Troubled Lovers in History demonstrates an exhilarating range: from the briefest of lyrics to rich and multipartite narrative adventures in exotic realms; from a comic monologue spoken in immigrant “Yinglish” to a soulful elegy set in San Antonio’s Pearl Beer brewery plant; from Martian invaders, through polar explorers, to all of us busy inflicting “words with edges” on those we love.
Goldbarth sets his unflinching study of individual hope and grief against the backdrop of history: the travels of Marco Polo; Bertha and Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of X-rays; an 1800 battle “twixt Dragon Sam, the great Exhaler of Gouts of Amazing Flame . . . and Liquid Dan, the Living Geyser.”
From the night stars to the little starring parts we all play every day, Troubled Lovers in History takes us into the text of our dreams and despairs, as witnessed by the writer whom Joyce Carol Oates called “a poet of remarkable gifts—a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart.”
Despite the extensive critical attention that has been paid to the work of W. B. Yeats, we are still very much in the process of understanding both the greatness and the modernity of this poet. The assessment of his poetry has rested primarily on the scope, intensity, and memorability of his lyrics, but his romantic beginnings have made it problematic to acknowledge him as a modernist, while his failure to produce a long poem has for some time raised questions about his greatness. Don’t major poets, the argument runs, produce major poems?
In this meticulous analysis of The Tower, David Young addresses both these issues, showing that this powerful volume represents Yeats at his best and most modern, and that its careful construction makes it the deliberate equivalent to the long poems of tradition.
By tracing the careful ordering of the poems in The Tower, Young demonstrates the volume’s overall vision, giving careful readings of each poem and illustrating the growing repetition of images that create a whole which is both emotionally and dramatically greater than the sum of its parts. Young contends that the best way to read Yeat’s lyrics is through attention to the context he created for them. Their interdependence, he asserts, is the true key to their modernity.
This eminently readable study appears at a time when most readers are in danger of losing touch with the particular achievement of Yeat’s individual volumes as he conceived them. Most students and readers now encounter Yeats in anthologies, in a volume of selected poems, or in a somewhat misleadingly presented complete Poems. Young convinces us that by persisting in this approach we will lose sight of a significant aspect of a foremost modern poet and the very elements that make him a true modern.
True-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman’s long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry’s singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved’s continued life, knotted with the truth of life’s contingency—to help make us more present to each other.
In the spirit of Blake’s vow of “mental fight,” Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno’s maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz,” to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman’s readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.
Although much is known about the mature Truman Capote--his literary genius and flamboyant life-style--details of his childhood years spent in Monroeville, Alabama, have remained a mystery. Truman Capote's Southern Years explores Capote's formative years, the abandonment by his mother, and his early life in the care of elderly relatives. In Monroeville young Capote formed significant bonds and played childhood games with his cousin, Jennings Faulk Carter, and next door neighbor, Nelle Harper Lee. Through the tales told here by Carter, readers discover the lively imagination and the early tragedies of a brilliant child.
Winner of the 1998 Ohioana Poetry Award
Skilled at both extended narratives and intense, intimate lyrics, David Baker combines his talents in his fifth collection of poems. Working in syllabics, sonnets, couplets, and free verse, Baker can write unflinchingly about love, illness, madness, and perseverance.
His small towns are the burgs of the Midwest, where there is a constant tension between a future that’s coming and a past that may never vanish. The grocer on the corner now carries mango chutney, and the city council must decide—Wendy’s or wetlands.
From these rural towns, Baker evokes lovers, mothers and fathers, highway workmen, hospital patients, and the long dead. He spots the inner struggles of everyday living, as in these lines from “The Women”: “there comes a rubbing of hands, and not as in cleaning. / As when something’s put away, but it won’t stay down.”
Regional in the best sense, Baker’s poems capture the universal human commerce of love and conflict enduring under the water towers and storefronts of America’s heartland.
Death, fame, art, and religion become comic subjects in Twenty First Century Blues, the fourth collection from Richard Cecil.Whether elegizing his predecessors, predicting his own end, channeling Dickinson’s “corpse-eye-view of stony death,” or imagining Yeats living in Indiana and dealing with English department politics, Cecil tempers his morbidity with a straightforward, tender brand of humor and a refreshing honesty about the shelf life of contemporary poetry. Deadpan and dark, yet pulsing with the spirit of life, these poems speak of historic France, Italy, and Switzerland, where religious persecutions, ancient catastrophes, and other, less personal, failures overshadow the disappointments and shortcomings of the poet’s modern life in the Midwest. Grimly cheered by these revelations, Cecil shows that poets, like cicadas screaming in the summer air, “won’t shut up until we’re skeletons.”
Denise Duhamel's much anticipated new collection begins with a revisionist tale--Noah is married to Joan of Arc--in a poem about America's often flawed sense of history. Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two Möbius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects.
At the book's center is "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted," a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of "Mille et un sentiments," modeled on the lists of Hervé Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with "Carbó Frescos," written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century.
Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies--to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.
Praise for David Mason
“. . . richly evocative and rare . . .”
—Publishers Weekly
“David Mason has succeeded in restoring to poetry some of the territory lost over recent centuries to prose fiction.”
—Paul Lake, First Things
In this new collection of essays, award-winning poet David Mason further broadens his exploration of Western and frontier themes. Beginning with the subject of poetry in and about the American West, he then widens his canvas to examine poets as diverse as James Wright, Anthony Hecht, and B. H. Fairchild, as well as taking up the idea of “the West” in global terms.
The title essay builds on a product of Mason’s upbringing in the American West—his “two minds” about the life of poetry, one aware that he needs and loves the art, and one equally aware that he understands a world outside cultural definitions. These two minds coexist throughout each lively, evocative essay, while Mason delves into family history and his efforts to connect himself to place, narrative poets of the American West, and farther-flung topics such as literary movements, post-colonial studies, and favorite Greek writers. In each of these meditations, Mason pursues a personal voice, connecting what he reads to a life outside books and making poetry accessible to the common reader.
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