No Place Like Home: Poems

Whether inhabited or remembered, whether solitary or teeming with family, whether a refuge from the world or a connection to a community, home is essential to the self. The pages of this anthology feature homecomings and leavetakings, urban apartments and cozy cottages, stately mansions and hermits' huts. In these poems we can watch a medieval housewife explain to her uncomprehending husband how she has spent her day; we can join with Robert Herrick as he gives thanks for his "humble roof . . . weatherproof"; we can peep in on Amy Lowell in the bath and John Donne in his bed, and join Joy Harjo for a meal at the kitchen table. Home can mean many things: from Horace's rural farm to Billy Collins's favorite armchair, from Milton's "blissful bower" in Paradise to Imtiaz Dharker's "Living Space" in the slums of Mumbai. Mary Oliver imagines her dream house, Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility--a fairer House than Prose, and a wide range of displaced poets long for their home countries: Ovid, Joachim Du Bellay, Kapka Kassabova, Mahmoud Darwish, and even Jules Supervielle feeling "Homesick for the Earth." Wherever you happen to dwell or whatever your idea of domestic bliss, you are sure to find visions that resonate in Poems of Home.