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Why read Goethe’s poetry today? Ours is an age which prizes both individual self-development and cultural diversity. Goethe (1749-1832) was the first major poet to show how these two values could be combined. Goethe, who coined the term “world literature,” explored a wide variety of subject matter, from love and creativity, to nature and religion. For Goethe life is a process with no final answers: “All meaning is only asking.” This selection of Goethe’s poetry aims to represent its formal and thematic variety in readable verse translations.

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides outside of space and time, and addresses readers who do not care who or where they are. In other words, place or the “there” of the poems is supposed to have no importance to the lyric voice.

The late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the summits of European poetry in the twentieth century. Completed in 1922, as were T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Duino Elegies ranks with them as a classic of literary Modernism and as an inquiry into the spiritual crisis of modernity. The ten long poems grapple with the issue of how the human condition and the role of art have altered in the modern era, with the decline of religion and the acceleration of technology.

Est-il aisé de se fondre à la Prairie? À priori, cela paraît simple, car les reliefs y sont modérés : quelques modestes buttes, des vallons aux pentes douces, pas de sommets olympiens à gravir. Dans ce sens, la plaine est par nature accessible à tous. Mais dans les deux autres dimensions, c'est une autre histoire! Faites bien attention à la portée de votre regard, car il n'y a pas grand-chose pour l'arrêter! Chacune peut faire de ce grand pays un espace à dimension variable.

La mer, le chagrin, le ciel, les Touaregs, l’amour et les sirènes… le bleu est partout dans nos coeurs. Dans cet album poétique, Philippe Béha nous dépeint, en mots et en images, tout ce que lui inspire la couleur bleue. Cet album plongera les lecteurs dans un étrange univers qui n’est pas sans rappeler celui de Chagall.

A collection of poetry about aging, grief, and the eccentricities of the natural world -- a cockroach, an eggplant.

A collection of laments and celebrations that reflect on our struggle to believe in the future of a world that continues to disappoint us. The poet challenges the boundaries of sleep and even death in these meditations on what lies just beneath the surface of contemporary life. These are poems that trouble over the idea of failure even as they continually recommit to the present moment. This is fierce music performed in a minor key.

Après «Le poème est une maison de long séjour», «Le poème est une maison de bord de mer» constitue le second volet de la trilogie «Catalogues affectueux». L'ensemble se veut une réflexion à la fois théorique et lyrique sur l'inscription de la parole poétique dans ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler très légèrement la biographie. Et cela aurait aussi pu être cyniquement intitulé «Tentative d'autobiographie poétique non-autorisée»... Ou alors, plus sérieusement «Pour une théorie générale de la mélancolie».

Tell: Poems for a girlhood is a collection based on the story of Reena Virk, who was murdered on November 14th, 1997, in a suburb of Victoria, British Columbia. The poems make use of what was spoken in the trials of the young people involved in her murder, and consider remembrances of girlhood, the unease of adolescence, and the circumstances that enable some to pass through unhurt.