Essential pleasures : a new anthology of poems to read aloud / edited by Robert Pinsky.

Audio CD contains poetry read by Robert Pinsky.

Includes index.

Part I, Short lines, frequent rhymes. Infant joy / William Blake -- Sick rose / William Blake -- We real cook / Gwendolyn Brooks -- When we two parted / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion -- For my contemporaries / J.V. Cunningham -- Wild nights - wild nights! / Emily Dickinson -- "Hope" is the thing with feathers / Emily Dickinson -- Soul selects her own society / Emily Dickinson -- If you were coming in the fall / Emily Dickinson -- Poets light but lamps / Emily Dickinson -- Song (sweetest love, I do not go) / John Donne -- Gospel / Rita Dove -- Dust of snow / Robert Frost -- To earthward / Robert Frost -- Tamer and hawk / Thom Gunn -- Self-unseeing / Thomas Hardy -- Ring presented to Julia / Robert Hetrick -- Spring and fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Otherwise / Jane Kenyon -- Facing it / Yysef Komunyakaa -- Song on porcelain / Czeslaw Milosz -- In time of plague / Thomas Nashe -- Fairy-land / Edgar Allan Poe -- Lie / Sir Walter Raleigh -- My papa's waltz / Theodore Roethke -- Wish for a young wife / Theodore Roethke -- Needle / Charles Simic -- To Mistress Margery Wentworth / John Skelton -- Question / May Swenson -- To one that had little wit / George Turberville -- Fine work with pitch and copper / / William Carlos Williams -- Poem ("As the cat") / William Carlos Williams -- To waken an old lady / William Carlos Williams -- Coat / William Butler Yeats.

Part II, Long lines, strophes, parallelisms. from Ecclesiastes: or, the Preacher -- City limits / A.R. Ammons -- Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney / Fulke Greville -- When you're lying awake with a dismal headache / W.S. Gilbert -- Supermarket in California / Allen Ginsberg -- Afterwards / Thomas Hardy -- Spelt from Sibyl's leaves / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Proverb / Kenneth Koch -- Bavarian gentians / D.H. Lawrence -- Fish / Marianne Moore -- Columbus / Ogden Nash -- Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure / Thomas Nashe -- I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra / Ishmael Reed -- from Jubilante agno [my cat Jeoffry] / Christopher Smart -- Lover exhorteth his lady to take time, while time is / George Tuberville -- Liver / Charles Harper Webb -- from Song of myself / Walt Whitman -- Dog / C.K. Williams -- Singing / C.K. Williams -- Self portrait on a rocky mount / C.D. Wright.

Part III, Ballads, repetitions, refrains. Cruel mother -- House that Jack built -- There was a man -- Western wind -- It was raining in the capital / John Ashbery -- Burglar of Babylon / Elizabeth Bishop -- Chemin de Fer / Elizabeth Bishop -- Low barometer / Robert Bridges -- Green grow the rashes, O / Robert Burns -- Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll -- Epitaph on a hare / William Cowper -- If you / Robert Creeley -- Bunches of grapes / Walter de la Mare -- When I was fair and young / Queen Elizabeth I -- Concord hymn / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Lullaby of a lover / George Gascoigne -- Darkling thrush / Thomas Hardy -- Oxen / Thomas Hardy -- Invictus / W.E. Henley -- Battle-hymn of the Republic / Julia Ward Howe -- Seventh / Attila Jozsef -- Fado / J.D. McClatchy -- Ballad of Aunt Geneva / Marilyn Nelson -- Village of reason / Michael Palmer -- Samurai song / Robert Pinsky -- Nature, that washed her hands in milk / Sir Walter Raleigh -- Eros Turannos / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Miniver Cheevy / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Song (When I am dead, my dearest) / Christina Rossetti -- Up-hill / Christina Rossetti -- When that I was and a little tiny boy / William Shakespeare -- Ballad / Charles Simic -- song from The princess (The splendour falls) / Alfred Tennyson -- Slumber did my spirit seal / William Wordsworth -- Blame not my lute / Thomas Wyatt.

Part IV, Love poems. N.V.N. / Anna Akhmatova -- Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold -- Variation on the word Sleep / Margaret Atwood -- Yoke / Frank Bidart -- Marriage for the millennium / Eavan Boland -- To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet -- Serenade at the villa / Robert Browning -- Follow your saint / Thomas Campion -- Body, remember / Constantine Cavafy -- Valediciton: forbidding mourning / John Donne -- Good morrow / John Donne -- Fine knacks for ladies / John Dowland -- How many paltry, foolish, painted things (Sonnet 6) / Michael Drayton -- Three sorts of serpents do resemble thee / Michael Drayton -- Love song: I and thou / Alan Dugan -- Little brown baby / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Putting in the seed / Robert Frost -- Measuring the tyger / Jack Gilbert -- Mock orange / Louise Gluck -- Yoko / Thomas Gunn -- Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden -- Skunk / Seamus Heaney -- Familiarization is not good - it / Lyn Hejinian -- Delight in disorder / Robert Herrick -- Upon Julia's clothes / Robert Herrick -- His excuse for loving / Ben Jonson -- My picture left in Scotland / Ben Jonson -- Garden by moonlight / Amy Lowell -- Letter / Amy Lowell -- To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell -- She / James McMichael -- Methought I saw my late espoused saint / John Milton -- Lover: a ballad / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- Illusion / Carol Muske-Dukes -- Hardness scale / Joyce Peseroff -- To my excellent Lucasia, on our friendship / Katherine Philips -- Epistle to Miss Blount / Alexander Pope -- River-merchant's wife: a letter / Ezra Pound -- Artfully adorned Aphrodite / Sappho -- When to the sessions of sweet silent thought (Sonnet 30) / William Shakespeare -- What is your substance, whereof are you made (Sonnet 53) / William Shakespeare -- To me, fair friend, you never can be old (Sonnet 104) / William Shakespeare -- My true love hath my heart and I have his / Philip Sidney -- final soliloquy of the interior paramour / Wallace Stevens -- Love song / William

Part V, Stories. Man-moth / Elizabeth Bishop -- Poison tree / William Blake -- Chimney-sweeper (from Songs of innocence) / William Blake -- Harlem happiness / Sterling Brown -- My last duchess / Robert Browning -- Waiting for the barbarians / Constantine Cavafy -- Badger / John Clare -- tomatoes / Stephen Dobyns -- Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot -- Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Gilgamesh, I: the story / David Ferry -- Home burial / Robert Frost -- Tributaries / Louise Gluck -- Story about the body / Robert Hass -- Frederick Douglass / Robert Hayden -- Woofer (When I consider the African-American) / Terrance Hayes -- Love unknown / George Herbert -- Vulture / Robinson Jeffers -- Dying speech of an old philosopher / Walter Savage Landor -- Paul Revere's ride / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia when the author was painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel / Gail Mazur -- What he thought / Heather McHugh -- Bible study: 71 B.C.E. / Sharold Olds -- Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred Owen -- Alone / Edgar Allan Poe -- Captain Carpenter / John Crowe Ransom -- Dickhead / Michael Ryan -- Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith -- Old man leaves party / Mark Strand -- Lost pilot / James Tate -- Ulysses / Alfred Tennyson -- Casey at the bat / Ernest Lawrence Thayer -- Tichborne's elegy / Chidiock Tichborne -- Hen / Ellen Voigt -- Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams -- This is just to say / William Carlos Williams -- Night wash / Anne Winters -- Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight / Yvor Winters -- Ars poetica: some recent criticism / James Wright.

Part VI, Odes, complaints, and celebrations. Rights of woman / Anna Laetitia Barbauld -- For the twentieth century / Frank Bidart -- Tyger / William Blake -- Boy breaking glass / Gwendolyn Brooks -- Startled into life like fire / Charles Bukowski -- What is a day / Thomas Camlion -- Homage to my hips / Lucille Clifton -- Kubla Khan / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Some days / Billy Collins -- Caesarea / Alfred Corn -- Lines written during a period of insanity / William Cowper -- to Brooklyn Bridge / Hart Crane -- Yet do I marvel / Countee Cullen -- Buffalo Bill's / E.E. Cummings -- For the last wolverine / James Dickey -- Days of me / Stuart Dischell -- Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae / Ernest Dowson -- My mother would be a falconress / Robert Duncan -- America / Allen Ginsberg -- Prayer / Jorie Graham -- Church monuments / George Herbert -- Virtue / George Herbert -- Ode for hi / Robert Herrick -- Corinna's going a-Maying / Robert Herrick -- God's grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes -- Rondeau / Leigh Hunt -- On the death of Dr. Robert Levet / Samuel Johnson -- Ode to himself / Ben Jonson -- Hour-glas / Ben Jonson -- Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats -- Ode to a nightingale / John Keats -- To autumn / John Keats -- To my twenties / Kenneth Koch -- On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia / Walter Savage Landor -- Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives / Walter Savage Landor -- Piano / D.H. Larence -- Where is the angel? / Denise Levertov -- Shunk hour / Robert Lowell -- In Houston / Gail Mazur -- Drunk in the furnace / W.S. Merwin -- Moy sand and gravel / Paul Muldoon -- Poet's work / Lorine Niedecker -- Naphtha / Frank O'Hara -- Pslam / George Oppen -- Chemo side effects: memory / Elise Partridge -- Bethsabe's song / George Peele -- Nick and the candlestick / Sylvia Plath -- On the cards and dice / Sir Walter Raleigh -- Diving into the wreck / Adrienne Rich -- Archaic torso of A

Part VII, Parodies, ripostes, jokes, and insults. On being fired again / Erin Belieu -- Dream song / John Berryman -- Several voices out of a cloud / Louise Bogan -- Doctor fell / Thomas Brown -- On some South African novelists / Roy Campbell -- You don't know what love is / Raymond Carver -- Marriage / Gregory Corso -- Epigrams 42, 60, 62 / J.V. Cunningham -- How we heard the name / Alan Dugan -- How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot / T.S. Eliot -- Zero-account / David Gewanter -- Of money / Barnabe Googe -- Afterwards / Seamus Heaney -- Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams / Kenneth Koch -- This be the verse / Philip Larkin -- How pleasant to know Mr. Lear / Edward Lear -- I, being born a woman and distressed / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Reasons that induced Dr. Swift to write a poem called the Lady's dressing room / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- To be liked by you would be a calamity / Marianne Moore -- Married state / Katherine Philips -- Hustler speaks of places / Carl Phillips -- Lake isle / Ezra Pound -- Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester / Sir Walter Raleigh -- Chard Whitlow / Henry Reed -- Academic / Theodore Roethke -- Who's on first? / Lloyd Schwartz -- Old Jake / Alan Shapiro -- Thoughts about the person from Porlock / Stevie Smith -- Pleasures of merely circulating / Wallace Stevens -- Eating poetry / Mark Strand -- Lady's dressing room / Jonathan Swift -- Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, dec'd. / Mark Twain -- Grecian kindness / John Wilmot -- Upon nothing / John Wilmot -- Personals / C.D. Wright -- Scholars / William Butler Yeats.

CD track listing. To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet ; Of money / Barnabe Googe ; His excuse for loving / Ben Jonson ; My picture left in Scotland / Ben Jonson ; Tichborne's elegy / Chidiock Tichborne ; Song (When I am dead, my dearest) / Christina Rossetti ; from Jubilate agno (My cat Jeoffry) / Christopher Smart ; Eros turannos / Edwin Arlington Robinson ; Wild nights--wild nights-- (249), The poets light but lamps-- (883), and The soul selects her own society-- (303) / Emily Dickinson ; Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney / Fulke Greville ; Bethsabe's song / George Pelle ; Ode to a nightingale / John Keats ; To autumn / John Keats ; Methought I saw my late espousèd saint / John Milton ; A married state / Katherine Philips ; My true love hath my heart and I have his / Philip Sidney ; Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion ; from Song of myself (1 & 52) / Walt Whitman ; Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester / Sir Walter Raleigh ; On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia / Walter Savage Landor ; Epitaph on a hare / William Cowper.

A vibrant anthology and accompanying CD that revive a great American tradition: the joy of reciting poetry aloud.