Konstantinos P. Kavafis--known to the English-reading world as C. P. Cavafy--has been internationally recognized as an important poet and attracted the admiration of eminent literary figures such as E. M. Forster, F. T. Marinetti, W. H. Auden, George Seferis, and James Merrill. Cavafy's idiosyncratic poetry remains one of the most influential and perplexing voices of European modernism.
Focusing on Cavafy's intriguing work, this book navigates new territories in critical theory and offers an interdisciplinary study of the construction of (homo)erotic desire in poetry in terms of metonymic discourse and anti-economic libidinal modalities. Panagiotis Roilos shows that problematizations of art production, market economy, and trafficability of erôs in diverse late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century European sociocultural and political contexts were re-articulated in Cavafy's poetry in new subversive ways that promoted an "unorthodox" discursive and libidinal anti-economy of jouissance.
The Caitanya Caritamrta is an early-seventeenth-century Bengali and Sanskrit biography of the great saint and Vaisnava leader Caitanya (1486–1533 CE) by the poet and scholar Krsnadasa, who has been given by Bengali tradition the title Kaviraja—“Prince of Poets.”
The text is of interest to theologians—Caitanya was, in Krsnadasa’s view, an androgyne of Krsna and Radha; philosophers—his theory was that aesthetic and religious experience are much the same in kind; historians of religion—the movement that Caitanya inspired has encompassed the great part of the eastern Indian subcontinent, and Krsnadasa has some interesting observations on his own times; and appreciators of literature—in Krsnadasa’s very long poem are embedded some lyric gems.
In Call Her by Her Name, the poet and performance artist Bianca Lynne Spriggs creates a twenty-first-century feminist manifesto suffused with metaphoric depth. This collection is a call-and-response of women—divine and domestic, legend and literal—who shape-shift and traverse generations. Through these narratives and cinematic poems, a chorus emerges of stories and lives rarely told.
Call Her by Her Name seeks to give voice to the voiceless, including lynched black women, the biblical "Potiphar’s wife," and women who tread the rims of phenomenal worlds—the goddess, the bird-woman, the oracle. While these poems reflect an array of women and women’s experiences, each piece could be considered a hue of the same woman, whether home-wrecker, Madonna, or midwife. The woman who sees dragons was perhaps once the roller-skating girl-child. The aging geisha may also be the roots woman next door. The woman who did not speak for ten years could have ended up sinking to the ocean floor. Spriggs gives each one life and limb, breath and voice, in a collection that adds up unequivocally to a poetic celebration of women.
Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting—of approaching the brink of connecting. It’s about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young. Nature often is there to help them out. The poet, also a writer of fiction and nonfiction, is interested in story, in his characters’ ability to move down the road, searching for their best selves, best home, putting together the pieces that move them toward that famous happy ending.
Honorable Mention of the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards
Two collections by an important Asian American writer -- Camp Notes and Other Poeems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories -- return to print in one volume.
Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts this experience.
Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all of her life-permeates her work.
Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.
"The core poems of Camp Notes and the title come from the notes I had taken when I was in camp, and it wasn’t published until thirty years after most of it was written. I was simply describing what was happening to me, and my thoughts. But, in retrospect, the collection takes on a kind of expanded meaning about that period in our history. As invariably happens, because Japanese American internment became such an issue in American history, I suppose I will be forever identified as the author of Camp Notes. Of course, I try to show that it’s not the only thing I ever did in my whole life; I did other things besides go to an internment camp during World War II. So, in some ways I keep producing to counteract that one image that gets set in the public mind. At the time that I was writing it, I wasn’t necessarily a political person. Now, when I reread it, even to myself, I think it probably has a greater warning about the dangers of being not aware, not aware of one’s own rights, not aware of helping other people who may be in trouble. I think that it does speak to our present age very acutely." -- Mitsuye Yamada, "You should not be invisible”: An Interview with Mitsuye Yamada, Contemporary Women's Writing, March 2014, Vol. 8 Issue 1
Read the whole interview at: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/8/1/1/414906/You-should-not-be-invisible-An-Interview-with
The candlefish, enormous schools of which enter the Pacific Northwest’s rivers in the spring, is so rich with oil that when supplied with a wick it can be used as a candle. Thus creatures of the water become transformed into instruments of fire and spirit, ultimately transcending this world.
Written as the author begins to navigate the second half of life, Candlefish unfolds along multiple lines of narrative and reflection. Each poem is rendered from experience and made incandescent by the spark of the author’s intellect and insight.
Whether tending the flower beds, skinnydipping on her birthday, conversing with a grown daughter, or bringing inside the teacup her husband can no longer carry, Elizabeth Biller Chapman distills each moment to its most vital components and makes them luminous with the necessity and surprise of relation.
Elizabeth Biller Chapman’s candlefish gracefully swim toward the pierced horizon all of us must face and are transformed by imaginative compassion as the book develops, season by season, from summer to spring.
Thomas Wyatt is the finest English poet between Chaucer and the Elizabethans. Many poems have been wrongly attributed to him, however, and the authenticity of different versions of his lyrics has been a matter of dispute. Richard Harrier makes a significant contribution both by establishing accurate texts and by determining the canon itself.
The only solid foundation for the Wyatt canon is his personal copybook, the Egerton MS, here reproduced in a diplomatic text. The apparatus records all changes within the manuscript and all contemporary variants; explanatory notes are provided. This volume, which includes a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the sources, will stand as the ultimate authority for the text and canon of Wyatt's poems.
This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.
Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories—Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European—and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.
Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."
Strung throughout the book are poems based on the Scottish photographer Eadwaerd Muybridge's Animal Locomotion, a historic photographic document. Pettit uses these pioneering images as the basis for his poetic dreaming, and the result is a poignant, integrated sequence of highly moving poems, studded between other vivid lyrics.
How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan—the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground.
Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets’ ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon.
Carmina Burana, literally “Songs from Beuern,” is named after the village where the manuscript was found. The songbook consists of nearly 250 poems, on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. Compiled in the thirteenth century in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region of Italy, it is the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse and provides insights into the vibrant social, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The multilingual codex includes works by leading Latin poets such as the Archpoet, Walter of Châtillon, and the canonist Peter of Blois, as well as stanzas by German lyric poets. More than half these poems are preserved nowhere else.
A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff’s famous cantata—no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.
Carmina Burana, literally “Songs from Beuern,” is named after the village where the manuscript was found. The songbook consists of nearly 250 poems, on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. Compiled in the thirteenth century in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region of Italy, it is the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse and provides insights into the vibrant social, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The multilingual codex includes works by leading Latin poets such as the Archpoet, Walter of Châtillon, and the canonist Peter of Blois, as well as stanzas by German lyric poets. More than half these poems are preserved nowhere else.
A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff’s famous cantata—no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.
Funny happenings.
The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences ca. 205–184 BC, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and Molière to modern times. This second volume of a new Loeb edition of all twenty-one of Plautus’ extant comedies presents Casina, Cistellaria, Curculio, Epidicus, and Menaechmi with freshly edited texts, lively modern translations, introductions, and ample explanatory notes.
Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, is cursed with the gift of true prophecies that are not believed by anyone. She foretells the city’s fall should Paris bring Helen as his wife, as well as the death of several of Troy’s heroes and her family. The classic myth turns into much more in Lesia Ukrainka’s rendering: Cassandra’s prophecies are uttered in highly poetic language—fitting for the genre of the work—and are not believed for that reason, rather than because of Apollo’s curse. Cassandra as poet and as woman are the focal points of the drama.
Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem encapsulates the complexities of Ukrainka’s late works: use of classical mythology and her intertextual practice; intense focus on issues of colonialism and cultural subjugation—and allegorical reading of the asymmetric relationship of Ukrainian and Russian culture; a sharp commentary on patriarchy and the subjugation of women; and the dilemma of the writer-seer who knows the truth and its ominous implications but is powerless to impart that to contemporaries and countrymen.
This strongly autobiographical work commanded a significant critical reception in Ukraine and projects Ukrainka into the new Ukrainian cultural canon. Presented here in a contemporary and sophisticated English translation attuned to psychological nuance, it is sure to attract the attention of the modern-day reader.
Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal—first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.
Polymetric gems, wistful elegies, and a lover’s prayer.
Catullus (Gaius Valerius, 84–54 BC), of Verona, went early to Rome, where he associated not only with other literary men from Cisalpine Gaul but also with Cicero and Hortensius. His surviving poems consist of nearly sixty short lyrics, eight longer poems in various metres, and almost fifty epigrams. All exemplify a strict technique of studied composition inherited from early Greek lyric and the poets of Alexandria. In his work we can trace his unhappy love for a woman he calls Lesbia; the death of his brother; his visits to Bithynia; and his emotional friendships and enmities at Rome. For consummate poetic artistry coupled with intensity of feeling, Catullus’ poems have no rival in Latin literature.
Tibullus (Albius, ca. 54–19 BC), of equestrian rank and a friend of Horace, enjoyed the patronage of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, whom he several times apostrophizes. Three books of elegies have come down to us under his name, of which only the first two are authentic. Book 1 mostly proclaims his love for “Delia,” Book 2 his passion for “Nemesis.” The third book consists of a miscellany of poems from the archives of Messalla; it is very doubtful whether any come from the pen of Tibullus himself. But a special interest attaches to a group of them which concern a girl called Sulpicia: some of the poems are written by her lover Cerinthus, while others purport to be her own composition.
The Pervigilium Veneris, a poem of not quite a hundred lines celebrating a spring festival in honor of the goddess of love, is remarkable both for its beauty and as the first clear note of romanticism which transformed classical into medieval literature. The manuscripts give no clue to its author, but recent scholarship has made a strong case for attributing it to the early fourth-century poet Tiberianus.
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Out of the contradiction, paradox, loss, and strange beauty of contemporary warfare, Brock Jones brings us Cenotaph, a collection of poems that have as their genesis Jones’s deployments to Iraq in 2002 and 2005, when he was in the US Army.
These are war poems, but also love poems and hate poems, poems about dying and living, poems about hope and hopelessness. These are poems that beautifully reflect Jones’s resignation to and rejection of the impossibility of saying anything definitive or honest about war.
These are poems that strive to do what poet Bruce Weigl described as the poet’s job: to find “some kind of miraculous way th at if you work hard enough to get the words right, that which you call horrific and wrong is defeated.”
Cenotaph is a poet doing the poet’s work: trying, hoping to get the words right.
First published in 1956, May Swenson's "The Centaur" remains one of her most popular and most anthologized poems. This is its first appearance as a picture book for children.
In images bright and brisk and nearly tangible, the poet re-creates the joy of riding a stick horse through a small-town summer. We find ourselves, with her, straddling "a long limber horse with . . . a few leaves for a tail," and pounding through the lovely dust along the path by the old canal. As her shape shifts from child to horse and back, we know exactly what she feels.
Sherry Meidell's water-color illustrations perfectly convey the wit and wisdom of May Swenson's poem. These are playful, satisfying images full of vitality and imagination. Meidell handles the joy of poem's fantasy and the joy of its occasional naughtiness with equal success.
Other books by and about May Swenson: Body My House, May Swenson, Dear Elizabeth, May Out West
With humor and compassion, George Bilgere continues his explorations of the human predicament. The settings of these poems range from Cleveland to Berlin, from childhood to old age. Bilgere’s subject, in the largest sense, is America, in all its craziness, its haunted past, its imperiled future. But what really centers this book is the English language itself, which these poems endeavor to renew, reinvent, and reinvigorate.
Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into
[her body] part that never sleeps the blood
and chambered meat that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door of the body.
“Reading Jeffrey McDaniel’s gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.”
—Major Jackson
Dramatis personae.
This volume collects important examples of Greek literary portraiture. The Characters of Theophrastus consists of thirty fictional sketches of men who are each dominated by a single fault, such as arrogance, boorishness, or superstition. Unassuming in style, his character sketches nonetheless bear resemblance to the vivid figures of the period’s New Comedy. The Hellenistic poet Herodas wrote mimes, a popular Greek entertainment in which one actor or a small group portrayed a situation from everyday urban life, concentrating on depiction of character rather than on plot. Here too in a new text and translation are substantial portions of the mimes of Sophron, a Syracusan of the fifth century BC whose work Plato is said to have enjoyed, as well as a selection of anonymous mime fragments.
The extant work of Sophron and the anonymous mime fragments are newly added to the Loeb Classical Library in this edition. And Jeffrey Rusten and Ian Cunningham have updated their editions of Theophrastus and Herodas (both first published in 1993) in light of the latest scholarship.
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.
This volume collects some of the liveliest examples of Greek literary portraiture. The Characters of Theophrastus sketches thirty hypothetical men, each dominated by a single fault, such as rudeness, superstitution, or greed. Unassuming in style, the sketches nonetheless bear resemblance on the one hand to Aristotle's account of faults and virtues and on the other to the vivid figures of Menandrian New Comedy. This new text and translation by Jeffrey Rusten is based on the most recent scholarship.
Herodas flourished in the 270s and 260s--the high point of Hellenistic poetry. His poems are choliambic mimes, dramatic dialogues that depict characters in everyday urban settings and situations. I. C. Cunningham presents a new translation of Herodas, based on his Teubner text.
Also included here, in a reprint of the earlier Loeb edition by A. D. Knox, are the fragments of Greek poetry in the choliambic meter--especially those which offer a tantalizing glimpse into the raucous and sordid world of Hipponax--and the lyric iambics on themes of Cynic philosophy by Cercidas.
Charles Olson is often described as one of the most influential American poets of the last quarter century; some would rather describe him as a cult figure, prophet of the Black Mountain poets and their descendants. Both judgments refer to an influence exerted as much through theories as through poems. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that is cogent and a pleasure to read. It provides the framework needed for understanding Olson's work.
Mr. von Hallberg shows us the Olson of the 1950s, who tried to bring change through teaching, who wanted poetry to communicate knowledge, as well as the more private poet of the 1960s, turning from history to myth. Olson's ambitions for poetry were based on his sense of cultural politics, and the author studies the relation between Olson's politics and his poetics. He traces too Olson's relation to older poets, especially Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. His book will interest anyone reading contemporary American poetry.
Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.
A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a vanished South, elegies for the lost, and glimpses of what Flannery O’Connor called the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” In language delicate and muscular, tender and raw-boned, Phillips writes of family, place, and that mythic conjunction of the two we call home.
In powerful poetry of epic proportions, which Harold Bloom has called his best work, Smith paints a stark and vivid picture of this ordeal and its principal participants, among them Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and Osceola, the Seminole chief.
Crackling with the hypervigilance of parenthood, Childcare explores the paradox at the root of raising kids: the joy of new life accompanies an awareness of potential loss. Rob Schlegel’s fourth collection observes the tangled emotions of fatherhood; even as he wonders at the strange intelligence of youth, he elegizes the present moment. The longitudinal wisdom of this collection appears in the choreography of its leaps — how it moves from the aside “[My son] needs my love the most when he least deserves it / Is something I read” to the reflection that “Death / Names my shape. I keep my clothes / From dust and ghosts and time. / I’m angry at my father for aging.” From Schlegel’s relentless curiosity and keen observations, the artistic crisis driving the book emerges: does poetry memorialize the ephemeral moment, saving something for us, or does it remove us from experience? The duality of language’s role — that it, ultimately, has the capacity to do both — doubles the significance of “childcare” in this collection, which comes to represent not just the work of child rearing but the dutiful care by adult children for their parents. Perhaps nothing can convey the scope and quality of family life like the concatenated dependencies of “(Un)conditional,” which terminate here: “If the cut draws blood / If life ends in desire // If it begins in love.”
Four plays by ancient Greece’s third great tragedian.
One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in six volumes.
Volume II contains Children of Heracles, about Athens' protection of the dead hero's children; Hippolytus, which tells of the punishment Aphrodite inflicts on a man who refuses to worship her; Andromache and Hecuba, the tragic stories of two noble Trojan women after their city's fall.
China’s profound influence on the avant-garde in the 20th century was nowhere more apparent than in the work of Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian literary journal Tel quel. Chinese Dreams explores the complex, intricate relationship between various “Chinas”—as texts—and the nation/culture known simply as “China”—their context—within the work of these writers. Eric Hayot calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West and ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming. The latest edition of this critically acclaimed book includes a new preface by the author.
“Lucid and accessible . . . an important contribution to the field of East-West comparative studies, Asian studies, and modernism.”
—Comparative Literature Studies
“Instead of trying to decipher the indecipherable ‘China’ in Western literary texts and critical discourses, Hayot chose to show us why and how ‘China’ has remained, and will probably always be, an enchanting, ever-elusive dream. His approach is nuanced and refreshing, his analysis rigorous and illuminating.”
—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.
Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti’s illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author’s lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s reading of Rossetti’s illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti’s poetics. Her exhaustive archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti’s commitment to illustration and attitudes to copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced. Janzen Kooistra also tracks the poet’s reception in the twentieth century through a complex web of illustrated books produced for a wide range of audiences.
Analyzing an impressive array of empirical data, Janzen Kooistra shows how Rossetti’s packaging for commodity consumption—by religious presses, publishers of academic editions and children’s picture books, and makers of erotica and collectibles—influenced the reception of her work and her place in literary history.
Christina Rossetti was considered the ideal female poet of her time. Her poetry was devotional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.
Dolores Rosenblum presents a fresh reading of Rossetti’s works and places them in the context of her life. Rosenblum shows that what was ostensibly devotional, moral, and loveless, was actually what Luce Irigaray calls “mimetism,” a subtle parody and subversion of the male tradition of literature.
Only with the coming of feminist criticism can Rossetti be meaningfully re-evaluated. Rosenblum calls Rossetti’s works the “poetry of endurance,” stating that it is similar, and at times identical, to the female “sentimental” tradition in literature. Rossetti endured the constraints of the Victorian female artistic spirit by becoming a “watcher.” Within this self-accepted role, Rossetti was able to carefully and deliberately choose artistic self-protection. In her religious poetry, Rossetti transcended, by aesthetic renunciation, the alienation and immobilization forced upon her.
Rossetti’s poetry is full of paradox; it sings about silence, exposes the poet’s oblivion. From the repining Victorian poet, there emerged a “stone woman.” Rosenblum discusses this passively enduring female figure’s alienation from knowledge and power, and how the myth of self strengthened the lyric voice within her. Because she was a woman, she was denied the male use of the lyric “I.”
Rossetti’s work is unified, Rosenblum argues, because she was a deliberate poet, and by accepting the “burden of womanhood,” she played out what men only symbolized as female in their art. By her mimicry and revision of the male tradition of literature, Christina Rossetti engaged the patriarchal tradition in ways that make it usable for the female experience, and that provide a critique of male objectification of women in art.
In Cinema Muto, Jesse Lee Kercheval examines the enduring themes of time, mortality, and love as revealed through the power of silent film. Following the ten days of the annual Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy, this collection of ekphrastic poems are love letters to the evocative power of silent cinema. Kercheval’s poems elegantly capture the allure of these rare films, which compel hundreds of pilgrims from around the world—from scholars and archivists, to artists and connoisseurs—to flock to Italy each autumn. Cinema Muto celebrates the flickering tales of madness and adventure, drama and love, which are all too often left to decay within forgotten vaults. As reels of Mosjoukine and D. W. Griffith float throughout the collection, a portrait also emerges of the simple beauty of Italy in October and of two lovers who are drawn together by their mutual passion for an extinct art. Together they revel in recapturing “the black and white gestures of a lost world.”
Cinema Muto is a tender tribute to the brief yet unforgettable reign of silent film. Brimming with stirring images of dreams, desire, and the ghosts of cinema legends gone by, Kercheval’s verse is a testament to the mute beauty and timeless lessons that may still be discovered in a fragile roll of celluloid.
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