The Dance

Description

One from a series of small, handsome hardcover volumes devoted to the world's classic poets. The binding, paper and production are of the highest quality. Series now contains over fifty titles. A delightful anthology that celebrates in verse the silent poetry of dance and the dancer. Chinese dagger dances and Hindu festival dances, belly dancers and whirling dervishes, high-school proms and wedding waltzes, tango, tarantella, mambo, flamenco, reels and jigs, disco and ballet - dances of all kinds move through the poems gathered here, as do some of the world's most famous dancers, from Nijinsky and Pavlova to Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire; from Isadora Duncan, George Balanchine and Martha Graham to Baryshnikov and Bojangles. In the work of more than 150 poets - including Shakespeare, Milton, Hafez, Rumi, Li Po, Rilke, Rimbaud, Lorca, Akhmatova, Whitman, Dickinson, Cummings, Eliot and Merrill - we feel and see the grace, the drama, the expressive power, and the sheer joy to be found in dance, around the world and through the ages.

Emily Fragos is an award-winning poet and editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthologies The Great Cat, The Dance, Music's Spell, Art and Artists, and Letters by Emily Dickinson. She lives in New York City.