The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country. There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country. There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

Title: A Poem to his Grace the Duke of Marlborough on the Glorious Successes of the last Campaign. By John Gery.]Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The POETRY & DRAMA collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The books reflect the complex and changing role of literature in society, ranging from Bardic poetry to Victorian verse. Containing many classic works from important dramatists and poets, this collection has something for every lover of the stage and verse. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Churchill, John; Gery, John; 1705. 13 p.; fol. 11602.i.13.(3.)

Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of Pure Spirit presents the life and writings of Armenian poet Hmayeak Shems (1896-1952). The Armenian Genocide of 1915 devastated Shems, who lost his family and home. For eight years he wandered in exile, his voice extinguished by anguish. Yet from debilitating isolation, Shems found a lyrical mastery of Armenian identity and modern spirit. Incontrovertibly shaped by his people's tragic history, Shems speaks simply yet profoundly. Illuminated by his poetry, this biography chronicles his travels, encounters, and thought to reveal a more compelling and complete portrait of Shems than previously known. Cover portrait of Hmayeak Shems by Ashot Zorian.

"A substantial contribution on three fronts: it identifies and associates for the first time a large number of poems pertinent to nuclear criticism; it advances our understanding of the subject of 'nuclearity' in our time; and it provides surprising insights into the verse it considers. . . . It is also an act of social conscience, not an apparent feature in most scholarly works."--William J. Scheick, J. R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English and American Literature, University of Texas at Austin The eve of the second millennium falls 50 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Looking across the spectrum of American poetry since 1945, John Gery explores the role that poets have begun to play in the nuclear age. While their diverse voices join in protesting against the end of the world, poetry also embodies what Gery calls "the way of nothingness" in contemporary experience, an individual sense of human continuity paradoxically coupled with a global sense of impending annihilation. The first full-length study of nuclear theory and American poetry, this book examines four distinct poetic approaches to nuclear culture--protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psychohistorical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty. Each is developed through a discussion of representative poems from a range of poets, including an extended study of works by Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. As a chorus of voices, Gery contends, these poets articulate both resistance to annihilation and an acceptance of the nuclear present. What recommends this poetry, he argues, is not its oppositional posture as much as its "unique imaginative ability to connect the material threat and symbolic presence of nuclearism with the deepest confines of the human spirit." He concludes that art, especially poetry, has a critical role to play in our time. Though it serves as a resource on nuclear-age poetry and theory, the book also speaks to general readers interested in art, literature, and contemporary American culture. John Gery is professor of English at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of two books of poems, The Enemies of Leisure (1995) and Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (1983), and of articles on contemporary poetry in journals such as Verse, Critique, Essays in Literature, and War, Literature, and the Arts.