Combining Grace Paley's four previous collections and new unpublished work, this work traces the career of this direct, attentive, never predictable poet. Whether she describes the vicissitudes and pleasures of life in New York City or the hard beauty of her adoptive rural Vermont, whether she celebrates the blessings of friendship or protests against social injustice, her poems brim with the compassion and tough good humor that have made her stories...

"The original edition, published in 1950, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This new, revised and expanded, edition contains, in addition to the introduction, an index of titles, an index of first lines, and 113 poems not included in the earlier volume."--Jacket.

A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet William Stafford, featuring unpublished works from his last year of life, including the poem he wrote the day he died, and providing selections drawn from throughout his career, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

One of the astonishing aspects of [Oliver's] work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets. ... These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward

In this new collection, "America's most popular poet" covers the everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union.

"The Asking opens with new and urgent poems by Jane Hirshfield, in which she faces again the contradictions that have shaped her work: "Some take/ in witnessed suffering, pleasure," she writes. "Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty." The volume then returns to the beginning, carrying us from her earliest volumes (including Of Gravity and Angels; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After), up through the important recent work (Come, Thief; The Beauty;...

"Got out of bed on two strong legs...might have been otherwise...took the dog uphill to the birch wood...did the work I love...might have been otherwise...we ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks...might have been otherwise...slept in a bed...planned another day just like this day...one day, I know, it will be otherwise."

"Capturing the shock and reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic through poetry, as Garvey's life goes into lockdown and his father becomes sick, Garvey must find a way to use his newfound musical skills to bring hope to both his father and himself"--