The Dance

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.