
”
”
Christine Evangelou (Pieces: A Poetry Anthology)
“
If you asked for a few words of comfort and
guidance I would quickly kneel by your side
and offer you a whole book …
— Hafez, from “Companion for LIfe,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyliis Cole-Davis & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Hafez
“
The things we have most longed for do not happen; or if they do, it is never at the time nor under the circumstances when they could have made us happiest.
”
”
Alan Ziegler (Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms)
“
We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.
”
”
Thomas Curtis Clark (1000 Quotable Poems: An Anthology of Modern Verse)
“
Without the tender rays of your love,
I am nothing but a withered sunflower.
”
”
Deborah Olajitan (Hearts & Flowers: An Anthology of Poems)
“
By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying— Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
”
”
Susan L. Rattiner (Great Poems by American Women: An Anthology)
“
Like the river, keep on flowing.
”
”
Avijeet Das (Life is a River: Stories and Poems (...And We Write Anthologies Book 2))
“
There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain
”
”
Robert Frost (New Enlarged Anthology of Robert Frost's Poems)
“
The Indian daughter is the most ignored and formally accepted prisoner in the world. They are convicts by gender.
”
”
Rishabh Dubey (The Idiosyncrasies of Life: An Anthology of Poems, Songs & Stories)
“
Fingers are the judge
Words are the verdict
Thoughts—prison.
”
”
China Cancio (Dark Touch: Anthology of Poetry)
“
Many a battles are won by our morals,
Many a morals are lost in the battles.
”
”
Saba Fatima (Refurbishing Sensibility: An anthology of poems)
“
The soul could be happier anywhere than where it happens to be.
”
”
William Sieghart (Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry: Selected by William Sieghart, Founder of the Forward Prizes)
“
For three hours without history or thirst Time is my own unpurchased and intimate Republic of the cool wind and blue sea.
”
”
William Sieghart (Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry: Selected by William Sieghart, Founder of the Forward Prizes)
“
Vol. 4: Complete Poems in English, Milton
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
Maybe I will keep wanting more,
perhaps I cannot stop this
restless aching snore...
”
”
C. Madan (The Poetic Refuge: An Anthology)
“
And when I look into those eyes,
the world around me pauses,
everything that exists just stops at your gaze,
when it meets mine, rising the burning blaze...
”
”
C. Madan (The Poetic Refuge: An Anthology)
“
His tales took on the form of an epic poem, and I felt I was hearing some Canadian Homer reciting his Iliad of the High Arctic regions.
”
”
Jules Verne (The Jules Verne Anthology: 45 Complete Works)
“
Now listen here Matt, and listen carefully”, the man asserted, “Since I know your dirty little secret, I need you to do something for me”.
”
”
Saleha A. (Caras De Malicia: An Anthology of Random Stories and Poems)
“
In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.
”
”
Ted Hughes (Poetry in the Making: An Anthology)
“
Moments hanging by a thread
Tortured twisted memories
Where angels fear to tread
If I could put together the pieces
Of the the puzzle in my mind
I could finally become whole again
And fill the void inside
”
”
Deborah Hyland (For the Moment: An Anthology of Poems Straight From the Heart)
“
Finding Peace- Poem Excerpt:
Peace is finding your bliss
Without any condition, situation, or person attached to it,
Peace is the tenacity to be you and feel your heart.
Peace is the sound you hear when you circle the scenery of your own soul.
Like a tree, so rooted to what is real
Like the ocean, exquisite and unending, whether people cherish it or not
Like a butterfly, unique and colourful, be it night or day.
Like the moon, full, even when not visibly so.
”
”
Christine Evangelou (Pieces: A Poetry Anthology)
“
My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
for a poem
Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous
Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly
Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp
Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.
”
”
Robinson Jeffers (The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers)
“
Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.
Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.
Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.
“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read’
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is My Creed,
Poem for J.,
The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
Girls aren’t like that.
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
They write about it.
And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.
Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn’t write.
”
”
Kingsley Amis
“
Mukhota
A hindi poetry anthology explores the various common elements of life. Right from religion, nature, nostalgia to love, freedom, and endless thoughts. Reading the poetries feels like touching every little aspects that constitute Life.
"Enjoy 7 days free Audiobooks for first registration
”
”
Rajeev Kejriwal
“
Truth's Virtue- Poem Excerpt:
Truth, in all her virtue,
Will be your sunrise, your sunset,
Your morning breeze and your bedtime nest,
She will want a home in your heart,
Guiding your way
As a star that pounces from the heavens,
Chasing cheating ghosts away,
She will be the fruitful soil, from which a sincere and striking beauty will spring free,
With sagely roots to ground her as the mightiest tree.
”
”
Christine Evangelou (Pieces: A Poetry Anthology)
“
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
— David Whyte, “Sweet Darkness,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
David Whyte
“
And I discovered Norton’s anthology of poetry in the patients’ library – it changed my life. I read the poems over and over again before I began to grasp their meanings. It wasn’t just that the words were musical notes my eyes could sing. It was the discovery that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings, emotions I could compare to my own. I had finally found others who were as lonely as I was. In an odd way, that knowledge comforted me.
”
”
Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues)
“
In ‘Colonization in Reverse’41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to ‘settle in de motherlan’ are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen ‘like fire’, turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who ‘immigrate an populate’ the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. ‘Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout’ plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are—like some of the colonizers from ‘the motherland’—lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with ‘Colonizin in reverse’?
”
”
Mervyn Morris (Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and the Jamaican Culture)
“
If we were not so-single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
— Pablo Neruda, from “Keeping Quiet,” transl. Alastair Reid, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Pablo Neruda
“
But the mind always
wants more than it has–
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses–as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren’t enough,
as if joy weren’t strewn all around.
— Holly J. Hughes, from “Mind Wanting More,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Holly J. Hughes
“
A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E’s knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H’s grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L’s head,
And M takes mustard, N drives to town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens, just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away.
”
”
Howard Nemerov
“
Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self—God’s idea of us when He devised us—the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself…“but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.
”
”
George MacDonald (An Anthology: 365 Readings)
“
He asked you not to like me,
So why did you, Neera?
Even now, I perform breaststrokes in caterpillar-stuffed north eastern clouds
He didn’t ask me for any poems for 50 years,
So why are you asking now, Neera?
Even now, standing in 10-foot-deep water, I wield icy rods
He wrote an editorial on my sub-judice case,
Turning an editor, why are you asking for my writing, Neera?
Even now, I love flatbreads stuffed with smoked penguin fat
He did not confess to being my anthology’s publisher
Why did you confess, Neera?
Even now, I have family-pack yawns in the face of families,
He didn’t like pronouncing my name
So why are you telling it to youths, Neera?
Even now, in bloody waters, I join the Bollywood chorus of tiger sharks
He had said I have nothing of a true writer
So why do you think I do, Neera?
At Imlitala, I knew rat roasts don’t taste too good without charcoal smoke
He said I have nothing creative in me
So why do you think I do, Neera?
Having burnt bank notes worth Rs 5,000 crore, I smelt death
He said I’ll never write poetry
So why do you think I have, Neera?
On the banks of Amsterdam’s canals I have heard doddering old men sing limericks
He transcended from sorrow to anger and anger to hate
Why are you so generous Neera?
Please don’t tell my grandmother.
”
”
Malay Roy Choudhury (ছোটোলোকের কবিতা)
“
….Nancy now gave herself to the wider problems surrounding friends and lovers, igniting her torches from theirs, yet following her own. One much disputed loyalty to an American Negro fired her to battle for recognition for his people, compiling and publishing her "Negro Anthology." Another friendship drew her to Spain during the Civil War, in which she participated actively on the side of freedom and composed a series of Spanish poems. Because of these and further deviations from the United status quo, she was refused permission to re-enter America, where she had hoped to join her closest companion, whose absence in Europe left her solitary at heart.
On Nancy Cunard
”
”
Iris Tree
“
When the windows like the jackal’s eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings’ steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers’ corks.
”
”
André Breton (Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)
“
NMK is a well know maxillofacial surgeon, from India, pens his first poetry book Miracle Mix, favourably reviewed by literary critic Prof. M Krishnan Nair. He says "Every poem has an emotional reality. This is rarely found in modern poetry."
Almost all the poems have a curious mix of humour and pathos. This anthology captures impressions made on poet's mind by various images and objects ranging from passing clouds, flowing streams to life itself. In simple yet evocative manner, the poet introduces the readers to his world of imagination through these poems. Sometimes he becomes one with the elements of nature and at others he narrates an old legend.
Dr. Nikhil Kurien writes under the pen name NMK, he is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon.
ISBN: 978-93-85020-82-7
Publisher: Zorba Books
book available on Zorba Book Store, Flipkart, amazon, Infibeam and shop clues and on Kindle.
”
”
NMK
“
It happens surprisingly fast,
the way your shadow leaves you.
All day you’ve been linked by
the light, but now that darkness
gathers the world in a great black tide,
your shadow joins
the sea of all other shadows.
If you stand here long enough,
you, too, will forget your lines
and merge with the tall grass and
old trees, with the crows and the
flooding river—all these pieces
of the world that daylight has broken
into objects of singular loneliness.
It happens surprisingly fast, the drawing in
of your shadow, and standing
in the field, you become the field,
and standing in the night, you
are gathered by night, Invisible
birds sing to the memory of light
but then even those separate songs fade,
tiny drops of ink in an infinite spilling.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Still Life at Dusk,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
“
A Lancashire Weaver
This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
The machines now stand idle
Looms clatter no more
There's a stack of old bobbins
piled up by the door.
I remember my Mam
she worked here, so she said
A Lancashire weaver
but now she is dead
Along with this mill
and along with the dreams
of working mill lasses
and their jobs, so it seems
We once wove the best
cotton cloth in the world
But now that's all gone
on the scrap heap been hurled
The clatter of clogs
on the old cobbled street
the humdrum staccato
from thousands of feet.
Tough work and much hardship
and many a care
Folks they got by
for brass, it was rare
but still we had pride
By Christ, did we ever!
Will it ever come back
The answer is NEVER
This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
I'm glad that my Mam
never saw it this way
Out in all weathers
came here every day
When this closed down
she had already died
Perhaps just as well
She'd have bloody well cried.
”
”
David Hayes (Echoes From a Cobbled Street: Stories and Poems from the North West)
“
When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake,
three layers of icing, home-made,
a candle for each stone in weight.
The icing was white but the letters were pink,
they said, EAT ME. And I ate, did
what I was told. Didn’t even taste it.
Then he asked me to get up and walk
round the bed so he could watch my broad
belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut.
The bigger the better, he’d say, I like
big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside
with multiple chins, masses of cellulite.
I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook,
my only pleasure the rush of fast food,
his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit.
His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck.
Or a beached whale on a king-sized bed
craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh.
too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk,
too fat to use fat as an emotional shield,
too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-built.
The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke
my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed.
He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat.
Soon you’ll be forty… he whispered, and how
could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned
in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.
I left him there for six hours that felt like a week.
His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed.
There was nothing else left in the house to eat.
”
”
Patience Agbabi (Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry)
“
December 9:
The Mexican literary mafia has nothing on the Mexican bookseller mafia. Bookstores visited: the Librería del Sótano, in a basement on Avenida Juárez where the clerks (numerous and neatly uniformed) kept me under strict surveillance and from which I managed to leave with volumes by Roque Dalton, Lezama Lima, and Enrique Lihn. The Librería Mexicana, staffed by three samurais, on Calle Aranda, near the Plaza de San Juan, where I stole a book by Othón, a book by Amado Nervo (wonderful!), and a chapbook by Efraín Huerta. The Librería Pacífico, at Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre, where I stole an anthology of American poets translated by Alberto Girri and a book by Ernesto Cardenal. And in the evening, after reading, writing, and a little fucking: the Viejo Horacio, on Correo Mayor, staffed by twins, from which I left with Gamboa's Santa, a novel to give to Rosario; an anthology of poems by Kenneth Fearing, translated and with a prologue by someone called Doctor Julio Antonio Vila, in which Doctor Vila talks in a vague, question mark-filled way about a trip that Fearing took to Mexico in the 1950s, "an ominous and fruitful trip," writes Doctor Vila; and a book on Buddhism written by the Televisa adventurer Alberto Montes. Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex-featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books - especially for a novice like myself - is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)
“
Writing is my soul food, sometimes I eat alone, sometimes I share the bread.
”
”
Marie H. Curran (Poems from Conflicted Hearts: An Anthology)
“
I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men—although the sum total of men’s learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.
”
”
Alan Ziegler (Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms)
“
When we write nowadays that six million perished during the Holocaust, the number is awesome, abstract; it is hard for the mind to comprehend that number, yet each one was a world. Can we fathom what we lost, what the world lost? NOTE: For years only her small group of friends knew about the existence of the poems. Her two close friends, who kept the manuscripts, and her former mathematics teacher from tenth grade, Hersh Segal, got together and published the Anthology - Blütenlese in Rechovot, Israel, in 1976. This privately financed publication reached a larger public and her name and fame spread, but very slowly. A second edition was published by the Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, in 1979.
”
”
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
“
IS THIS LOVE? Abegunde Sunday Olaoluwa Is this love that stirs up my feelings, Or is it athirst for the meaning of loving? Am I getting lost in longing? Is it you I'm lovingly awaiting? Love is ever magical, Yes I know, I know…. Love is ever mystical, It's a union of souls. Hating is never logical, Yes I know, I know…. Dating is ever tactical,
”
”
Abegunde Sunday Olaoluwa (Love Poems: An anthology of winning poetry submissions in the CAPRECON/SPIC Love Poem Competition)
“
ATTACHED TO MY HEART Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact Attached to my heart Is a wonderful picture, A symbol of love Given to me from above. Attached to my heart Are memories unforgotten, Issues that were begotten On my short journey on earth. Attached to my heart Is a beautiful picture, With a radiant face Smiling at the world.
”
”
Abegunde Sunday Olaoluwa (Love Poems: An anthology of winning poetry submissions in the CAPRECON/SPIC Love Poem Competition)
“
Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness.
”
”
Salil Jha (Naked Soul: The Erotic Love Poems)
“
Every villainess is the heroine in the story she tells.
”
”
Deborah Olajitan (Hearts & Flowers: An Anthology of Poems)
“
paraveredus, from Greek para ‘beside, extra’ + Latin veredus ‘light horse’. Palgrave Francis Turner (1824–97), English critic and poet, known for his anthology The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861). Pali n. [mass noun] an Indic language, closely related to Sanskrit, in which the sacred texts of southern Buddhism are written. Pali developed in northern India in the 5th–2nd centuries BC. adj. relating to Pali. from Pali pāli(-bhāsā) ‘canonical texts’. pali n. (pl. same or palis) (in Hawaii) a cliff. Hawaiian. palilalia
”
”
Angus Stevenson (Oxford Dictionary of English)
“
I believe the poem and the poet are one. All of us are a part of this universe, and there is a universe within us. So as individuals, we are poetic universes swinging in a rhythm, carving our paths like musical notes...
”
”
Fouqia Wajid (Aatish 2)
“
We organized ‘The Great Indian Poetry Contest’, an international poetry competition. It was judged by an eminent panel consisting of Kalki Koechlin and Kausar Munir. It was an extensive process which started in May 2018 and took several months to conclude. It included multiple rounds of screening, reading and re-reading the poems on various levels, discussing and arguing our choices of winners, reasoning out each selection with the jury, and finally declaring the results in November 2018.
”
”
Fouqia Wajid (Aatish 2)
“
Don't be afraid to explore your creative space!
”
”
Shemique Blair (Love, Marriage, Divorce & Growth: A poem anthology)
“
I lift myself from lifeless hands
and cut the tethers from my soul
until I rise, my bonds cut free,
to join the flowers that are whole.
”
”
Nathaniel Luscombe (Faces to the Sun)
“
My invariable criterion for whether a poem deserved to be included in these pages was this: that it should be able to surprise and delight the common reader. Every page should be a source of pleasure and discovery.
”
”
John S. Major (World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time)
“
The world is an anthology in which we all are poems.
”
”
Madhu Raghavendra
“
Tieken has suggested, on the basis of the problems we have outlined, that all the Sangam poems in the major anthologies were composed to order by poets who were perfectly aware of the fictive nature of their subject (tuṟai) and its context. Thus eighth- or ninth-century poets at the Pandya court, in Tieken’s reconstruction, deliberately composed poems with an internal speaker addressing a far more ancient hero or patron—as if a poet today were to adopt the persona of, say, Christopher Marlowe writing verses for Queen Elizabeth. But there is no need to conjure up such a scenario, with early-medieval court poets busy composing thousands of poems deliberately retrojected into the distant past, using conventional themes as well as invented materials meant to bring these ancient kings and bards to life. Is it not far more economical to imagine a process whereby the poems, many of them very old, all of them self-conscious literary efforts to begin with, survived through a slow process of recording, editorial accretion, and explication? Moreover, the relation of poem to colophon must have been, in many cases, far more intimate than any linear development could account for. There may well have been cases where the text and the colophon are, in a special sense, mutually determining—that is, cases where the poetic situation at work in the poem fits and informs the colophon long before the latter was recorded. Again, there is no need to assume that the “fictive” nature of the colophon means it is false. Quite the contrary may be the case: poem and colophon, though certainly distinct, usually share a single mental template. Fiction often offers a much closer approximation to truth than what passes for fact can give us. It’s also possible that some of the colophons are arbitrary editorial interventions long after the period of composition—that is, that well-known, ancient names were recycled by creative editors. We need to keep an open, critical mind as we investigate these materials.
”
”
David Dean Shulman (Tamil: A Biography)
“
Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.” To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.
”
”
Lynne Olson (Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War)
“
Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go. They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all. There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall.
”
”
Susan L. Rattiner (Great Poems by American Women: An Anthology)
“
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits;
A Poets pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on Female wits:
If what I do prove well it won’t advance;
They’l say it’s stoln, or else it was by chance.
”
”
Susan L. Rattiner (Great Poems by American Women: An Anthology)
“
Song Day, in melting purple dying,
Blossoms, all around me sighing,
Fragrance, from the lilies straying,
Zephyr, with my ringlets playing, Ye but waken my distress;
I am sick of loneliness. Thou, to whom I love to hearken,
Come, ere night around me darken;
Though thy softness but deceive me,
Say thou’rt true, and I’ll believe thee; Veil, if ill, thy soul’s intent,
Let me think it innocent! Save thy toiling, spare thy treasure:
All I ask is friendship’s pleasure;
Let the shining ore lie darkling,
Bring no gem in lustre sparkling! Gifts and gold are nought to me;
I would only look on thee! Tell to thee the highwrought feeling,
Ecstasy but in revealing;
Paint to thee the deep sensation,
Rapture in participation, Yet but torture, if compressed
In a lone, unfriended breast. Absent still! Ah! come and bless me!
Let these eyes again caress thee;
Once, in caution, I could fly thee:
Now, I nothing could deny thee; In a look if death there be,
Come, and I will gaze on thee!
”
”
Susan L. Rattiner (Great Poems by American Women: An Anthology)
“
Peace is white sun reflections on summer pear trees, and ocean mist droplets defying gravity by air currents. Peace is caffeinated goodbye-kissing and velvet smiles laced with credence. Trumpet horns sound off the coming of Blue Jays, Swallows and Chickadee’s. And there is no sadness echoing within or without. There is a taste of God in every grass blade and car horn raging in the city. The stop lights are all green, and there are children playing in the fountains. A dog laps my hand, and finally—I remembered what it’s all about.
”
”
J. Carpenter (You, Me & The End of The World: Poetry Anthology)
“
Ghost House
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about;
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me-
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad-
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.
”
”
Robert Frost (New Enlarged Anthology of Robert Frost's Poems)
“
Perhaps, just perhaps, you’re there.
How little he needs. Just love. More love.
— Christopher Wiseman, from “Bedside Manners,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Christopher Wiseman
“
I want you to look again and again,
to recognize the tender grasses,
curled like a baby’s fine hairs
around your fingers, as a recurring
miracle, to see that the river rocks
shine like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death.
— Rebecca Baggett, from “Testimony,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyliis Cole-Davis & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)
”
”
Rebecca Baggett
“
I see you in the scattered fossils
I see you in fear and sadness
I feel you in faraway mountains
I feel you in human kindness
”
”
Arushi Raj (Prism: Poetry Anthology)
“
Our cat, Murray Sparkles Rainbow Cat Caplan,
”
”
Nancy S. Nelson (Young People of the Pandemic: An Anthology of Stories, Anecdotes, and Poems by 10- to 21-Year-Old Americans)
“
It is sickening to think that policemen don’t make us feel as safe anymore. Walking into the streets, we are afraid.
”
”
Nancy S. Nelson (Young People of the Pandemic: An Anthology of Stories, Anecdotes, and Poems by 10- to 21-Year-Old Americans)