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In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with the 83rd
Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a
night raid on Munster and disappeared. Widespread aerial
bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to
the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and
unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as
the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World
War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of
poems during the Second.
In researching the life of his grandfather, Daniel Swift became
engrossed with the connections between air war and poetry.
Ostensibly a narrative of the author's search for his lost
grandfather through military and civilian archives and in
interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, and England,
"Bomber County" is also an examination of the relationship between
the bombing campaigns of the Second World War and poetry, an
investigation into the experience of bombing and being bombed, and
a powerful reckoning with the morals and literature of a vanished
moment.
In his honest, humorous, revealing and reader-friendly Diary of A
Former Fat Man: My Real-World, Year-Long Journey From Obesity to A
Healthier Weight And Lifestyle, Daniel Swift shares what it was to
be thirty-seven, over 300 pounds, and fearful for his survival.
Swift provides a rare 360 degree view of the effects of weight and
weight loss, sharing the physical, mental and emotional effects
this year had on him. Men and women of all ages will learn how they
can reverse decades of poor decisions and make life-saving changes
to their daily routine. Unlike most weight-loss books, Swift offers
no quick-fix solutions, no expensive spa-driven plans, no promises
of a wonder machine to do the work. Instead, he lays out in journal
format how a trip to the emergency room drove him to evaluate his
physical condition and his nutritional needs, and how he managed to
succeed despite the distractions and obstacles everyday life
provides. In the first year, the author dropped over seventy
pounds...and more importantly kept it off. Energized, and now a
certified personal trainer, with a positive outlook and a full life
ahead, he now offers his experience and expertise offering this
book and the fitnessforus.com community as helpful resources to
those looking to take control of their weight and health.
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77 Dream Songs (Paperback)
John Berryman; Edited by Daniel Swift; Introduction by Henri Cole
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R410
R334
Discovery Miles 3 340
Save R76 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that
half a century later still shocks and astounds
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published "77 Dream
Songs," but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation.
A "spooky" collection in the words of Robert Lowell--"a maddening
work of genius."
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction,
Berryman had discovered "a looser style that mixed high and low
dictions with a strange syntax." Berryman had also discovered his
most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk,
irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: "We
touch at certain points," Berryman claimed, of Henry, "But I am an
actual human being."
Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while
the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, "Life, friends, is
boring," these poems never are. Henry lusts: seeing a woman
"Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika"
he can barely restrain himself: "only the fact of her husband &
four other people / kept me from springing on her." Henry despairs:
"All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry's side.
/ Then came a departure." Henry, afraid of his own violent urges,
consoles himself: "Nobody is ever missing."
"77 Dream Songs" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berryman's
formal and emotional innovations--he cracks the language open,
creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings--remain as
alive and immediate today as ever.
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Berryman's Sonnets (Paperback)
John Berryman; Edited by Daniel Swift; Introduction by April Bernard
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R418
R344
Discovery Miles 3 440
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once
passionate, forbidden, and doomed
John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have
surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was
suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice--even
an unpopular one--for a poet in a midcentury American literary
scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right
choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for
the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen
helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a
colleague.
"Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally,
passion utterly thwarted" this is how the poet April Bernard, in
her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle,
and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of
course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the
meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of
tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal
mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the
poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as
nutcase.
In "Berryman's Sonnets," the poet draws on the models of Petrarch
and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence.
Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional
strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe
for rediscovery by contemporary readers.
'An extraordinary book of real passionate research' Edmund de Waal
In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his
broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before
the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a
potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths
Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade.
At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most
controversial: a genius writer - 'The most important living poet in
the English language' according to T. S. Eliot - but also a traitor
and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure.
Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went
to visit him at what was perhaps the world's most unorthodox
literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum.
Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse
captures the essence of Pound - the artistic flair, the profound
human flaws - whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in
the twentieth century.
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