- Table View
- List View
Negro Mountain (Phoenix Poets)
by C. S. GiscombeA cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory. In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.” The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
Mandible Wishbone Solvent (Phoenix Poets)
by Asiya WadudA poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound to reflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being. The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud’s poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we. Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of “isthmus” and “drift,” respectively, which offer further grounds for contemplation and provide a frame for the poems.
Mandible Wishbone Solvent (Phoenix Poets)
by Asiya WadudA poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound to reflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being. The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud’s poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we. Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of “isthmus” and “drift,” respectively, which offer further grounds for contemplation and provide a frame for the poems.
PORTAL (Phoenix Poets)
by Tracy FuadA poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety. Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread. Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.
PORTAL (Phoenix Poets)
by Tracy FuadA poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety. Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread. Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.
My Poetics
by Maureen N. McLaneAcclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar—but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane’s essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation? If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is the scholar’s art,” My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet’s art. Punctuated with McLane’s poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.
Goethe and the Ginkgo: A Tree and a Poem
by Siegfried UnseldIn 1815, Goethe gave symbolic expression to his intense relationship with Marianne Willemer, a recently married woman thirty-five years his junior. He gave her a leaf from the ginkgo tree, explaining that, like its deeply cleft yet still whole leaf, he was "single yet twofold." Although it is not known if their relationship was ever consummated, they did exchange love poetry, and Goethe published several of Marianne's poems in his West-East Divan without crediting her authorship. In this beautiful little book, renowned Goethe scholar Siegfried Unseld considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. Unseld begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne. Unseld reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.
Goethe and the Ginkgo: A Tree and a Poem
by Siegfried UnseldIn 1815, Goethe gave symbolic expression to his intense relationship with Marianne Willemer, a recently married woman thirty-five years his junior. He gave her a leaf from the ginkgo tree, explaining that, like its deeply cleft yet still whole leaf, he was "single yet twofold." Although it is not known if their relationship was ever consummated, they did exchange love poetry, and Goethe published several of Marianne's poems in his West-East Divan without crediting her authorship. In this beautiful little book, renowned Goethe scholar Siegfried Unseld considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. Unseld begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne. Unseld reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.
One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition
by Paul VerlaineFrench poet Paul Verlaine, a major representative of the Symbolist Movement during the latter half of the nineteenth century, was one of the most gifted and prolific poets of his time. Norman Shapiro's superb translations display Verlaine's ability to transform into timeless verse the essence of everyday life and make evident the reasons for his renown in France and throughout the Western world. "Shapiro's skillfully rhymed formal translations are outstanding." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Book of 1999" "Paul Verlaine's rich, stylized, widely-variable oeuvre can now be traced through his thirty years of published volumes, from 1866 to 1896, in a set of luminous new translations by Norman Shapiro. . . . [His] unique translations of this whimsical, agonized music are more than adequate to bring the multifarious Verlaine to a new generation of English speakers." —Genevieve Abravanel, Harvard Review "Shapiro demonstrates his phenomenal ability to find new rhymes and always follows Verlaine's rhyme schemes." —Carrol F. Coates, ATA Chronicle
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (Phoenix Poets)
by Connie VoisineThe Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploug
Lyric Powers
by Robert von HallbergThe authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry. To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic’s attention. The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Powers will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.
Lyric Powers
by Robert von HallbergThe authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry. To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic’s attention. The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Powers will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.
Lyric Powers
by Robert von HallbergThe authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry. To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic’s attention. The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Powers will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.
Lyric Powers
by Robert von HallbergThe authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry. To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic’s attention. The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Powers will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.
At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn
by Joshua Weiner J. J. WeinerMaverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.
At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn
by Joshua WeinerMaverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.
At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn
by Joshua WeinerMaverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.
From the Book of Giants (Phoenix Poets)
by Joshua WeinerSong for Thom Gunn There is no east or west in the wood you fear and seek, stumbling past a gate of moss and what you would not take. And what you thought you had (the Here that is no rest) you make from it an aid to form no east, no west. No east. No west. No need for given map or bell, vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill. Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.
From the Book of Giants (Phoenix Poets)
by Joshua WeinerSong for Thom Gunn There is no east or west in the wood you fear and seek, stumbling past a gate of moss and what you would not take. And what you thought you had (the Here that is no rest) you make from it an aid to form no east, no west. No east. No west. No need for given map or bell, vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill. Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.
From the Book of Giants (Phoenix Poets)
by Joshua WeinerSong for Thom Gunn There is no east or west in the wood you fear and seek, stumbling past a gate of moss and what you would not take. And what you thought you had (the Here that is no rest) you make from it an aid to form no east, no west. No east. No west. No need for given map or bell, vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill. Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest
by C. K. WilliamsWinner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest
by C. K. WilliamsWinner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.
In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest
by C. K. WilliamsWinner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.