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Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world's oldest living language. Poet Gustaf Sobin's luminous English version beautifully captures the astounding and strange French original. For Michaux, the Chinese culture ranked as the world's richest, a culture grounded in its written language, which bound China together through three millennia and across its enormous territories. Ideograms in China presents an oblique history of that culture through the changing variety and beauty of the ideograms: Michaux looks into a dozen scripts--from ancient bronze vessels bearing ku-wen script to running script to standard k'ai-shu characters--and the poem carries the rhythms of someone discovering the soul of a civilization in its impression of ink on paper.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest poems brought together in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems. "Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." —Charles Tomlinson
Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled the art of stalking the flies that lay their eggs directly over the truffles every winter since childhood on his family estate in Provence. Since the death of his young wife, Julieta, the truffles have come to represent something far more than a delicacy for Cabassac's palate: they trigger an evocative sequence of dream visions in which he and his lost wife enter, on winter nights, a state of intimate and prolonged communion. As Cabassac becomes increasingly involved in his dream life with Julieta, he loses his hold on his teaching obligations, on managing his estate, on his waking life altogether. Set against the fading of traditional Provencal culture and an incandescent Mediterranean landscape, The Fly- Truffler celebrates a love that, by its very ardor, outlasts a lifetime. Reading group guide included."
Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge
of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected
terrain: the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on
prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six
essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the
relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling
wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival
curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation
on existence itself: Artifacts are read as realia, and history as
an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons.
Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalene - these tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobin's lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed "Luminous Debris", "Ladder of Shadows" picks up where the former left off: with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late Roman and early Christian ruins in his adopted region of Provence, sifting through iconographic, architectural, and sacramental vestiges to shed light on nothing less than the existential itself.
Drawing on the life of Greta Garbo, Gustaf Sobin spins a masterful tale about the enigmatic nature of idolatry.
"Earth, the dense element of our residence, our realities, raised, heightened, transformed--by language alone--into its spacious complement: air"--with this succinct remark Gustaf Sobin suggests his intentions in his newest collection. Word chases word in the poet's search for the transcendent. In lyric transformation, the poems in The Earth as Air arise out of the particular, the graphic, the intensely perceived, turning experience into the weightless particles of a new, intellective music.
The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials, establish a dialogue with silence. Breath, its syllables buried in the resonant space between the word and the void, unlocks "the gloriole, the ring of things released". Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems are nothing more nor less than a search for the redemptive, celebrating the regeneration of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials once again confirms the praise of Robert Duncan, who described Sobin's work as "a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed".
"Earth, the dense element of our residence, our realities, raised, heightened, transformed--by language alone--into its spacious complement: air"--with this succinct remark Gustaf Sobin suggests his intentions in his newest collection. Word chases word in the poet's search for the transcendent. In lyric transformation, the poems in The Earth as Air arise out of the particular, the graphic, the intensely perceived, turning experience into the weightless particles of a new, intellective music.
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