Literature lovers will be in raptures over Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of American’s most beloved authors. The new volume, assembled by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, collects for the first time fascinating archival material, giving readers access to lesser-known poems, poems in progress, and brief prose works. Ever-attentive to both nature and culture, Bishop was truly a cosmopolitan poet, and the selections reflect this, categorized as they are by locale: Brazil, Nova Scotia, New York. Overall, the works are formal and orderly, adhering to strict schemes of rhyme and meter, but they’re leavened by Bishop’s wit and her observant eye, which never fails to provide fresh perspectives. Sometimes you embolden, sometimes bore, she writes of the sea in Apartment in Leme. You smell of codfish and old rain. Homesick, the salt/weeps in the salt-cellars. The collection provides a wonderful glimpse into the origins of Bishop’s genius, and her personal evolution the movement from girlhood to womanhood, from the romantic to the ironic can be traced here. Bishop won every prize imaginable during her lifetime, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award, and with this new volume, it’s easy to see why.

The work of Franz Wright displays a different kind of craftsmanship. In God’s Silence the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers looser, more spacious poems with lines less closely knit, the absorption of them as natural as respiration for the reader. Marked by melancholy and a seemingly hard-won wisdom, the collection as a whole reflects the plight of an isolated soul at odds with the unseen.

In On the Bus, a poem at once nightmarish and lovely, a trip by public transportation brings to the poet’s mind a group execution, inspires diverting speculations/on the comparative benefits/of waiting in front of a ditch to be shot. Despite the sharing of a common, horrible fate, Wright imagines a lack of solidarity among the people involved. This tension between the opposing poles of isolation and communion is a recurring theme. For the poet, there is no co-existence, only existence: Nobody has called for some time./(I was always the death of the party.) he writes in Progress. Wright produces poems of unusual intimacy, and his humility, as evidenced in an urgent prose poem called From the Past, stays with the reader in the end: Who did I imagine I was, that things as they are, reality as God gave it, was not enough for me?

Best known for a pair of provocative memoirs, The Liar’s Club and Cherry, Mary Karr is also an acclaimed poet. A new collection called Sinners Welcome finds her coming to terms with her spiritual self, remembering lost friends and battling the empty-nest blues as her son leaves home for college. Karr is a master craftswoman, and her poems call attention to themselves through their very apparent artistry. She digs in deep to create tension a verbal reversal that’s unexpected, a phrase that astonishes, an image that startles. In Revelations in the Key of K, Karr describes how the alphabet has literally shaped her life: I came awake in kindergarten,/under the letter K chalked neat. . . And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid /names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break. A series of pieces re-envisioning famous religious tableaux (the Crucifixion, the Nativity, the Garden of Gethsemane) contains some of the collection’s most precise and sculpted poetry. Indeed, Karr’s own spiritual quest is the foundation of the book, which concludes with a wonderful essay called Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer.

<B>Spring into summer with Douglas Florian’s playful poems</B> Douglas Florian does it again. In his newest title, <B>Summersaults</B>, the award-winning children’s poet and illustrator brings together another perfect combination of verse and pictures. But children’s poetry? Who would’ve thunk it! Well, not Florian apparently. The former cartoonist whose work often appeared in <I>The New Yorker</I> magazine first launched into the children’s book scene with several nonfiction titles on careers. But something was missing. "I wanted to use more of my imagination," Florian says. One day at a flea market, he picked up a book of poems called <I>Oh, That’s Ridiculous</I>, edited by William Cole. Florian was so amused and inspired by the book that he decided to write some poems of his own and quickly realized his niche. "The poetry just seemed suited for my quirky nature," he says. And quirky it is. Since that fateful day, Florian’s whimsical imagination has produced such witty titles as <I>Bing Bang Boing, Laugh-eteria</I> and <I>Beast Feast</I>. His newest book, <B>Summersaults</B>, which includes such humorous verses as "Sidewalk Squawk" and "Dog Day," is a celebration of the season. The poems and pictures take the reader on a fantastic, fun-filled vacation. From "dande-lion" fields to cow pastures to "sidewalk hiking" to "The Sea," the book embraces all that summer has to offer. Florian’s creative style both in illustration and word usage catches the eye and hits the funny bone. Never a stickler for the rules of grammar, he uses words as he uses paints anyway he wants. Often treating the poems as pictures, he uses the formatting of the text to convey his message. So "The Swing" swings, the "Double Dutch Girls" skips, "Fireflies" flies, and "Summersaults" tumbles. How does he get away with such unconventional usages of words? Poetic license. "The sound of the word is what really matters," says Florian. "So I often switch things around and try to shake things up." Anything that enriches the word works for him. His goal is to have fun with the poetry and bring a sense of fun to his audience.

Where does the inspiration for these amusing musings come from? "Nature is an amazing endless variety of forms, structures and habitats," says Florian, who lives in New York City with his family. "The more you research the more inspiring it becomes." According to the author, <I>Beast Feast</I>, a 1994 ALA Notable Children’s Book, opened the floodgates to animals and nature for him. "As I would find out information about one animal, it would inspire me to write about another I had come across," says Florian. And the same goes for the seasons. While he was researching his first seasonal title, Winter Eyes, which won the 1999 <I>New York Times Book Review</I> Best Illustrated Books Award, Florian started thinking about all the marvelous things that summer has to offer. "I try to separate each topic in my head while I’m working on it, so that I can see it on it’s own terms," says Florian. "But once the inspiration is there, I can’t wait to get started on it." Florian, who grew up watching his father paint landscapes of the shores of Cape Cod and Long Island, credits his excitement for and love of nature to those early years. He gets back in touch with nature by reading Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau. "I have to activate the brain waves in order to work," he admits. As for the illustrations, he likes to mix those up and he admits that his creations are often accident or trial and error. "The way the human eye sees things and the camera picks them up are two very different things," says Florian. Creations that may look fabulous on paper end up looking less exciting in a book, so he plays around a bit. Florian has worked with such diverse media as brown bags with watercolor <I>(Beast Feast)</I>, crayon and off-white paper, and watercolor and colored pencils on vellum paper (as in <B>Summersaults</B>). "I liked the way the liquid sat on top of the paper," says Florian of his latest creation, "and I had a lot of fun doing the illustrations." Florian’s pictures and poems undoubtedly convey the fun he had writing <B>Summersaults</B>. But more importantly, his poems show readers that words do not have to be literal and mundane. They can be played with and adapted to whatever meanings we choose. "Poetry is not black and white," says Florian. "It is more like the gray and purple area that connects all the things we live in."

Often considered the most impracticable of art forms, poetry has been infused with a new purpose thanks to popular author and radio personality Garrison Keillor. He has long championed the genre on his NPR show The Writer’s Almanac, and Keillor now offers a new book, Good Poems for Hard Times, the follow-up to his 2002 anthology Good Poems in support of his belief that poetry is the ideal antidote for the everyday pressures and concerns that plague us all. The meaning of poetry is to give courage, he writes in the volume’s introduction. The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadences, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam you and me. Keillor himself picked the 185 pieces collected in the book, and his choices vary in period and category, displaying a wonderful range of voices and forms. Old favorites like Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost and William Shakespeare stand alongside newer writers, including Barbara Hamby and R.S. Gwynn. There are poems on family and work, aging and love and simple day-to-day survival, poems to provide joy, inspiration and optimism, to combat sorrow, loneliness and loss. Poets can make a feast out of trouble, /Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair, R. J. Ellmann writes in To A Frustrated Poet, and Keillor’s collection supports his statement. Whatever your situation or particular set of cares, Good Poems for Hard Times contains the perfect cure.

Julie Hale keeps her old copies of The New Yorker in Austin, Texas.

<B>Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry</B> For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <!–BPLINK=0618152857–><B>Song ∧ Dance</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 80 pages, ISBN 0618152857), Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. <I>"Did you ever have a family?"</I> he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <!–BPLINK=0374263027–><B>A Short History of the Shadow</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Farrar, Straus, $20, 96 pages, ISBN 0374263027), gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <B>The Seconds</B>, gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. <I>Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.</I>

<B>Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry</B> For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <!–BPLINK=0618152857–><B>Song ∧ Dance</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 80 pages, ISBN 0618152857), Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. <I>"Did you ever have a family?"</I> he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <B>A Short History of the Shadow</B>, gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <!–BPLINK=0399147861–><B>The Seconds</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Putnam, $24, 88 pages, ISBN 0399147861), gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. <I>Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.</I>

<B>Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry</B> For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <B>Song ∧ Dance</B>, Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. <I>"Did you ever have a family?"</I> he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <!–BPLINK=0374263027–><B>A Short History of the Shadow</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Farrar, Straus, $20, 96 pages, ISBN 0374263027), gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <!–BPLINK=0399147861–><B>The Seconds</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Putnam, $24, 88 pages, ISBN 0399147861), gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. <I>Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.</I>

Nothing inspires fear in the hearts of readers quite the way poetry can. The hoary literary category is something most of us attend to only in school. But this holiday season, poetry gets a lift from the literature lovers at Sourcebooks, who have designed a beguiling gift around the most overlooked genre in the publishing industry. Poetry Speaks, a trio of audio CDs accompanied by an impressive anthology, offers a star-studded lineup of authors reading their own classic poems aloud. Hear the prize winners and the poet laureates, the writers who nursed their verse to near-perfection modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; confessionalists Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. Beginning with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose 1888 reading from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is offered here on audio for the first time, Poetry Speaks spans more than a century and presents the recordings of 42 writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s crisp, prim delivery of "I Shall Forget You" and a sonorous reading of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from William Butler Yeats. Crackling with age, Walt Whitman’s recitation from "America" is ghostly, and T. S. Eliot’s alert to his audience as he prepares to read "Prufrock" is priceless: "I must warn you, it takes a little time always to warm up the engine." The Poetry Speaks companion volume includes photos of the writers and selections of their work. Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and other luminaries contributed biographies and essays on each author. From symbolism to imagism, free verse to blank verse, Poetry Speaks offers a quick literary fix to those who’d rather listen than read.

Gorey details One of the most singular figures in American letters is celebrated in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, which collects a quarter-century’s worth of interviews with the inimitable artist and author, who died last year. Organized chronologically and drawn from sources like The New York Times and The New Yorker, these pieces reveal their subject’s wide-ranging tastes and unmatchable intellect. Gorey, who had no formal art training, attended Harvard in the 1940s. He eventually wound up in New York, where launching a 40-year literary career he devised the demise of many an innocent in wonderfully whimsical, slightly disturbing books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies ("K is for Kate who was struck with an ax, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks," so the story goes) and The Chinese Obelisks. Gorey’s trademarks the furtive figures, the violence set to verse initially gave him a cult following until he gained the wider audience he deserved. Over the course of countless books, he did for cats what James Thurber did for canines. His lanky dancers jetŽd their way across the pages of a ballet book called The Lavender Leotard. In Ascending Pecularity, he discusses his influences the choreography of Balanchine, the paintings of Balthus, the stories of Borges an artistic assimilation that fed his singular style. With abundant photos of the artist as well as samples of his work, Ascending Pecularity reveals what made Gorey, the ultimate eccentric, tick.

A medieval classic It’s no surprise that one of Gorey’s favorite reads was the 11th century Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. (He frequently named his cats after the story’s characters.) Considered by many to be the world’s first novel, Genji, a narrative of intrigue, romance and manners set in medieval Japan, remains a hallmark of world literature more than 1,000 years after its debut. Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese courtier, the novel follows the beautiful prince Genji through a series of stormy love affairs and risky political ventures, introducing along the way a large cast of characters, both good and evil. The story spans 75 years and given the fiery nature of its protagonist contains plot twists aplenty. Royall Tyler’s fresh, lyrical translation of the novel, heralded as a literary event comparable to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, sets a new standard for approaching the narrative. Tyler, a renowned Japanese scholar, compiled glossaries, notes and a list of characters for this distinctive, two-volume boxed edition. Delicately illustrated with black-and-white reproductions from medieval scrolls and texts, this new, world-class version of Genji brings ancient Asian culture to life the way few literary works can. Truly a timeless tale.

Nothing inspires fear in the hearts of readers quite the way poetry can. The hoary literary category is something most of us attend to only in school. But this holiday season, poetry gets a lift from the literature lovers at Sourcebooks, who have designed a beguiling gift around the most overlooked genre in the publishing industry. Poetry Speaks, a trio of audio CDs accompanied by an impressive anthology, offers a star-studded lineup of authors reading their own classic poems aloud. Hear the prize winners and the poet laureates, the writers who nursed their verse to near-perfection modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; confessionalists Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. Beginning with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose 1888 reading from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is offered here on audio for the first time, Poetry Speaks spans more than a century and presents the recordings of 42 writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s crisp, prim delivery of "I Shall Forget You" and a sonorous reading of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from William Butler Yeats. Crackling with age, Walt Whitman’s recitation from "America" is ghostly, and T. S. Eliot’s alert to his audience as he prepares to read "Prufrock" is priceless: "I must warn you, it takes a little time always to warm up the engine." The Poetry Speaks companion volume includes photos of the writers and selections of their work. Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and other luminaries contributed biographies and essays on each author. From symbolism to imagism, free verse to blank verse, Poetry Speaks offers a quick literary fix to those who’d rather listen than read.

Gorey details One of the most singular figures in American letters is celebrated in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, which collects a quarter-century’s worth of interviews with the inimitable artist and author, who died last year. Organized chronologically and drawn from sources like The New York Times and The New Yorker, these pieces reveal their subject’s wide-ranging tastes and unmatchable intellect. Gorey, who had no formal art training, attended Harvard in the 1940s. He eventually wound up in New York, where launching a 40-year literary career he devised the demise of many an innocent in wonderfully whimsical, slightly disturbing books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies ("K is for Kate who was struck with an ax, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks," so the story goes) and The Chinese Obelisks. Gorey’s trademarks the furtive figures, the violence set to verse initially gave him a cult following until he gained the wider audience he deserved. Over the course of countless books, he did for cats what James Thurber did for canines. His lanky dancers jetŽd their way across the pages of a ballet book called The Lavender Leotard. In Ascending Pecularity, he discusses his influences the choreography of Balanchine, the paintings of Balthus, the stories of Borges an artistic assimilation that fed his singular style. With abundant photos of the artist as well as samples of his work, Ascending Pecularity reveals what made Gorey, the ultimate eccentric, tick.

A medieval classic It’s no surprise that one of Gorey’s favorite reads was the 11th century Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. (He frequently named his cats after the story’s characters.) Considered by many to be the world’s first novel, Genji, a narrative of intrigue, romance and manners set in medieval Japan, remains a hallmark of world literature more than 1,000 years after its debut. Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese courtier, the novel follows the beautiful prince Genji through a series of stormy love affairs and risky political ventures, introducing along the way a large cast of characters, both good and evil. The story spans 75 years and given the fiery nature of its protagonist contains plot twists aplenty. Royall Tyler’s fresh, lyrical translation of the novel, heralded as a literary event comparable to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, sets a new standard for approaching the narrative. Tyler, a renowned Japanese scholar, compiled glossaries, notes and a list of characters for this distinctive, two-volume boxed edition. Delicately illustrated with black-and-white reproductions from medieval scrolls and texts, this new, world-class version of Genji brings ancient Asian culture to life the way few literary works can. Truly a timeless tale.

If you don’t count Jewel, then Billy Collins just may be the most popular poet in America. In June, Collins was appointed to the post of U.S. Poet Laureate, and this month he celebrates the release of his seventh poetry collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, which includes almost 100 poems, 20 of them new.

The work follows the success of his previous offering, Picnic, Lightning, which has sold some 40,000 copies bestseller status for poetry. Collins’ broad popular appeal is often attributed to the accessibility of his distinctive tone, described by one critic as a casual, blue-jeans kinda style. In his new work, he disarms the reader by writing about himself: how much he used to enjoy cigarettes, what kind of house he lives in. He uses clear language, routinely incorporating humor even as he shows marked insight. In fact, the poet who usually finishes a poem in one sitting describes humor as a door into the serious. Collins also calls his poetry a form of travel writing and likes to question life from a different perspective, as he does in Walking Across the Atlantic. But for now I try to imagine what this must look like to the fish below, the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing. Collins will probably be doing a bit more traveling now that he has a three-book, six-figure deal with Random House, an unheard of offer for a literary poet. The lover of jazz and good whiskey is a professor of English at Lehman College and lives in Somers, New York, with his wife, Diane, an architect.