For her five volumes of poetry over the course of her career, Jane Cooper (1924–2007) was deeply admired by her contemporaries, and teaching at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly forty years, she served as a mentor to many aspiring poets. Her elegant, honest, and emotionally and formally precise poems, often addressing the challenges of women’s lives—especially the lives of women in the arts—continue to resonate with a new generation of readers. Martha Collins and Celia Bland bring together several decades’ worth of essential writing on Cooper’s poetry. While some pieces offer close examination of Cooper’s process or thoughtful consideration of the craft of a single poem, the volume also features reviews of her collections, including a previously unpublished piece on her first book, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), by James Wright, a lifelong champion of her work. Marie Howe, Jan Heller Levi, and Thomas Lux, among others, share personal remembrances of Cooper as a teacher, colleague, and inspiration. L. R. Berger’s moving tribute to Cooper’s final days closes the volume. This book has much to offer for both readers who already love Cooper’s work and new readers, especially among younger poets, just discovering her enduring poems.

Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (Under Discussion)

Biographies & Memoirs

Bland, Celia

Collins, Martha

Arts & Literature

University of Michigan Press

This text provides classroom teachers with information on developing a systematic procedure for assessing reading skill performance and offers prescriptive instruction. The first chapter addresses reading as a language process and establishes the basic conceptual framework. The remainder of the text is organized around five steps that should be followed to provide effective reading instruction. New to this edition: --The latest research on teacher instruction for technologically advanced students. --More emphasis on student assessment versus clinical diagnoses. --The importance of assessing and guiding reading through language literacy development is stressed.

Assessing and Guiding Classroom Reading Instruction

Education & Teaching

Cheek, Jr., Earl

Schools & Teaching

McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins' childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poet’s life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and “found” material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white—to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.

White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Pittsburgh Press

Praise for Martha Collins: “A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century . . . in supple and complex poems. . . .[N]o subject is off limits for her piercing intellect.” —Cynthia Hogue, AWP Chronicle

Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pitt Poetry Series)

Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet's husband during the six months following his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet's grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.

Because What Else Could I Do: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal—first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.

Casualty Reports: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

A collection of poems in which the author draws on dream and world, image and idea, and sound and sense to describe a vision of open, living space

The Arrangement of Space (Peregrine Smith Poetry Series)

Gibbs-Smith

A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins 
the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this was not the country, they used a steel arch with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this was a modern event, the trees were not involved. ―from "Blue Front"
Martha Collins's father, as a five-year-old, sold fruit outside the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909. What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking.
In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence―newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.

Blue Front: Poems

Graywolf Press

A unique anthology that illuminates the history and the art of translating poetry into English
Into English allows readers an extraordinary opportunity to experience the process and artistry of translating poetry. Editors Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer invited twenty-five contributors, all of them translators and most of them also poets, to select one poem in another language and three English translations of it, and then to provide an essay about the challenges and rewards of translating it. This anthology offers the original poem and the translations side by side, so readers can compare the translations for themselves.
The original poems are from across time and around the world. The poets include Sappho, San Juan de la Cruz, Basho, Rilke, Akhmatova, García Lorca, Szymborska, Amichai, and Adonis. The languages represented are many, from Latin to Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. More than seventy translators are included, among them Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Ruth Fainlight, David Hinton, Rosemary Lloyd, Khaled Mattawa, and W. S. Merwin. Into English becomes a chorus in celebration of international poetry and translation―what George Kalogeris, quoting Virgil, describes as “song replying to song replying to song.”
“Into English plunges the reader into a translation seminar: the joyous, argumentative, fetishistic, obsessive, and unending struggle to give poems new life in English. This generous book offers a plenitude: plural poems, plural languages, plural eras, plural translators. And summons us to add to the bounty.”―Rosanna Warren
“Into English is the great book so many of us have waited for: an anthology that actually teaches one about craft. For what is the discussion of literary translation if not a patient, detail-oriented, step-by-step education for a poet on the masteries of word choice, precision, tone? To say that I love this very special collection is an understatement.”―Ilya Kaminsky
Contributors include Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Willis Barnstone, Chana Bloch, Karen Emmerich, Danielle Legros Georges, Johannes Göransson, Joanna Trzeciak Huss, George Kalogeris, J. Kates, Alexis Levitin, Bonnie McDougall, Jennifer Moxley, Carl Phillips, Hiroaki Sato, Cindy Schuster, Rebecca Seiferle, Adam Sorkin, Susan Stewart, Cole Swensen, Arthur Sze, Stephen Tapscott, Alisa Valles, Sidney Wade, Ellen Doré Watson, and David Young.

Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries

Prufer, Kevin

Martha Collins offers haunting reflections on time and other subjects in Day unto Day, a spare and subtle seventh collection. The book consists of six sequences: during one month each year, for six years, Collins wrote a short poem each day. With perfectly distilled lines, she captures the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another the slow burn of time passing, the ambiguity of an old / new leaf” turning over, even as she collages a wide range of material that includes often disturbing news of the world. Writing in the tradition of poetic meditation, Collins shows us the full degree of her mastery a mature voice, poems with tremendous scope, and lines exceptionally controlled. Here is the work of a seasoned poet at the height of her career.

Day Unto Day: Poems

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

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