Books and Libraries

Your Résumé”
Julia Alvarez, “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library
Laurie L. Patton, “On Learning a Sacred Language in Childhood”
Lewis Carroll, “What is the Use of a Book?”
Patricia Hooper, “The World Book
Margarita Engle, “Tula [“Books are door-shaped”]”
 
Celebrating Individual Books and Authors
Andrew Marvell, “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’”
John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
W. H. Auden, “Auden on Montaigne”
Ivor Gurney, “George Chapman – The Illiad”
R. S. Thomas, “Henry James”
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Acquiring an Encyclopedia”
Ezra Pound, “Cantico del Sole”
Andrew D. Scrimgeour, “Winter Pages”
Siegfried Sassoon, “To an Eighteenth Century Poet”
Joseph Brodsky, from “Elegy for John Donne”
Giovanni Boccaccio, “Boccaccio Sends Petrarch a Copy of Dante”
Anne Stevenson, “Re-reading Jane”
Wendy Cope, “My Father’s Shakespeare”
 
Because of Libraries
Alberto Rios, “Don’t Go into the Library”
J. K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
William E. Gladstone, “Books Are a Delightful Society”
Liz Lochhead, “Random”
Yuriy Andrukhovych, “Library”
Kostas Koutsourelis, “Library”
Laurynas Katkus, “On the Sixth Floor”
Jill Osier, “Elegy”
Robert L. Chapman, “Library”
Rosemary Griebel, “Library”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things"
Alasdair Paterson, “On the Library”
William Cowper, from “An Ode Addressed”
Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries”
Frederick Buechner, “Holy a Place”
Gerald Stern, “Stepping Out of Poetry”
Lesbia Harford, “Closing Time: Public Library”
Abraham Cowley, “Mr. Cowley’s Book Presenting It Selfe”
Margaret Cavendish, “Fame’s Library within the Temple”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Library”
Gillian Clarke, “In a Cardiff Arcade”
U. A. Fanthorpe, “In the English Faculty Library, Oxford”
James Russell Lowell, “Literature for Desolate Islands”
Ian McMillan, “Adult Fiction”
 
Always the Librarians
Joseph Mills, “If Librarians Were Honest”
Andy Jackson, “Enquiry Desk”
Rita Dove, “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967”
William Mcllvanney, “In the Library”
Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long”
Sean O’Brien, “The Beautiful Librarians”
John Holland, “On the Death of Esther Caterer”
Philip Metres, “Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker’s Stroke”
 
The Writing of Books
Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing”
Durs Grünbein, “On Learning Old Vocabulary”
Amit Majmudar, “Vocative”
Alicia Ostriker, from Ars Poetica
Gabriela Mistral, “The Teller of Tales”
Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense”
Philippe Jaccottet, from “Songs from Below”
Ilya Kaminksky, “Author’s Prayer”
William Blake, from Songs of Innocence
Les Murray, “The Privacy of Typewriters”
Li Sen, “Confronting Nujiang”
William Stafford, “A Writer’s Fountain Pen Talking”
Odia Ofeimun, “I Am a Writer,”
Petrarch, from Canzoniere 1, “O You Who Hear”
Gaius Valerius Catullus, “To Whom Shall I Offer this Book?”
William Butler Yeats, “Where My Words Go”
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”
Marcus Valerius Martialis, “Epigrams 1,3, “My Little Book”
Horace, Ode 3.30, “More Lasting than Bronze”
Guido Cavalcanti, “Sonnet XVIII”
Uejima Onitsura, Untitled haiku
Johann W. Goethe, “Authors”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet and His Songs”
Callimachus, “The Very First Time”
 
Marginalia
John F. M. Doraston, “The Bookworm”
Robert Burns, “The Book-Worms”
Evenus, “Page-eater”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh
Ben Jonson, “To My Book-seller”
Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Bookmarks”
Tarannum Riyaz, “The Scent of Old Books”
Robert Herrick, “Make Haste Away”
Udava R. Tennakoon, “Books Up on Books”
Decimus Ausonius, “You’ve Bought Books”
Eugene Field, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”
Andrew Lang, “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise”
Adilia Lopes, “I Don’t Like Books”
Lope de Vega, “So Many Books”
Ecclesiastes 12:11-12, “The Sayings of the Wise”
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”
 
Rethinking Books and Libraries
Frank Osen, “Bookshop Shopping”
Douglas Dunn, “December’s Door”
Joe Lucia, “The Afterlife of Libraries”
Bertolt Brecht, “The Book Burnings”
Michael Symmons Roberts, “The Future of Books”
Elaine Equi, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn”
 
Index of Authors