National Network for Equitable Library Service

The idea for this collection was to offer a tip of the hat to people whose lives and/or works have influenced the author. Each piece is forwarded by a short background story as well as an epigram which provides some descriptive entry and flavour. The key was to construct these pieces in the author's own style and voice and not fall into simple mimicry. Many names have been encrypted into the pieces as fractured homonyms, a sort of pun for the astute reader.

Juhan Liiv (1864-1913) has the same significance for Estonian culture that Federico García Lorca and T.S. Eliot have for modern culture created, respectively, in Spanish and English. Liiv's existential-patriotic and intimate-holistic lyrics have had an impact across Estonian society. Rebellion against all models and fashions existing in poetry unites Liiv with Walt Whitman: noble and proud, always in search of original expression, ever aspiring to resemble God in the inimitability of creation.

Where other poets of his generation developed strategies of deconstruction, Jean-Pierre Vallotton invented a brave new mosaic with the parameters left behind by traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. If William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, T.S.

These meticulous, skillful, and endlessly revealing poems are astounding in their restraint and delicate comprehension of the natural world. Minimal language and brief verses contribute to the precise imagery illustrated in these gorgeously spare narrative lyrics. From East Coker to Northern Ontario, the fine line between poetry and deceit lurks, inevitably, in the corners of each of our lives. Dan Jalowica illuminates precisely these in language honed, spare, pure, gorgeous.

On Order and Things is the story of an impossible love between a man and a woman. Confused characters living in a senseless world where love and creativity are irrelevant. This poetic narrative is for all of us.

Existentialist in approach, this collection of tightly woven, abstract poems explores ageing and what it means to not be young anymore.

A stunning collection of poems, these works explore moments of empathy in suffering, epiphany in ruin, and grace in surrender. In chronicling a journey from childhood grief through the dark rapture of love and longing, these translucent poems unveil vulnerability, uncertainty, and movement into the half-light of a new beginning.

Death and its many mysteries are explored in these autobiographical poems about the passing of the poet's beloved brother, the dementia that claimed her father, and the inevitable bodily changes that come with age. Experimenting with traditional forms such as elegies and dirges, the poems keep coming back to the paradoxes of love and loss. Finally, though, solace comes in shimmering poems that connect with the poet's two earlier collections and celebrate the beauty of rural upstate New York.

The poems in Courage Underground burrow beneath the skin to examine the relationship between consciousness and body. They penetrate hidden emotions contained by vital organs; they enter the sensibilities of lower order creatures and characters of the mythic underworld. The journey elicits new perspectives on loss and alienation that are both hilarious and startling. "Beating boldly at the centre of Courage Underground, Julie Roorda's provocative new volume of poetry, is the very root of courage: heart.

Written to read like a memoir, this collection of poetry details the life of a family across generations and provides a moving and haunting portrait of the Italian mother who is the center around which this family revolves. But this is much more than a story about ethnicity; it transcends any single identity and explores instead the many ways in which people learn to identify themselves.