This charming volume is a collection of ink washes produced by engraver and historian John Warner Barber (1798-1885), each depicting a specific locale in a Connecticut town. Barber, possibly the first popular American historian, created these drawings in preparation for producing wood engravings to be included in his book Connecticut Historical Collections (1836), one of the first popular local histories in the US. In creating these drawings, Barber sought realism, but also to portray the beauty in rural nature and the peacefulness and harmony of life in small-town Connecticut. The drawings, most never published before, are accompanied by contemporary descriptions of the view and buildings, and the changes that have occurred there since the mid-nineteenth century.

This is the first book published in English by of the work of Brazilian poet Adélia Prado. Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes.As Ellen Watson says in her introduction, "Adélia Prados poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments...And, seemingly at every turn, there is food." But also, an abundance of dark things, cancer, death, greed. These are poems of appetite, all kinds.

In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control - because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

Colonists and Native Americans alternate in these poems of encounter between the intruding culture and the culture the colonist found. Walking in Stone refers to spiritual sources powerful enough to sink their footsteps into rock.Against such a background, John Spaulding finds voices of encounter (in a way he speaks for them by inheritance-his ancestors came to New England in 1750 and one married a Native American). His poems resemble journal entries, oral testimonies. The "knife people," the "iron men," as the Indians call them, come in "floating islands" across the sea. The colonists saw them as "wild people," "Satan's children." Separately and together in these powerful poems they suffer cold and pestilence, capture and slaughter, and although one is the military victor, both suffer spiritual loss.

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood-commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own-a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing "the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true. "Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted "in the faces of old regrets." But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue "beating loud." The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.

An excellent study of American intellectuals in the 40's and 50's.

According to legend, the Bedouin tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia held poetry competitions during annual fairs near Mecca. The wining poems called Mu'allaqát, or Hanging Odes, were embroidered in gold on banners and suspended from the walls of Arabia's most sacred shrine, Ka'ba. Desert Tracings is a translation of six classical sixth to eighth century odes. Arabic codes (qasidas) traditionally begin with the relationship of the lover to the loved. Usually set at opening in the beloved's abandoned desert campsite, where the only evidence that remains is tent marks and torrent beds in the sand - "naked tracings,/ worn thin, like inscriptions/ carved in flat stones" - the qasida moves gracefully through the thematic parts, the lover's grief, the quest, and the final acceptance of a world deprived of the beloved. Like the oryx-doe trapped within the unyielding cycles of the desert world.As Michael Sells writes in his introduction, the qasidahas been overshadowed in the West by other Arabic literature, such as The Arabian Nights, but the qasidais the primary literary tradition in both pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabia. The remarkable richness of language and range of mood captured in theses translations help explain their enduring fascination.

The Arrogance of Race is a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery and racism in America. George Fredrickson, one of the most respected and cogent historians of this complex and troubling subject, maintains that racism is a cultural phenomenon not a mere by-product of class conflict and colonialism. He opts for a "dualistic" rather than a more popular monolithic explanation of the tragedy of racism.

Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space-personal, historical, geological-against the progression of time-evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder-frenzy, darkness, chaos-leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony, and beauty. A star burns and sunlight falls on the world.

Poetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an award-winning author.

A collection of poetry from an award-winning poet, playwright and novelist.

Analyzes racial prejudice and its impact on white as well as black children, and provides wise counsel and a plan for action that is as fresh—and as necessary—as when the book was first written.

Saving the Appearances is about the world as we see it and the world as it is; it is about God, human nature, and consciousness. The best known of numerous books by the British sage whom C.S. Lewis called the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers," it draws on sources from mythology, philosophy, history, literature, theology, and science to chronicle the evolution of human thought from Moses and Aristotle to Galileo and Keats. Barfield urges his readers to do away with the assumption that the relationship between people and their environment is static. He dares us to end our exploitation of the natural world and to acknowledge, even revel in, our participation in the diurnal creative process.

Powerful preacher, political negotiator for New England in the halls of Parliament, president of Harvard, father of Cotton Mather, Increase Mather was the epitome of the American Puritan. He was the most important spokesman of his generation for Congregationalism and became the last American Puritan of consequence as the seventeenth century ended. The story begins in 1639 when Mather was born in the Massachusetts village of Dorchester. He left home for Harvard College when he was twelve and at twenty-two began to stir the city of Boston from the pulpit of North Church. He had written four books by the time he was thirty-two. Certain he was God's chosen instrument and New England God's chosen people, he disciplined mind and spirit in service to them both. Tempted to "Atheisme" and unbelief, afflicted early by nightmares and melancholy, then by hope and joy, he was a pioneer in recognizing the excitement of the new sciences and sought to reconcile them to theology. This well-wrought biography, the first of Increase Mather in forty years, draws on the extensive Mather diaries, which were transcribed by Michael Hall.