"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
Zbigniew Herbert was a major 20th-century Polish poet, essayist, and dramatist, born in Lviv in 1924 and associated with a strong moral, anti-totalitarian voice in postwar Polish literature. Report from the Besieged City is one of his best-known poems, first published in English in the...
These last six days have been about materiality: one object, one specific made or found thing, and its exact physical fact being conflated with everything that's accumulated on top of that fact through use, culture, or attention. A crate. A furrow. A toad in an...
I don't think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it's a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it's part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It's not for the...
Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the...
Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, editor, and translator known for her wit and formal experimentation. She was born in Missouri in 1887, studied at Bryn Mawr College, and became one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry. Selected Poems is one of...
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, widely admired for work that bridges lyric poetry, meditation, ecology, and philosophy. She’s also known as a lucid critic of poetry and has written influential essays on how poems work and why they matter. Ten Windows: How...
Annie Dillard is an American writer best known for her lyrical and philosophical essays about nature, attention, and spiritual life. Her most famous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. It's a work of made up of connected essays and observations...
Francis Ponge, a French poet mostly concentrated on everyday objects, wrote Le Parti pris des choses in seclusion during the German occupation of France, and published it in 1942. The title is usually translated into English as Taking the Side of Things (or The Nature...
Every text this last few days has, in one way or another, been circling around the same question: what's a path and what makes a path? Not a road already drawn and simply walked afterward, but a path in the sense that seems to keep...
Antonio Machado was a major Spanish poet and playwright, associated with the Generation of ’98, a group of writers who reflected on Spain’s identity and crisis at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in Seville in 1875 and died in 1939 in...
