New and Collected Poems
(Richard Wilbur)
These collected poems of the Poet Laureate of the United States are, despite the prevailing view of modern poetry, a monument to the accessible and the beautiful. The language is lush, full "of heat and juice and heavy jammed excess," and deeply thoughtful. His concern for careful human stewardship of nature extends also to the artist's creative struggle to capture the truth of the world. One poignant poem, "The Writer," addresses this through his reaction to listening outside the door as his daughter earnestly struggles to compose a story on her typewriter: "It is always a matter, my darling/Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish/ What I wished you before, but harder." The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1989.
The Catbird's Song : Prose Pieces 1963-1995
(Richard Wilbur (Editor)
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The Catbird's Song is a selection of prose pieces on a variety of topics by one of the most distinguished poets and translators of our time, Richard Wilbur, a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His many other honors include the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Translation Prize.
