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Ronald TanakaThe Shino Suite: Sansei Poetry by Ronald Tanaka
The Greenfield Review Press, 1981

Ronald Tanaka, born in 1944 in the Poston Relocation Center, is Sansei, or third generation Japanese-American. The Shino Suite begins with the instruction, "to be read in one sitting," and an epigraph by Miyamoto Musashi, "People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the void. This is bewilderment." The book, beautifully illustrated by the author, proceeds to give shape and articulation to what one may mistake as void. A new 2005 edition of The Shino Suite by Authors Choice Press provides a broader context for the original set of poems. Since the original publication, Tanaka writes, he has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, Major Depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The author explains how his early work can be seen as part of a self-destructive struggle with mental illness. The Greenfield Review edition won a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1982 and was selected by the Library Journal as one of the best small press publications of 1981.

Alan DunganPoems 2 by Alan Dugan
Yale University Press, 1963

Poems 3 by Alan Dugan
Yale University Press, 1967

Poems 4 by Alan Dugan
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1974

Alan Dugan, 1923-2003, lived in New York City and then Truro, MA.  His first book, published in 1961, titled, simply, Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award and the Prix de Rome. Poems has been continuously on the shelves of the Poetry Center and was signed by the author in 1966 and again in 1978, when he read for the Poetry Center’s reading series. The poems in Poems are laced with cynicism and range from ghoulish to the sublime. Poems 2 is a signed first edition and Poems 3 and Poems 4 were signed by Dugan in 1978.

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Retrieved from Storage
In the late 1970s the Poetry Center began to cull and store books from its collection in order to make room for new acquisitions. By 2007, when we moved into our new, permanent home, we had 477 boxes of books in storage. Our library staff has begun the arduous task of retrieving boxes, re-cataloguing titles, and restoring the books to their rightful place on our shelves. Below are a few highlights from our returning books.

Elizabth BishopPoems North & South—A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop        
Houghton Mifflin, 1955

Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Chatto & Windus, 1956

Elizabeth Bishop was 44 years old when her second book of poems was published by Houghton Mifflin. It won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956. Her third book of poems, simply entitled Poems, was published in England in the next year. It contains
selections from both her first and second books. It was an auspicious beginning as far as publishing goes.

Wallace StevensHarmonium by Wallace Stevens
Alfred A. Knopf, 1953

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955, lived and worked in Hartford, Connecticut.  Harmonium, Stevens' first book, was first published in 1923, when he was already 40 years old.  The critics were divided.  Helen Vendler wondered if “The Emperor of Ice Cream” was a “nonsense ditty,” while the critic Matthew Johnson thought “Anecdote of a Jar” would be “spell-binding for hundreds of years.”  A fourth edition, this book is in beautiful condition.