The University of North Carolina Press / Poetry

John Skelton, Priest As Poet

by Arthur F. Kinney – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

Kinney shows how the Mass, the Divine Offices, and the liturgy underlie the themes and image clusters of Skelton's poems and argues that liturgical music, especially the plainsong, informs all of Skelton's meters....

Skeleton of Light

by Thomas Vance – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

The essential mind-mysteries are the subject of Vance's poems. Themes of mutability, maturation, discovery, and delight are projected through brilliant archetypal imagery controlled and perfected by a striking...

Song in the Wilderness

by Paul Green – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

This work is a cantata for chorus and orchestra, with baritone solo, celebrating the pioneers who settled the American wilderness. In his poem, Green has given us the finer spirit of the ancestors of many native...

Robert Lowell's Language of the Self

by Katharine Wallingford – The University of North Carolina Press (July 25, 2018)

Katharine Wallingford's incisive study treats Robert Lowell's work as a poetry of self-examination and explores the ways in which he used methods common to psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy in...

One Foot in Eden

by Lore Metzger – The University of North Carolina Press (July 25, 2018)

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions...

The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry

by Samuel Hynes – The University of North Carolina Press (July 25, 2018)

The pattern in Hardy's poetry is the eternal conflict between irreconcilables that was, for him, the first principle, and indeed the only principle, of universal order. Hynes analyzes this pattern as it is manifested...

The Poems of Phillis Wheatley

by Phillis Wheatley – The University of North Carolina Press (July 25, 2018)

For nearly thirty-five years Julian Mason's The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1966) has been the standard edition of the poems and letters of this young black poet of eighteenth-century Boston. This new edition...

The Carnivore

by David R. Slavitt – The University of North Carolina Press (July 11, 2018)

Directly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the...

Day Sailing

by David R. Slavitt – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined...

Sylvia Plath

by Jon Rosenblatt – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

The author shows how Plath's remarkable lyric dramas define a private ritual process. The book deals with the emotional material from which Plath's poetry arises and the specific ritual transformations she dramatizes....

A Time of Bees

by Mona Van Duyn – The University of North Carolina Press (June 15, 2018)

The twenty-five poems included in this collection present a poet mature in both craft and perception and possessed of a fine capacity for being both lyric and analytic at the same time. There is no posturing,...

Modern Poetry and the Tradition

by Cleanth Brooks – The University of North Carolina Press (February 01, 2018)

This study presents the revolutionary thesis that English poetry and poetic theory were deflected from their richest line of development by the scientific rationalism that came with Hobbes and has continued...

The Poetry of Thomas Hardy

by J. O. Bailey – The University of North Carolina Press (February 01, 2018)

This handbook provides the background necessary for fully understanding the nearly one thousand poems of Hardy. As it treats the poems individually and often supplements the analysis of a poem by relating it...

Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory

by B J Leggett – The University of North Carolina Press (November 01, 2017)

Leggett traces the effect of several important theoretical works on the poetry and prose of Stevens during a period in which he was formulating an aesthetic between 1942 and 1954. The author offers new readings...

The Works of James M. Whitfield

by Robert S. Levine & Ivy G. Wilson – The University of North Carolina Press (February 01, 2011)

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful...

Making Something Happen

by Michael Thurston – The University of North Carolina Press (January 14, 2003)

Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically...

The Poems of Edward Taylor

by Edward Taylor – The University of North Carolina Press (December 01, 2014)

Now considered America's foremost colonial poet, Edward Taylor was virtually unknown until some of his poems were discovered in the Yale library and published in 1937. The intellectual brilliance and the emotional...

New Poems of Emily Dickinson

by William H. Shurr – The University of North Carolina Press (January 01, 2015)

For most of her life Emily Dickinson regularly embedded poems, disguised as prose, in her lively and thoughtful letters. Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William...

The Black Bard of North Carolina

by Joan R. Sherman – The University of North Carolina Press (November 09, 2000)

For his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art of poetry, George Moses Horton merits a place...

The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer

by Robert B. Jones & Margot Toomer Latimer – The University of North Carolina Press (February 01, 2014)

This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five...

Chocolate Pie

by Michael Chitwood – The University of North Carolina Press (May 01, 2012)

Chocolate Pie

Poetry by Michael Chitwood

"The woman who made it

hadn't been to church

in years . . ."

This article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook....

Raising Cane and Backwater Graffiti

by Tammy Brown – The University of North Carolina Press (September 01, 2012)

How can a stolen body steal cane?

Blazing sun—no sign of rain . . ."

This article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.

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