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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
Wanneer die son verduister, staan mense stil om na te dink oor lig
en donker. So word daar oor veel meer as hierdie natuurlike
verskynsel besin. Sinisme en humor bly nie agterwee nie maar die
groot gedagte skyn weemoed en verwondering te wees. In hierdie 94
gedigte praat bekende digters en debutante saam; prosaskrywers,
joernaliste, musikante en ander openbare figure waag hulle hand aan
die poesie. Die resultaat is ’n sonderlinge verkenning van die
kreatiewe kragte wat vaardig raak wanneer die natuur sy heerskappy
bevestig.
A great deal of excellent poetry was composed in Scotland in the
first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1603, when James
Stewart became also king of England and Ireland, several Scottish
poets moved to London, and commented on events at Court. Others
preferred to remain in their homeland, at a distance from the
metropolis; and some who had gone south soon returned home. In
addition to the perennial themes of love and religion, attention
was given to topics such as national identity, foreign travel,
civil society, monarchy, the good life, friendship, retreat, and
the nature and language of literature itself. Poets faced the
political and cultural challenges inherent in the novel concept of
Great Britain in a variety of ways, and the thistle and the rose
bloomed together in the Jacobean garden of verses.
Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet is higher now than it has ever
been. It is generally agreed that the Poems of 1912-13, written in
memory of his first wife, are some of the greatest elegies in the
language. This invaluable new study concentrates on the 'Emma
Poems', setting them in the context of Hardy's troubled first
marriage, then analysing them one by one. John Greening - a poet
himself and author of the Greenwich Exchange Guides to Poets of the
First World War and W.B. Yeats - highlights the distinctive music
of this twenty-one poem 'suite', while exploring the sexual and
spiritual tensions concealed witihn Hardy's Dorsetshire and North
Cornish landscapes.
Met Adam Small se oorlye op 25 Junie 2016 het daar ’n einde gekom
aan die lewe van ’n unieke mens en ’n unieke oeuvre: ’n digter,
dramaturg en denker met besonderse insig in die aktualiteite van sy
tyd. Hoewel die toekenning van die Hertzogprys aan Small in 2012 en
die gepaardgaande publisiteit daarrondom die idee vir ’n
huldigingsbundel by die SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns laat
ontstaan het, was dit Small se dood wat die deurslag gegee het om
die publikasie te verwesenlik: Wanneer ’n kunstenaar sterf en sy
stem vir ewig verstom het, bied dit immers die geleentheid om
oorkoepelend oor die geheel van sy kunstenaarskap te besin. Die
bydraes in hierdie bundel dra die ondertoon van ’n afsluiting, ’n
terugblik op die mens en kunstenaar Adam Small, met temas soos die
toekoms van Afrikaans en die Afrikaanse letterkunde, die
uitbreidende rol van Kaaps, en sosiale vraagstukke soos bendegeweld
en armoede. Mense wat Small van naby geken het is hier aan die
woord saam met literatore en kollegas uit die
maatskaplikewerk-omgewing waarby Small lewenslank betrokke was.
Adam Small: Denker, digter, dramaturg – ’n Huldiging hoef nie as
afsluiting van die gesprek oor Small se lewe en werk beskou te word
nie – inteendeel: Dit bied juis ook geleentheid om die
oorkoepelende blik oor Small se kunstenaarskap as inleiding tot
verdere ondersoek te benut.
Based on extensive research, this authoritative study places
Bukowski's poetry in its American cultural context, and explores
the key poems and collections in his development. It traces
magazines, literary contacts and influences from the mid-1940s to
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). and Walt Whitman? About
how and why Bukowski formed his unique reading style and public
image? And about where he fits into West Coast and post war
American verse? Although the book takes into account the best of
the American and European commentary that currently exists, it also
offers an original and intriguingly British point of view, giving
special attention to Bukowski's readings during the 1970s and his
influence upon the current generation of West Coast Poets.
Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his
humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all:
the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas
were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and
the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at
demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His
mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by
reaching people who didn't read books. His poetry was political,
musical, radical and relevant. By the early 1990s, Benjamin had
performed on every continent in the world (a feat which he achieved
in only one year) and he hasn't stopped performing and touring
since. Nelson Mandela, after hearing Benjamin's tribute to him
while he was in prison, requested an introduction to the poet that
grew into a lifelong relationship, inspiring Benjamin's work with
children in South Africa. Benjamin would also go on to be the first
artist to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley in
a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela. The Life and Rhymes of
Benjamin Zephaniah is a truly extraordinary life story which
celebrates the power of poetry and the importance of pushing
boundaries with the arts.
Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the francophone lyric
in the translingual Franco-Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory,
comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic
literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the
poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabes (Egypt), Salah
Stetie (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi
(Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys side-by-side comparisons of
classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic
commentary traditions in the original language against the
landscapes of modern and contemporary French and francophone
literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal
three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into the French
lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they
engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the
history and world of Arabic literature. Through fine-grained
analyses of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art
books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a cross-cultural
history and rereading of French and francophone literatures in
relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of
classical Arabic poetics. It offers a translingual, comparative
repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies
along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis. The vision of the
postfrancophone succeeds the point of exhaustion within the French
poetic sociolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for
the study of French and francophone poetry.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool
University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. The
Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most sophisticated writers
of the twentieth century, suffered from sexual impotence. This
emotionally overwhelming condition shaped his literary experience
in ways that have not been understood. Until now Borges has largely
been considered an asexual author who could not read, think, or
write about desire and sex, but in this book historian Ariel de la
Fuente shows that sexuality was a major preoccupation for him, both
as a reader and as an author. De la Fuente has conducted an
extensive literary investigation in Borges's figurative erotic
library and presents for the first time a study of the relationship
between Borges's sexual biography, his erotic readings, and the
writing of desire and sex in his work. The author explores relevant
literary questions while employing a historical method and the book
is truly an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of history
with Latin American, European, and Eastern literatures, poetry,
philosophy, and sexuality. Argued with clarity, Borges, Desire, and
Sex offers an unexpected perspective on the literature and figure
of a world-wide influential author.
The classic reference work--an invaluable sourcebook for poets
and readers
A Critical Introduction proposes a new didactic and dynamic way of
reading the great twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa
(18881935). The aim is to present a holistic vision of this complex
poet, promoting his literary geniality in order to better
understand his orthonymic-heteronymic poetry. A guiding motif is
Pessoas own Be as plural as the universe. In leading the reader
through the poets published literary work Jeronimo Pizarro allows
an intimate perspective, alongside an academic one, to better
understand the workings of Pessoas mind and life. Discussion
centres on the dilemmas an editor faces when editing posthumously.
A prime question revolves around the genesis of Pessoas heteronyms
and orthonyms. Understanding is revealed by a critical perspective
on the unity that exists in all of Pessoas literary work.
Interpretations of the poems; explanation of the profundity of The
Book of Disquiet; and his isms of Paulism, Caeirism,
Intersectionism and Cessationism, are discussed and analysed. The
issue of Pessoas astrological predictions his birth year and the
effects of this event on Portuguese national history is debated. A
chapter is devoted to the effect that translating Omar Khayyams
Rubaiyat had on the poet. The work contains eleven texts written by
Pessoa in English (including an autobiographical note from 1935), a
substantive dual language bibliography, and is highly illustrated
with facsimiles of the poets own written material. A Critical
Introduction is essential reading for all scholars and students of
Pessoas literary output and life circumstances. The work has been
written to appeal to cultural studies (arts and aesthetics)
enthusiasts in general at both undergraduate and postgraduate
level, but given the engagement of new critical material it also
provides a structured resource for future research.
This second edition of Nicholas T. Parsons' The Joy of Bad Verse is
accompanied by a new and expanded Introduction that considers the
remarkable literary phenomenon of bad poetry down the ages and the
remarkable chutzpah of its practitioners. It brings the theme up to
date with the current eruption of "instapoetry" on Instagram,
poetry happenings and other whimsical contributions to the tsunami
of verse now washing over social media. This book celebrates such
remarkable poets as Julia A. Moore, who was known as "The Sweet
Singer of Michigan"; or Solyman Brown, the Laureate of American
dentistry; or the Rev. E.E. Bradford whose wonderfully innocent
raptures on (preferably naked) pubescent boys were praised by the
Westminster Review as wholesome and uplifting. Of course the iconic
figure of William McGonagall, "the Scottish Homer", is not
neglected. To him and several others such as Martin Tupper, a
forerunner of "Thought for the Day" and many an Anglican sermon,
biographical sketches are dedicated. The chapter on "Limping
Laureates" rescues from deserved obscurity several persons such as
Alfred Austin who achieved this poorly remunerated, but sought
after, status without actually being any good at writing poetry. In
this world of wonders, wooden ideological verse (including the
brown-nosing of political monsters in verse) jostles with banality,
virtue-signalling and unintentional comedy. Not forgetting the
contribution of real poets on an off day (Wordsworth's inimitable
tribute to a stuffed owl), which, as the author says, lend a
distinction to the genre. Auberon Waugh once lambasted modern
poetry because it neither rhymed, scanned nor made sense. But here
is a treasure trove of stuff to read out loud, stuff which mostly
rhymes, if unfortunately, scans if the author was in the mood, and
makes the sort of sense that leaves you gasping for more.
A major biography of one of literature's most romantic and
enigmatic figures, published in hardback to great acclaim: 'one of
the great biographies of recent times' (Sunday Telegraph).
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia's greatest poet
- the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare - and his brief
life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. T.J
Binyon's biography of this brilliant and rebellious figure is 'a
remarkable achievement' and its publication 'a real event'
(Catriona Kelly, Guardian). 'No other work on Pushkin on the same
scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in
English... And Pushkin is well worth writing about... he was a
remarkable man, a man of action as well as a poet, and he lived a
remarkable life, dying in a duel at the age of thirty-seven.' (John
Bayley, Literary Review) Among the delights of this beautifully
illustrated and lavishly produced book are the 'caricatures of
venal old men with popping eyes and side-whiskers, society beauties
with long necks and empire curls and, most touchingly, images of
his "cross-eyed madonna" Natalya' (Rachel Polonsky, Evening
Standard). Binyon 'knows almost everything there is to know about
Pushkin. He scrupulously chronicles his life in all its disorder,
from his years at the Lycee through exile in the Crimea, Bessarabia
and Odessa, for writing liberal verses, and on to the publication
of Eugene Onegin and, eventually, after much wrangling with the
censor, Boris Godunov' (Julian Evans, New Statesman) and in this,
'Binyon is unbeatable'(Clive James, TLS).
'All serious lovers of poetry will want this book.' A. N. Wilson
All good poetry has the power to transport and transform us, to
inspire and challenge us, to comfort and heal us, and to hold up a
mirror to the world around us. In A Century of Poetry, Rowan
Williams invites you to reflect with him on 100 poems from the past
100 years - poems with an originality and depth that can impel you
to search your heart, and to explore your own experience and
emotions at a deeper level. Featuring the work of both famous and
lesser-known poets, from different faiths, languages and cultures,
A Century of Poetry gives you a fresh perspective on works you may
be familiar with, as well as introducing you to poems you'll be
pleased to discover for the first time - or perhaps discover again.
These meditations, by a writer who is both a poet and a theologian,
will open new doors into the experience of reading and absorbing
great poetry, highlighting the ways in which their language and
imagery can touch unfamiliar places in the heart and enliven the
lifelong adventure of spiritual growth and exploration.
A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman is one of the best-loved books of
poems in English, but even now its author remains a shadowy figure.
He maintained an iron reserve about himself - and with good reason.
His emotional life was dominated by an unhappy and unrequited love
for an Oxford friend. His passion went into his writing, but he
could barely hint at its cause. Spoken and Unspoken Love discusses
all Housman's poetry, especially the effect of an existence
deprived of love, as seen in the posthumous work, where the story
becomes clear in personal and deeply moving poems.
Fernan Gonzalez lived from about AD 910 to 970. The popular image
of him is of a fearsome warrior who gave his people protection from
their enemies (both Muslim and Christian), and a wise and respected
lord who enabled them to live in security and harmony. He was
generally accepted to have played a strategic role in achieving
independence for Castile and freeing it from dominance by the
kingdom of Leon. The Poema de Fernan Gonzalez was composed (by an
unknown author) in the mid-thirteenth century as an enduring
celebration of his triumphs and account of his life and deeds. Fact
and legend have become intertwined and there is much within its
stanzas that is certainly not closely based on historic facts! This
new translation is set against a detailed study of the historic
context of the Castillian conflicts and a factual account of the
life and achievements of Fernan Gonzalez. The political situation
of the time in which the poem was composed is also considered, as
is the manner in which the'history' it espouses came to be handed
down over three centuries, the possibility of a pre-existing rich
oral tradition surrounding this iconic figure, and the possible
sources employed by the poet in constructing the poem.
"I try to write something every day even though I am not writing
poetry, just to get myself in touch with language."-Edwin Morgan
Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern literature.
Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his
long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the
playful to the profound. Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language
presents previously uncollected prose - journalism, book and
theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio
scripts, forewords and afterwords - all carefully moulded to the
needs of differing audiences. Morgan's writing fizzes with clarity
and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from
cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the
changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find
surprises and delights in this new collection.
Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective
of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists
(including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan
Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and
lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed
around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day.
Avant-Folk argues that the merging of the demotic with the
avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly
vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets,
publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of
small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still
largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to
place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the
transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small
press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding
the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and
between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of
Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing
practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive
the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.
The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work,
very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it
later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered
its publication. This edition is twofold, for there exists an
illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator
himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at
Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial
selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the
translation in this book. From his creative attention to detail in
these lectures there arises a sense of the immediacy and clarity of
his vision. It is as if he entered into the imagined past: standing
beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they
beached their ship on the coast of Denmark, listening to the rising
anger of Beowulf at the taunting of Unferth, or looking up in
amazement at Grendel's terrible hand set under the roof of Heorot.
But the commentary in this book includes also much from those
lectures in which, while always anchored in the text, he expressed
his wider perceptions. He looks closely at the dragon that would
slay Beowulf 'snuffling in baffled rage and injured greed when he
discovers the theft of the cup'; but he rebuts the notion that this
is 'a mere treasure story', 'just another dragon tale'. He turns to
the lines that tell of the burying of the golden things long ago,
and observes that it is 'the feeling for the treasure itself, this
sad history' that raises it to another level. 'The whole thing is
sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real. The "treasure" is not
just some lucky wealth that will enable the finder to have a good
time, or marry the princess. It is laden with history, leading back
into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not
beyond the reach of imagination.' Sellic Spell, a 'marvellous
tale', is a story written by Tolkien suggesting what might have
been the form and style of an Old English folk-tale of Beowulf, in
which there was no association with the 'historical legends' of the
Northern kingdoms.
A E Housmans poetry (especially A Shropshire Lad) remains
well-known, widely read and often quoted. However, Housman did not
view himself as a professional poet, always making quite clear that
his proper job was as a Professor of Latin. Housmans fame as a poet
has often obscured the fact that he was the leading British
classical scholar of his generation, and a Cambridge Professor. It
has also sometimes been suggested that Housmans two areas of
activity are the sign of a flawed or divided personality. This book
argues that there is no fundamental tension between Housman the
poet and Housman the scholar, and his career is presented very much
as that of a working academic who also wrote poetry. The book gives
a full account of what Housman described as the great and real
troubles of my early manhood, and in particular his unrequited and
life-long love for his undergraduate friend Moses Jackson. It
resists the temptation to classify Housman too exclusively as a
melancholic, and is sceptical about Housmans reputed rudeness and
misanthropy, pointing out that, though Housman was famously aloof
in manner, he was notably loyal and generous, courteous in his
daily dealings and generally liked by those who knew him. He also
possessed a highly developed sense of the absurd and a ready and
often disconcerting wit, features which characterised not only his
letters and miscellaneous writings, but also, famously, much of his
scholarly work.
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