In time for Halloween: a one-of-a-kind hardcover collection of poems from ancient times to the present about ghosts, zombies, and vampires. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.
This selection of poems from across the ages brings to life a staggering array of zombies, ghosts, vampires, and devils. Our culture's current obsession with zombies and vampires is only the latest form of a fascination with crossing the boundary between the living and the dead that has haunted humans since we first began writing. The poetic evidence gathered here ranges from ancient Egyptian inscriptions and the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh to the Greek bard Homer, and from Shakespeare and Milton and Keats to Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Here too are terrifying apparitions from a host of more recent poets, from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Rita Dove and Billy Collins, from Allen Ginsberg and H. P. Lovecraft to Mick Jagger and Shel Silverstein. The result is a delightfully entertaining volume of spine-tingling poems for fans of horror and poetry both.

Introduction: One Foot Out of the Grave
 
THE CORPOREAL UNDEAD
 
Henry Israeli
Depraved Cogitation
 
Kim Addonizio
Night Of The Living, Night Of The Dead
 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Der Totentanz (The Dance of the Dead)
 
Bryan Dietrich
Zombies
 
Robert E. Howard
Dead Man’s Hate
 
William Shakespeare
Puck’s Nighttime Speech
 
Eugene Lee Hamilton
On Two Of Signorelli’s Frescoes
1. The Rising of the Dead
2. The Binding of the Lost
 
Marvin Bell
The Book of the Dead Man (Medusa)
1. About the Dead Man and Medusa
2. More About the Dead Man and Medusa
 
Edgar Allan Poe
The Sleeper
 
Charles Baudelaire
Metamorphoses of the Vampire
 
Tony Barnstone
The Revenant
 
George Gordon, Lord Byron
from The Giaour
 
William Baer
All Hallows Eve
 
Michael Hulse
The Death of Dracula
 
Alexandra Teague
Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, Watches House of Dracula
 
Tim Siebles
Blade, The Daywalker
 
Tim Siebles
Blade, Historical
 
Conrad Aiken
The Vampire
 
Jim Stewart
Count Orlok
 
Tony Trigilio
My Childhood Nightmares Unfolded in Serial Narrative
 
Sarah Maclay
The View From Harold Way
 
THE INCORPOREAL UNDEAD
 
Jorge Luis Borges
Dead Hoodlums
 
Sholeh Wolpe
Ghost Tango
 
Alan Michael Parker
Words for Spring
 
Matthew Sweeney
In the Dust
 
Hayden Carruth
The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill
 
Li-young Lee
Nocturne
 
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
 
Gary Young
I last saw my mother
 
Emily Dickinson
One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted
 
Charles Harper Webb
Haunted
 
Robert Frost
Ghost House
 
David Orr
Daniel
 
T. S. Eliot
from Little Gidding
 
David Daniel
Paint
 
Thomas Hardy
The Shadow on the Stone
 
Mark Jarman
Goodbye to a Poltergeist
 
Howard Nemerov
I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee
 
William Shakespeare
The Ghost of King Hamlet
 
Ciaran Carson
Labuntur et Imputantur
 
James Merrill
Voices from the Other World
 
Charles Simic
from The Invisible
 
Anne Sexton
Ghosts
 
Harold Pinter
Ghost
 
Richard Garcia
The White Ghosts
 
Edward Hirsch
Hotel Window
 
John Donne
The Apparition
 
Richard Hunt
Gas-lamp Ghost
 
Walt Whitman
As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
 
D.H. Lawrence
The Inheritance
 
Anonymous
The Unquiet Grave
 
John Milton
Sonnet 23: Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint
 
Derek Dew
(Weathervane) Pirate Ship of the Dead
 
Yusef Komunyakaa
Blue Dementia
 
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
The Ghosts (from The Song of Hiawatha)
 
Molly Peacock
Great-Grandmother’s Young Ghost
 
Jorge Teillier
In Order to Talk with the Dead
 
William Stobb
The Panther
 
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Incantation of the Spirits of Earth and Air
 
Vachel Lindsay
from The Ghosts of the Buffaloes
 
Egyptian Pyramid Text
The Dead King Eats the Gods
 
DEVILS, GODS, ANGELS, DEATH
 
Amin Esmaielpour
From Zahhak’s Burning Tehran
 
Michelle Mitchell-Foust
From Hell, Mister Lusk
 
Dante Alighieri
Canto XIII: The Wood of Suicides (from The Inferno)
 
Arthur Rimbaud
Night of Hell
 
John Milton
Satan’s Speech to the Fallen Angels (from Paradise Lost)
 
Stephen Dobyns
The Gardener
 
Boris Pasternak
Mephistopheles
 
H. P. Lovecraft
Nemesis
 
Allen Ginsberg
Howl, Part II
 
Anonymous
The Whale
 
Bishop Theobaldus
The Whale
 
Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
from The Devil’s Walk
 
George Meredith
Lucifer in Starlight
 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
from Faust
 
Rita Dove
Hades’ Pitch
 
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill
Devil’s Tattoo
 
David St. John
In the Pines
 
Alexander Pushkin
Demons
 
Jennifer Clement
Deus Ex Machina
 
Anonymous
From The Oldest Legends of Ancestors
 
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Sonnet 100
 
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
 
Anonymous
Beast from The Sea (from The Book of Revelation)
 
Christina Rossetti
The World
 
Charles Baudelaire
Incubus
 
Anonymous
Enkidu’s Dream of the Underworld (from The Epic of Gilgamesh)
version by Tony Barnstone and Emma Varesio
 
Homer 
The Land of the Dead (from The Odyssey)
 
Lynda Hull
Address (from Suite for Emily)
 
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
 
William Shakespeare
Flute Playing the Death of Thisbe
 
Robert Louis Stevenson
Death to the Dead For Evermore
 
Suzanne Roberts
Skeleton
 
Grace Schulman
Instructions for a Journey 
 
Dana Curtis
The Angel Opened
 
Billy Collins
Questions About Angels
 
Edward Hirsch
Isis Unveiled
 
Helene Cardona
To Kitty, Who Loved The Sea And Somerset Maugham 
 
C. K. Williams
Halo
 
Anonymous
from Psalm 18
 
Willis Barnstone
God of the Gas Chambers, Where Are You Hiding?
 
Robert Pinsky
The Refinery 
 
Shel Silverstein
Monsters I’ve Met 
 

Edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust