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Customs
by Solmaz SharifLonglisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLonglisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book PrizeA New Yorker Essential Read of 2022A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022An NPR Best Book of 2022A Literary Hub Best Reviewed Poetry Collection of 2022_______________'Witty and incisive… [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief' New York Times_______________The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look, a National Book Award finalistWith Customs, Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures, in society, in language itself, by which these limits act on us.Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal; to navigate a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that can become a relentless challenge; a mutating shibboleth. Through the poet's adept balancing of tonal and formal elements, these poems interrogate the 'customs' of the nation-state, of the English language, of the paces these systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead, the propulsive force that informs each line, each white space, and punctuation mark, is a powerfully galvanizing and healing force.Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities of restlessness, of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.
The Art of Revising Poetry: 21 U.S. Poets on their Drafts, Craft, and Process
Using side-by-side pairings of first drafts and final versions, including full-page reproductions from the poets' personal notebooks, as well as an insightful essay on each poem's journey from start to finish, The Art of Revising Poetry tracks the creative process of twenty-one of the United States' most influential poets as they struggle over a single word, line break, or thought. This behind-the-scenes look into the creative minds of working poets, including African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native poets from across the US, is an essential resource for students practicing poetry, and for instructors looking to enliven the classroom with real world examples. Students learn first-hand from the deft revisions working poets make, while poetry teachers can show in detail how experienced poets self-edit, tinker, cut, rearrange, and craft a poem. The Art of Revising Poetry is a must-have for aspiring poets and poetry teachers at all levels.
Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing)
by Justine McConnellThroughout his career, Derek Walcott turned to the literature and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. His book-length poem recasting the epics of Homer, Virgil and Dante in St Lucia is best-known in this regard, yet Omeros is only the pinnacle of a lengthy and lively dialogue that Walcott developed between the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Caribbean. Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean explores how, in developing that discourse between ancient and modern, between Europe and the Caribbean, Walcott refuted the suggestion that to engage with literature from elsewhere was to lack originality; instead, he asserted a place for Caribbean art in a global, transhistorical canon. Drawing on Walcott's own theoretical concerns, this book explores his engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity from three key perspectives. Firstly, that a perception of time as linear must be coupled with an understanding of it as simultaneous, thereby doing away with the oppressive power of history and confirming the 'New World' on a par with the 'Old'. Secondly, that syncretism lies at the heart of Caribbean life and art, with influences from Africa, Asia, and Europe constituting key parts of Caribbean identity alongside its indigenous cultures. Thirdly, that Caribbean literature creates the world anew without erasing the past. With these three postcolonial conceptions at the heart of his engagement with ancient Greece and Rome, Walcott revealed the reasons why classical reception has been a rich facet of Caribbean artistry.
The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100-1400 (Oxford History of Poetry in English)
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date—1100—marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date—1400—English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts—history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.
A Poetic Language of Ageing (Bloomsbury Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life)
Exploring the potential of poetry and poetic language as a means of conveying perspectives on later life, this book examines questions such as 'how can we understand ageing and later life?' and 'how can we capture the ambiguities and complexities that the experiences of growing old in time and place entail?' As poetic language illuminates, transfigures and enchants our being in the world, it also offers insights into the existential questions that are amplified as we age, including the vulnerabilities and losses that humble us and connect us. This volume suggests a path towards the poetics of ageing by means of presenting analyses of published poetry on ageing ranging from William Shakespeare to George Oppen; the use of reading and writing poetry among lay people in old age, including persons living with dementia; and the poetic nuances that emerge from other literary practices and contexts in relation to ageing – counting personal poetic reflections from many of the contributing authors
The Poetics of Utopia: Shadows of Futurity in Yeats and Auden
by Stewart ColeFocusing on the work of two of the 20th-century's most politically engaged poets - W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden - this book unpacks how they directly confront the concept of “utopia,” how they engage with utopia as a literary genre, and how their work conceives of poetry as a utopian artform capable of uniquely embodying our social aspirations.Despite consistently projecting visions of more ideal futures through both its subject matter and its form, poetry is not often counted among the annals of utopian literature. Through an examination of these two great writers' poems, essays, reviews, and other writings, with a focus on many of their best-known poems, this book highlights both the pervasive presence of a utopian impulse in their work and the importance of their contributions to discussions of utopia's meaning and relevance in both their own politically fraught era and ours.
The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats (Oxford Handbooks)
The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.
A Method, A Path
by Rowan EvansAn award-winning poet explodes the notion of translation, showing us the poem in a supple, malleable form'Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut' Guardian________________________________The poems at the centre of A Method, A Path explore the turbulent transmission of historical and mythic voices that 'reach across' time and place, and a fierce rejection of the nationalist ideologies that have sought to 'island' them. Here, translation is a lived and open-ended negotiation, invested in the potential for magic utterance and ritual action in spite of language's violence: 'words / tear their wing bones / and grow new heads / in the wound ('On Eglond'). Each poem or sequence gathers around a different instance of dialogue or communication with others: with other voices and languages, with other authors and found texts, with other species. They also mark a record of Evans' interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and performers through his work both as writer and sound artist. The physical and textual landscapes of the book move from the flooded and wooded terrains of Somerset and East Anglia, to the burnt hills of Andalusía in the company of Federíco García Lorca, the poems always inhabiting a place between Evans' own words and external voices – whether via translation, haunting, or invocation. In this 'tirelessly inventive, substantial collection of vivid lyrical work' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Awards), the truant strangeness of the more-than-human world is made present in its ability to warp and transform the poet's voice, where 'even the ground under your feet is a fluid, malleable surface' (Kayo Chingonyi).
The Homeric Centos: Homer and the Bible Interwoven (OXFORD STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SERIES)
by Anna LefteratouThe Homeric Centos, a poem that is Homeric in style and biblical in theme, is a dramatic illustration of the creative cultural and religious dialogue between Classical Antiquity and Christianity taking place in the Roman Empire during the fifth century CE. The text is attributed to Eudocia, empress and poet, who died in exile in the Holy Land ca. 460. With lines drawn verbatim from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the poem begins with the Creation and Fall and ends with Jesus' Resurrection and Ascension. In this blend of Homeric style and Christian themes, there are also echoes of Classical and classicising literature, stretching from Homer and drama to imperial literature. Equally prominent are echoes of earlier Christian canonical and apocryphal works, verse models, and theological works. In The Homeric Centos: Homer and the Bible Interwoven, Anna Lefteratou analyzes the double inspiration of the poem by both classical and Christian traditions. This book explores the works relationship with the cultural milieu of the fifth century CE and offers in-depth analysis of the scenes of Creation and Fall, and Jesus' Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. This book exposes the work's debt to centuries of Homeric reception and interpretation as well as Christian literature and exegesis, and places it at the crossroads of Christian and pagan literary traditions.
Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts: Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Gaps
by Dirk WiemannAnglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers).The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.
Inside Out & Back Again
by Thanhhà LaiTen-year-old Hà has only ever known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, and the warmth of her family and friends close by. But when the Vietnam War reaches the gates of her home, Hà and her family are forced to flee.The journey onboard a refugee ship bound for America is hard - but nothing can prepare Hà for the strangeness of the country that greets them on the other side. The language is impossible, the food is strange - and not all the locals are friendly. But amongst her struggles, Hà finds joy, friendship - and most of all, the power of hope, love and family.
Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India (I.B. Tauris Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Persian Literature)
by James WhiteA wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This book demonstrates that the globalising tendency of migration created worldly literary systems which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. By close reading over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry that have remained hidden on the shelves of libraries in India, Iran, Turkey and Europe, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors, and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. In so doing, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread.
Three Poems: Northleigh, 1940; In Stereo; all of it (Modern Plays)
by Alistair McDowallI suppose I never questioned why I was only one piece beforeA woman trapped at home during an air raid.A mother who starts to see double.A whole life in one breath.Three short plays by Alistair McDowall introduce us to three women whose ordinary lives mask extraordinary internal worlds. This trilogy includes the plays, Northleigh, 1940, In Stereo and all of it, written for and performed by Kate O'Flynn, this edition was published to coincide with the run at the Royal Court and the Avignon Festival in June 2023.
Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry
by Laura S. LieberStaging the Sacred examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Laura Lieber proposes an account of hymnody as a performative and theatrical genre, combining religious and theatrical studies to examine how performers creatively engaged their audiences, utilized different modes of performance, and created complex characters through their speeches. To truly consider performance and engage with these poems fully, Lieber urges readers to imagine the world beyond the page. While poetry and hymnody from Late Antiquity are usually presented in textual form, Lieber moves away from studying the text on its own, engaging instead with how these poems would have been performed and acted. The specific literary techniques associated with oratory and acting in Late Antiquity, such as apostrophe and vivid imagery, help craft a more accurate idea of liturgical presentations. Lieber suggests ways that these ancient poets could have used their physical spaces of performance by borrowing from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime. A highly interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across religion, theatre, literature, and beyond, Staging the Sacred proposes a novel interpretation of Late Antique hymnody and poetry as a performative genre, akin to oratory, theatre, and other modes of public performance, placing these works in their wider societal context.
How the Qur'=an Works: Reading Sacred Narrative
by Leyla Ozgur AlhassenThe Qur'an is a text of extraordinary depth and complexity. In How the Qur'an Works, Leyla Ozgur Alhassen takes the reader on a journey through the Qur'an, moving from one verse to another, one story to another, focusing on narratological elements while conducting a close reading in order to understand particular Qur'anic stories and to show how the text's literary techniques enhance its theological agenda. She unpacks the text by focusing on Qur'anic narrative, and specifically, repetition in Qur'anic stories. Repetition is an important part of the Qur'an's literary technique. Ozgur Alhassen traces the use of repetition as a narrative device from the text's overall structure to individual letters. She compares different Qur'anic stories and explores the kinds of repetition that occur in them and what purposes they serve. Repetition, she shows, forges patterns, connections, and layers of meaning that develop, complicate, and comment on the Qur'an's messages.
Bad Diaspora Poems: Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
by Momtaza MehriDiaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.'Exceptional… Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century'BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other'A once in a generation poet' CALEB FEMI, author of PoorThe definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind.We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.
Ronald Knox’s Lectures on Virgil’s Aeneid: With Introduction and Critical Essays
This book makes available Ronald Knox's hitherto unpublished lectures on Virgil's Aeneid delivered at Trinity College, Oxford, as part of a lecture course on Virgil in 1912. Written with Knox's customary incisiveness and with frequent allusions to contemporary life, the lectures are devoted to the appreciation of the Aeneid and focus on what he called the 'essential and dominant characteristics' that make up its greatness. They deal with Virgil's political and religious outlook, ideas of the afterlife, sense of romance and pathos, narrative style, sources, versification and appreciation of scenery. His interpretation of the relationship between Dido and Aeneas renders redundant the question, much debated to this day, of whether Aeneas loved Dido, and also portrays Aeneas more sympathetically than is currently fashionable. The additional introductory and critical essays by the contributors place the lectures in their historical and scholarly context, bring out their enduring relevance and illustrate how Ronald Knox's distinctive approach might be still developed to advantage. As Robert Speaight noted in his presidential address to the Virgil Society in 1958, 'many of us who love our Virgil will now understand him better because Ronald Knox loved and understood him so well'.
Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry
by Mark FordWoman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems (over 150) that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma in November of 1912. Mark Ford uses these poems to develop a narrative of their four-year courtship on the remote and romantic coast of Cornwall where they met, and then follows Thomas's poetic recreation of the slow degeneration of their marriage and their embittered final decade. Ford shows how Emma's writings and experiences during this time were fundamental to Thomas's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Although for over a decade the marriage between Thomas and Emma had been troubled, and indeed Emma spent much time during her final years secluded in her attic rooms above his study, her death stimulated him to write some of the greatest elegies in English. Twenty-one of these, including masterpieces such as 'The Voice' (which opens 'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me') and 'After a Journey' were collected in 'Poems of 1912-13'. While these have received much attention and are often read by school pupils and university students alike, his numerous other poems about Emma have only rarely been discussed. Ford corrects this oversight, providing accessible and insightful readings from a poet's perspective.
Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen
This new, select edition of Wilfred Owen's letters provides a fresh understanding of the poet's life in his own words. Wilfred Owen's fame as one of the great war poets of the twentieth century is unsurpassed, with Dulce et Decorum est possibly the defining piece of World War literature. Owen's letters reveal the man behind the cultural icon; human with all his foibles, whose 25 years were marked by great highs and lows, by emerging modernity, and the violence of war. Evocative, lyrical, and often surprisingly funny, the letters act as both autobiography and companion to the famous war poems. He was both an accomplished poet and one of the finest letter-writers of the twentieth century. Accompanied by new notes and new introduction, as well as previously redacted and omitted material, the new edition of Owen's Selected Letters brings together past and contemporary scholarship to provide fresh insights into Owen's character and poetic development.
Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics)
by Du Bellay Ronsard'Live now and listen, do not wait in vain Until tomorrow; pluck life's rose today.' Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard are two of the major sixteenth-century French poets and leaders of the extraordinary group known as 'La Pléiade'. Determined to create a national vernacular literature, the Pléiade poets profited from an intense study of Greek and Roman models and from a creative use of classical mythology to produce a body of verse that reflects the vigour and variety of European Renaissance culture. Du Bellay broke new ground with the gritty realism and resentment of the Regrets and with his meditation in the Antiquities on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. In a series of sonnet sequences (Cassandre, Marie, Astrée, Hélène) Ronsard developed the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry with a wider range of situations, a richer imagery, and more robust sensuality. His reputation as France's greatest love-poet should not, however, obscure his excellence in an astonishing variety of forms and genres such as elegies, odes, philosophical hymns, and religious controversy. Anthony Mortimer's verse translations cover this many-faceted achievement in a version that functions as English poetry in its own right without departing from the letter and spirit of the original. The French text is given on facing pages and a useful appendix contains extracts from seminal manifestos by the two poets. A critical introduction, a glossary of names and places, and abundant notes encourage the reader to place the poems in their social and cultural context. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination (Ancient Environments)
This book positions Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought. The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it.Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid's poem as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem's ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.
mahogany (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by erica lewismahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.[sample poem]i'm like a woman who once knew splendor* sometimes i feel like the pink pantherall naked and pinklost in the morass ofdo the best you can todayand nigga heal thy selfour end of winterspirits breaklike old tibetan snowi rememberyou was conflictedand i found myself alonehere on my ancient hurtthe disquieting humof living historydear god, pleaseput my head above my heartwe can only be togetherif the stories are toldplain facesame instrumentjust a couple of coke bottlesfull of gasolinelike god and rainis a waste of timemy mother used to clean housesas a childsome days i can barelyget out of bedin my mindshe's like diana rossscrubbing the white lady's stairsin lady sings the bluesexcept prettierand with green eyesi've just been livingoff of cough dropsand water and angerjust sitting in the whole foodsparking lot eating pineapplei am literallythe definition of "hot mess"pain changes everythingsomebody comeand pick upmy limp bodyoff the groundi am dyinga slow ohio deathwe miss you starmanit's our first sunrise of the burn* "dark side of the world"erica lewis
Mirror of Obedience: The Poems and Selected Prose of Simone Weil
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the foremost French philosophers of the 20th century; a mystic, activist, and writer whose profound work continues to intrigue and inspire today. Mirror of Obedience collects together Weil's poetry and autobiographical writings translated into English for the first time. It offers a rare glimpse into a more personal and introspective Weil than we usually encounter. She was writing and re-working her poems until the end of her life and in a letter from London to her parents, dated 22 January 1943, she expressed the wish for her verses to appear together in print in chronological order, a wish which this volume honours.Weil was a thinker who wrote with discipline and spareness and cherished the poetic form for its power to compress language and distill meaning. In these poems and literary writings, we see her own efforts to craft poems as essential expressions of thought, bringing into view another aspect of Weil's quest for beauty and truth.
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism)
by Victoria N. MorganTaking readers through the various stages of criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, this guide identifies both the essential critical texts and the key debates within them. The texts chosen for discussion represent the canonical readings which have typically shaped the area of Dickinson studies throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century and provide a lens through which to view current critical trends. Chapters focus on style and meaning, gender and sexuality, history and race, religion and hymn culture, and performance and popular culture. In all, this guide serves as a user-friendly reference tool to the vast body of criticism on Dickinson to date by suggesting formative starting points and underlining essential critical highlights. It provides students and scholars of Dickinson with a sense of where these critical texts can be placed in relation to one another, as well as an understanding of pivotal moments within the history of reception of Dickinson from late nineteenth-century reviews up to some of the definitive critical interventions of the twenty-first century.
Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist
by Elizabeth Sarah ColesThe scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first monographic study of her work to date, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while slipping their constraints of form and emotion. Carson's attention to sources-ancient and modern, textual or visual-is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style. The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form-from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance-to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and intent. Carson's portraits of working perform to readers even where she fantasizes her own erasure; where chance, poetic economy, impersonation, and imitation ride the line of anonymity. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now.