River Poems

Description

An anthology that explores the power and beauty of rivers through poems from around the world and through the ages. AN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY POCKET POET.Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations—the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India’s Ganges, Egypt’s Nile, the Yellow River of China—and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it’s natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents.
In this collection, British poets from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald mingle with American voices ranging from verses by the indigenous Klallam people and the African-American spirituals “Deep River” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” to such recent poets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Natasha Tretheway. Walt Whitman’s iconic “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and Emily Dickinson’s tersely erotic “My River Runs to Thee” stream alongside poems from ancient Babylon and Egypt. Contributions from India, Nepal, Japan, China, Thailand, France, Germany, Russia, Serbia, Chile, Mexico, the Congo, and Nigeria round out this celebration of the rivers of the world.
Includes:
• “My River Runs to Thee” by Emily Dickinson
• “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
• “Ol’ Man River” by Oscar Hammerstein II
• “The Golden Boat” by Rabindranath Tagore
• “The River God” by Stevie Smith
• “The River Bends but the Water Does Not” by Buddhādasa Bhikkhu 
• “The Niagara River” by Kay Ryan
• “Amazon” by Pablo Neruda 
 
Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. CONTENTS
 
HEADWATERS  
Hymn to the Nile
Ezekiel 47:9
LAOZI  From Dao De Jin
WANG WEI Cormorant Bank From Gold Dust Spring
DAFYDD LLWYD OF MATHAFARN  From To The River Dyfi
ALEXANDER POPE From Windsor Forest
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE  To the River Otter
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON  First Fountain
TRADITIONAL ENGLISH SONG The Waters of Tyne
TRADITIONAL AMERICAN SONG Shenandoah
RALPH WALDO EMERSON The River
HENRY DAVID THOREAU From The Journal
CARL SANDBURG Languages
PABLO NERUDA  Amazon
TED HUGHES River
VASKO POPA  Great Lord Danube
GABRIEL OKARA The Call of the River Nun
JIM HARRISON River III
RICHARD HUGO  Beaverbank
DAVID WAGONER  Talking to Barr Creek
DUANE NIATUM  Evening Near the Hoko River
CHARLES WRIGHT  Cloud River
 
 
Rapids & Pools  
WANG WEI  Luan Family Rapids
HENRY VAUGHAN  The Water-Fall
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON  Could Love
EDGAR ALLAN POE  To the River
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON  From The Brook
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON  Looking-Glass River
THOMAS HARDY  The Something that Saved Him
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS  Inversnaid
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS  Stream and Sun at Glendalough
IVAN BUNIN  With the Current
NIKOLAUS LENAU  Look into the Stream
ROBERT FROST Too Anxious for Rivers
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS  River Rhyme
ANNE RIDLER River God’s Song
TED HUGHES  Low Water
WILLIAM STAFFORD Looking Across the River
DIANE WAKOSKI  The Canoer
KAY RYAN The Niagara River
GARY SNYDER  The Canyon Wren
DON MCKAY  Pool
GEFFREY DAVIS Upriver, Downstream
JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS  Suture
DONOVAN DOUGLAS  Haskin’s Creek, August, As Revival
TRINITY HERR Topography
NATASHA TRETHEWEY Elegy
RAYMOND CARVER  Simple
Freeze, Flow & Flood  
FUJIWARA NO SADAYORI  Winter Dawn, Uji River
JOHN DRYDEN  London After the Great Fire, 1666
EDMUND SPENSER From Prothalamion
HENRY DAVID THOREAU From The Journal
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW From To the River Charles
WALT WHITMAN  From Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
SIDNEY LANIER The Song of the Chattahoochee
RUDYARD KIPLING  The River’s Tale
THOMAS HARDY  Overlooking the River Stour
KENJI MIYAZAWA  Along that Frozen Little River
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS  Down by the Salley Gardens
T.S. ELIOT  From The Dry Salvages
W.H. AUDEN  River Profile
A.R. AMMONS  River
JAMES WRIGHT To Flood Stage Again
WILLIAM STAFFORD  Ask Me
HAYDEN CARRUTH The Water
DON MCKAY  Night Skating on the Little Paddle River
JAMES DICKEY Inside the River
SHUNTARO TANIKAWA  From The River
WENDELL BERRY  The River Voyagers
LOUIS GLÜCK  Early December in Croton-on-Hudson
LOUISE ERDRICH  I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
KAREN HOULE  Pleasure Craft
ALICE OSWALD  Birdwatcher
EMILY ROSKO  Flood Plain
 
 
Troubled Waters  
From The Epic of Gilgamesh
WILLIAM BLAKE Why Should I care for the Men of Thames
JÓNAS HALLGRÍMSSON  The Sog, Iceland
WALT WHITMAN  Cavalry Crossing a Ford
ERNST STADLER  Ride Over the Cologne Rhine Bridge at Night
WILFRED OWEN  Shadwell Stair
LOUIS MACNEICE  Charon
EUGENIO MONTALE  Near Capua
RABINDRANATH TAGORE  The Golden Boat
PAUL DRESSER On The Banks of the Wabash, Far Away
H.D.  Leda
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS From Paterson
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II  From Ol’ Man River
CONSTANCE URDANG The River
STEVIE SMITH  The River God
TED HUGHES Ophelia
JAMES WRIGHT In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling,
                         West Virginia, Has Been Condemned
CITTADHAR HṚDAYA  River
WILLIAM MEREDITH  At the Confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado
CHARLES BUKOWSKI  The Rivers
TSITSI ELLA JAJI  Limpopo Blues
JAMES GALVIN  Cache la Poudre
JORGE HUMBERTO CHÁVEZ  The River
TRACY SMITH Wade in the Water
TODD DAVIS  Poem Made from Sadness and Water
KIT EVANS Riverbed Blues
 

Meditations & Meanderings  
LAOZI From Dao De Jin
DU FU  Thoughts on Traveling By Night
KOBAYASHI ISSA  Cricket Singing
UEJIMA ONITSURA Below the Jumping Sweetfish
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH  Upon Westminster Bridge
OSCAR WILDE  Symphony in Yellow
MARCEL PROUST  The Carafes of the Vivonne
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE Mirabeau Bridge 
WALLACE STEVENS The River of Rivers in Connecticut
LANGSTON HUGHES  The Negro Speaks of Rivers
BUDDHĀDASA BHIKKHU  The River Bends But the Water Does Not
PAULINE STAINER  Pouring the Sand Mandala into the Thames
SYLVIA PLATH  Faun
ROBERT BLY Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River
GRACE PALEY  Suddenly There’s Poughkeepsie
JAMES REANEY  To the Avon River, Above Stratford, Canada
GARY SNYDER River in the Valley
EAVAN BOLAND  Anna Liffey
MARY OLIVER  At Black River
SAM HAMILL  A Snapshot of Susitna
ALICE OSWALD From Dart
TCHICAYA U TAM’SI  Brush Fire
TODD DAVIS  Gnosis
PAULA BOHINCE La Seine
 
Deltas  
ZHANG RUOXU  Moonlight on the Spring River
MATSUO BASHO  Mogami River 
                            Hot Summer Day
EMILY DICKINSON   My River Runs to Thee
                              Least Rivers
WILLIAM GIBSON  From The River Columbia
ALICE MEYNELL The Visiting Sea
VALERY BRYUSOV  To Myself
HART CRANE  Repose of Rivers
CARL SANDBURG  River Moons
MARINA TSVETAEVA From The Notebook
ROBINSON JEFFERS  Salmon-Fishing
RUTH PITTER The Estuary
EUGENIO MONTALE  Delta
THEODORE ROETHKE  River Incident
SHUNTARO TANIKAWA River
JAMES DICKEY  Awaiting the Swimmer
RAYMOND CARVER  Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
DAVID BOTTOMS  In a Jon Boat During a Florida Dawn
JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS  Sediment
BRUCE BOND  The Delta
SCOTT STARBUCK The Hunger HENRY HUGHES is a poet, essayist, and professor of English at Western Oregon University. A winner of the Oregon Book Award, he is also the editor of the Everyman’s Library collections The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing and Fishing Stories. Foreword by Henry Hughes
 
It was our first river trip together, falling in love and maybe afraid of falling as we slid the wooden drift boat down the icy ramp into Oregon’s Siletz River, running cold and clear through the dripping dark vault of basalt and towering evergreens. Chloë pointed out gray dipper birds walking underwater, acrobatic otters, and rolling Chinook salmon; and I rowed, avoiding mossy rocks and overhanging snags, reading the gravelly bends and blue chutes. We talked and gazed, anchoring in a turquoise pool under a golden stand of alder to cast our flies. “This feels like a poem,” Chloë said.  
Her observation reflects an ancient confluence of water and words. Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations—the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India’s Ganges, Egypt’s Nile, the Yellow River of China—and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it’s natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents. Rivers teem with symbolic significance: they have long been ritual sites for funerals and baptisms, for deaths and rebirths; they slake our thirst, nourish our crops, and provide us with food, transportation, and power.
This collection of poems honors the geographic and cultural legacies of rivers, “Loving them all the way back to their source,” as Raymond Carver vows. “Hymn to the Nile,” from the second millennium BCE, hails the life-giving Egyptian river: “If the Nile smiles, the earth is joyous.” Fifteen hundred years later, the Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel, reminds us that “wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live.” Concurrently in China, the Dao De Jin affirms that “The highest good is like water / Nourishing all things.” Water settles in low places, coming “close to the Dao,” the way, the natural order of the universe. East Asian reverence for rivers surfaces in Chinese Tang dynasty poets and Japanese haiku masters such as Matsuo Basho and his transformative Mogami River that “Has poured the hot summer sun / Into the ocean.”   
In the West, Edmund Spenser sets a flowery and swan-filled wedding on the “Sweet Thames,” asking it to “run softly, till I end my song.” England’s River Thames runs through many poems in this collection, hailed by John Dryden as the quenching salvation after the Great Fire of 1666, and by Alexander Pope as the “Father of the British Floods.” Modern portraits of the Thames by Wilfred Owen, Louis MacNeice, and Stevie Smith recognize the watershed’s industrial degradation and urban squalor; but the river is nonetheless imbued with mysterious powers. “They say I am a foolish old smelly river,” Stevie Smith writes. “But they do not know of my wide original bed / Where the lady waits, with her golden sleepy head.”   
Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald speak the river voices of western England; John Burnside takes us for a cool swim on a hot summer night in Scotland; and Welsh poet Owen Sheers gauges human arrogance in the face of flooding. In “Clonfeacle,” Paul Muldoon tells the riverside story of St. Patrick as a parable of negotiation amid the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland, and the struggles and stamina of Irish womanhood are brilliantly personified in Eavan Boland’s “Anna Liffey.” 
Across the Atlantic, American voices spring from their own deep pools of memory. Louise Erdrich witnesses a devastating flood on Minnesota’s Chippewa reservation. Seeing the distressed herons flying above, her grandfather tells her “These are the ghosts of the tree people” and the poet longs to “dream our way back” to those sacred origins. Struggle and hope echo through the African-American spirituals “Roll, Jordon Roll” and “Deep River,” and are honored afresh in Tracy Smith’s “Wade in the Water”: “Singing that old blood-deep song / That dragged us to those banks.”  Walt Whitman’s expansive “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” achieves an urban transcendence beyond place and time. Our collective connection to rivers is powerfully realized in Langston Hughes’ sonorous evocation of identity, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” where he contemplates the Mississippi transformed by emancipation and the currents that enlarge our consciousness: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”   
Flowing or still, water reflects the cycle of life. Canadian poet Don McKay recalls ice skating on the Little Paddle River where “Some may glimpse a lost one / in the spaces between the skaters or the watchers.” On Florida’s Black River, Mary Oliver watches a napping alligator, fearing its predatory ferocity and reminded that “death comes before / the rolling away / of the stone.” And in a moving elegy, Natasha Tretheway relives salmon fishing with her beloved late father.     
Rivers don’t stop at political or social boundaries, as Mexican poet Jorge Humberto Chávez dramatizes in his troubling portrait of the Rio Grande. Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda offers a sensual tribute to his beloved multinational Amazon River; Tchicaya U Tam’si marks the confluence of his life with that of the complicated Congo; and Serbian poet Vasko Popa hails the “great Lord Danube” as it glimmers across Europe. The poetry in this collection flows from over twenty nations in millions of miles of changing currents.  
Since our first river adventure in Oregon, Chloë and I have explored the Columbia, Amazon, Hudson, Thames, Elbe, Hvítá, Seine, and countless smaller waterways, like the Cherwell near her family’s home in Oxfordshire where we endeavored to punt away a summer afternoon, admiring swans, drinking wine, and reading poetry. Whether it was the wine, a stuck pole, or some rough meter that caused my unexpected swim, we were soon revived by laughter and cups of Pimm’s at the Boat House. Whatever trouble we get into, boating in sticky canals or tricky rapids, in high and low water, fair weather or foul, the rivers and their flow of words endure, deepening and carrying us on. DE

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