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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
How to find wisdom and spiritual sustenance in a time of crisis and
uncertainty? In Divine Fire, David Woo answers with poems that move
from private life into a wider world of catastrophe and renewal.
The collection opens in the most personal space, a bedroom, where
the chaotic intrusions of adulthood revive the bafflements of
childhood. The perspective soon widens from the intimacies of love
to issues of national and global import, such as race and class
inequality, and then to an unspoken cataclysm that is, by turns, a
spiritual apocalypse and a crisis that could be in the news today,
like climate change or the pandemic. In the last part of the book,
the search for ever-vaster scales of meaning, both sacred and
profane, finds the poet trying on different personas and
sensibilities-comic, ironic, earnest, literary, self-mythologizing-
before reaching a luminous detente with the fearful and the
sublime. The divine fire of lovers fading in memory-"shades of the
men in my blood"-becomes the divine fire of a larger spiritual
reckoning. In his new book of poems, Woo provides an astonishing
vision of the world right now through his exploration of timeless
themes of love, solitude, art, the body, and death.
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.
Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary
film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only
real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO
Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen
to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an
acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal
collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here
reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating
career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the
Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of
his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his
films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter,
Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this
truly remarkable artist.
Hoelderlin (17701843) is the magnificent writer whom Nietzsche
called my favourite poet'. His writings and poetry have been
formative throughout the twentieth century, and as influential as
those of Hegel, his friend. At the same time, his madness has made
his poetry infinitely complex as it engages with tragedy, and
irreconcilable breakdown, both political and personal, with anger
and with mourning. This study gives a detailed approach to
Hoelderlin's writings on Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles, whom
he translated into German, and gives close attention to his poetry,
which is never far from an engagement with tragedy. Hoelderlin's
writings, always fascinating, enable a consideration of the various
meanings of tragedy, and provide a new reading of Shakespeare,
particularly Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth; the work proceeds
by opening into discussion of Nietzsche, especially The Birth of
Tragedy. Since Hoelderlin was such a decisive figure for Modernism,
to say nothing of modern Germany, he matters intensely to such
differing theorists and philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, all
of whose views are discussed herein. Drawing upon the insights of
Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis, Hoelderlin and the Poetry
of Tragedy gives the English-speaking reader ready access to a
magnificent body of poetry and to the poet as a theorist of tragedy
and of madness. Hoelderlin's poetry is quoted freely, with
translations and commentary provided. This book is the first major
account of Hoelderlin in English to offer the student and general
reader a critical account of a vital body of work which matters to
any study of poetry and to all who are interested in poetry's
relationships to madness. It is essential reading in the
understanding of how tragedy pervades literature and politics, and
how tragedy has been regarded and written about, from Hegel to
Walter Benjamin.
A medieval Catalan verse fantasy by Bernat Metge, the most
important Catalan writer of the fourteenth century, Written around
1381 by Bernat Metge, the most important Catalan writer of the
fourteenth century, the Llibre de Fortuna i Prudencia is a fantasy
in verse, drawing on learned sources, principally The Consolation
of Philosophy by Boethius. Early one morning, Bernat, the
protagonist and narrator, decides to alleviate his sorrows by
strolling around the harbour of Barcelona. He meets an old man,
apparently a beggar, who tricks him into getting into a boat which,
despite the absence of sails and oars, conveys him to an island
where the goddess Fortuna appears to him. In a heated discussion,
Bernat blames her for all his misfortunes. His next meeting is with
Prudenciawho is accompanied by seven maidens representing the
liberal arts. Prudencia is able to lessen his despair, and exhorts
him to trust in providence and renounce material possessions. When
she considers him cured, she and the maidens send him sailing back
to Barcelona, where he quickly goes home to avoid gossiping
townsfolk. Published in association with Editorial Barcino,
Barcelona. DAVID BARNETT, whose doctorate is from Queen Mary,
University of London, continues to be involved in research on
medieval Catalan literature.
In 1816, following the scandalous collapse of his marriage, Lord
Byron left England forever. His first destination was the Villa
Diodati by Lake Geneva where he stayed together with Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori. Byron in
Geneva focuses sharply on the poet's life in the summer of that
year, a famous time for meteorologists (for whom 1816 is the year
without a summer), but also that crucial moment in the development
of his writing when, urged on by Shelley, Byron tried to transform
himself into a Romantic poet of the Wordsworthian variety. The book
gives a vivid impression of what Byron thought and felt in these
few months after the breakdown of his marriage, but also explores
the different aspects of his nature that emerge in contact with a
remarkable cast of supporting characters, which also included
Madame de Stael, who presided over a famous salon in Coppet, across
the lake from Geneva, and Matthew Lewis, author of the splendidly
erotic Gothic' best-seller, The Monk. David Ellis sets out to
challenge recent damning studies of Byron and through his
meticulous exploration of the private and public life of the poet
at this pivotal moment, he reasserts the value of Byron's wit,
warm-heartedness, and hatred of cant."
A novel based on fact about the child prodigy who lived in Scotland
from 1803-11.
When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had 'started
writing like mad' and produced 'a sententious prose book, about the
length of a short novel, called the Citizen' he was registering a
sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost
visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his
sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime.
Much later in his career he would say that 'Birmingham is what I
think with.' This 'melange of evocation, maundering, imagining,
fiction and autobiography,' as he called it, was written 'so as to
be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.' All that
was known of this work before Fisher's death in 2017 is that
fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and
that - never otherwise published - it was thought not to have
survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and
the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet's literary executor,
has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction
with the first 1961 published version of Fisher's signature collage
of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript
of it found among the poet's archive at the University of
Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were
considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work
that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single
publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City,
its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then
Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this
landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most
emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher's
own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on
his profound response to changes wrought upon England's industrial
cities in the middle of the 20th century.
Published in anticipation of the centenary of the poet's birth, The
Poetry of Dylan Thomas is the first study of the poet to show how
his work may be read in terms of contemporary critical concerns,
using theories of modernism, the body, gender, the carnivalesque,
language, hybridity and the pastoral in order to view it in an
original light. Moreover, in presenting a Dylan Thomas who has real
significance for twenty-first century readers, it shows that such a
reappraisal also requires us to re-think some of the ways in which
all post-Waste Land British poetry has been read in the last few
decades.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool
University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is
one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish
writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and
intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This
study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and
translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns,
including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation,
mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of
Carson's writing is to be found in his radical imaginative
engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in
particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts,
serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other
concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile
mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of
creative impetus for Carson's imagination. Accordingly, the book
adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography,
urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It
provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson's
work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary
representations of space.
Ovid's rarely studied Ibis is an elegiac companion-piece to the
Tristia and Ex Ponto written after his banishment to the Black Sea
in AD 8. Modelled on a poem of the same name by the Hellenistic
poet Callimachus, Ibis stands out as an artistically contrived
explosion of vitriol against an unnamed enemy who is characterised
in terms of the Egyptian bird with its unprepossessing habits.
Based in a tradition of curse-ritual, it is the most difficult of
Ovid's poems to penetrate. Robinson Ellis's edition remains an
indispensable - if typically eccentric - platform for the study of
the poem's obscurities. Indeed Ellis deserves the primary credit
for bringing Ibis back from obscurity into the light of day.This
reissue of Ellis's 1881 edition includes a new introduction by
Gareth Williams setting the edition in the context of earlier and
later developments in scholarship. Ellis's edition not only made a
significant contribution to research into the Ibis, it is an
important representative of a particular vein of scholarship
prevalent in nineteenth-century Latin study.
For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society
in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura
contains much of striking, even startling, contemporary relevance.
This is true, above all, of the fifth book, which begins by putting
a strong case against what it has recently become fashionable to
call 'intelligent design', and ends with an account of human
evolution and the development of society in which the limitations
of technological progress form a strong and occasionally explicit
subtext. Along the way, the poet touches on many themes which may
strike a chord with the twenty-first century reader: the fragility
of our ecosystem, the corruption of political life, the futility of
consumerism and the desirability of limiting our acquisitive
instincts are all highly topical issues for us, as for the poem's
original audience. Book V also offers a fascinating introduction to
the world-view of the upper-class Roman of the first century BC.
This edition (which complements existing Aris and Phillips
commentaries on books 3, 4 and 6) will help to make Lucretius'
urgent and impassioned argument, and something of his remarkable
poetic style, accessible to a wider audience, including those with
little or no knowledge of Latin. Both the translation and
commentary aim to explain the scientific argument of the book as
clearly as possible; and to convey at least some impression of the
poetic texture of Lucretius' Latin.
The years 950-1200 are often called the Golden Age of the Jews in
Spain. During this period, the Jews reached a peak of achievement
in all aspects of their life-political, spiritual, and cultural.
They produced great works of literature and philosophy; their
poetry represents a peak of literary achievement unparalleled in
Hebrew until the twentieth century. The poets of the Golden Age
forged the language of the Hebrew Bible into a magnificent
instrument for the expression of every facet of their
experience--love and friendship, war and exile, philosophy and
prayer. Their poems reflect their overarching consciousness of
Israel's relationship with God and their deep concern with the fate
of the Jewish people in exile. Not until modern times did Hebrew
poetic genius flourish again with such freedom and with such
intensity. This volume conveys in modern English something of the
greatness of that literature while as far as possible preserving
the poetic values and beauty of the Hebrew original. Brief notes on
the work of each of the thirteen poets represented put the poems in
their proper perspective and do much to elucidate their meaning.
The poets included are Dunash Halevi ben Labrat, Joseph ibn
Abithur, Isaac ibn Kalpon, Samuel Hanagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol,
Isaac ibn Gi'at, Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra,
Joseph ibn Zabara, Judah Alharizi, Shem Tob ben Palquera, and
Todros ben Judah Abulafia. 'Remains the only anthology in English
devoted entirely to the Golden Age with selections from all the
major and some minor poets presented in verse translations. The
book is a gift to the academic world and to all readers interested
in the literary achievements of the Jews.' From the Foreword by
Raymond Scheindlin
Poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we
come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Throughout human
history, poetry has provided stories about what people observe in
the sky. Stars, planets, comets, the moon, and space travel are
used as metaphors for our feelings of love, loneliness,
adventurousness, and awe. This anthology includes poets,
astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today,
from all around the world. Sappho, Du Fu, Hafez, and Shakespeare
are joined by Gwyneth Lewis's space requiem, Tracy K. Smith on the
Hubble telescope, and Charles Simic, whose poem accompanied a NASA
mission. Astronomers Tycho Brahe and Edmund Halley accompany modern
scientists including Rebecca Elson, Alice Gorman on the first woman
in space, and Yun Wang's space journal on travel to Andromeda. This
collection reaches across time and cultures to illuminate how we
think about outer space, and ourselves.
From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015)
comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old
Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven
generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our
best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among
others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the
Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.
The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is
reappropriated from a government document establishing the
beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At
every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides
affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech
those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas for
those they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.
Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written
from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a
military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken
brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the
book travels through—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José,
California—we see that racism, objectification, and sexual
violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to
her. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of
the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods.
Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are
questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up
during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.
A new and completely revised edition of this authoritative work,
intended to encourage personal appreciation and independent
appraisal by students of English. This is a stimulating
introduction to the poetry composed in an age that witnessed
fundamental cultural developments: the emergence of the English
from among the warring tribes of Europe, their conversion to
Christianity, the development of feudalism and the chivalric myth,
the military adventure of the Crusades, and the growth of a
vigorous citizen class in the burgeoning towns of England.
This book provides a sustained exploration of creativity. Philip
Gross provides a poem, 'Cave diver in the deep reach', and an
extended commentary on how the poem was written. These are followed
by contributions from typographer Jeremy Tankard, whose unique
'Redisturbed' typeface is used throughout this book, and artist
Rika Newcombe, who provides the cover image. Caves of making offers
the textual equivalent of a creative festival - a festival on the
page. It brings together the work of three remarkable creatives and
offers, in their own words, insights into their creative process.
Philip Gross is a writer of many parts - spanning poetry,
thought-provoking fiction for young people, schools opera libretti,
radio short stories and plays. Collaboration with the visual arts,
dance, music and other art forms has been one of the sources of
energy in his writing life. Jeremy Tankard has built a worldwide
reputation for the high quality and unique designs of his
typefaces. In the development of the Redisturbed typeface chosen
for Caves of making, he wanted to take the idea of a unicase
alphabet much further than previous experiments and treat it as a
conventional text type.Rika Newcombe's paintings have an uncanny
sympathy with the world of creative writing. Images from her work
grace the covers of all books in the Creative Writing Studies
series.
The fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence
on British society and culture over the last four centuries. For
hundreds of years, anthologies have shaped the way we encounter
literature. Eighteenth-century children and young women were
introduced to the 'safe' bits of Shakespeare or Milton through
censored collections; Victorian working-class men and women
enrolled at adult learning institutions to be taught from The
Golden Treasury; First World War soldiers nursed copies of The
Oxford Book of English Verse in the trenches; pop-loving teenagers
growing up in the 1960s got their first taste of the counterculture
from the bestselling The Mersey Sound. But anthologies aren't just
part of literary history. Over the centuries, they have influenced
the course of British social change, redrawing the map of 'high'
and 'low' culture, generating conversations around politics,
morality, class, gender and belief. The Treasuries, by the literary
scholar and journalist Clare Bucknell, reveals the extraordinary
amount we can learn about our history from the anthologies that
brought readers together and changed the way they thought.
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