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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he
expressed in his poems. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within
the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that
continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer
who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens
composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen
moments. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was
forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to
create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he
became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William
Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The
complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical,
and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through
his poems. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens
has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding
poets to read.
Description: In Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised
Poems, Paul Mariani revisits forty years of writing poems,
including revising many of his earlier lyrics, to shape his latest
volume into a life lived and lived again over the past seven
decades. The eight sections--or cantos--each composed of twelve
poems, cover roughly a decade apiece and contour Mariani's search
for answers to the constant interplay of the felt presence of the
Mystery we call God as it plays with the modern imagination.
Mariani's background is Catholic and broadly classic, and warmly
embraces all aspects of Christianity and Judaism and the world even
beyond those. The Poiema Poetry Series Poems are windows into
worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into
understandings that won't twist themselves into tidy dogmatic
statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely
peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the
casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds.
We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and
disappointment, but we arrive in the poet's company. Poetry is a
partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain
something of value--to get at something important. Ephesians 2:10
says, ""We are God's workmanship . . ."" poiema in Greek--the thing
that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry
Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith
seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through
their creativity and craftsmanship. These poets are recent
participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and
John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the
centuries--through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of
Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R.S. Thomas, and
Denise Levertov--down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With
the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring
tradition, and as a reader contributing to it. --D.S. Martin,
Series Editor About the Contributor(s): Paul Mariani is the author
of seven collections of poetry as well as several biographies and
works of prose, including Deaths and Transfigurations: Poems,
Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, and God and the Imagination: On
Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable. Of his many honors, Mariani has
been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
From the day Paul Mariani arrives at Eastern Point Retreat House to take part in the five-hundred-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, he realizes that his expectations and assumptions about who he is, what he knows, and what he believes are about to change radically. In this profound memoir Mariani blends a brief life of St. Ignatius and meditations on the life of Jesus with the day-to-day unfolding of thirty days of silence at the retreat house. His journey of introspection, self-revelation, and spiritual renewal leads him to a new understanding of his relationship with God and of what it truly means to put others before oneself.
Poems deal with love, family, immigrant America, nature, childhood,
and death.
Here, in his fifth book, Paul Mariani uses the trope of the wheel
to chart the kinds of losses we all face in living: deaths and
separations, lost loves, lost friends, lost happiness. The wheel of
fortune, a ferris wheel ridden with a friend now dead, Dante's
paradisal wheel, the wheel of the morning sun, by turns call up
Hart Crane and Wilfrid Owen, Stevens and Williams, Whitman and
Hopkins.
"Thorough and just. . . . Quietly, surely in touch with itsdistinguished subject."Richard Wilbur
Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literarylandscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizesand two National Book Awards for poetry. Married three times,always to writers, he had his dark side, suffering from cripplingbouts of manic depression and alcoholism. Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters,and dozens of interviews, Paul Mariani has given us a balanced,passionate, and readable life, capturing the man, his age, andhis place in literary history. "[Mariani's] vigorous narrative style sparkles with rich details. . . . These pages bring out the sheer interestingness of Lowell's mindas it is encountered in letters, prose reflections, and in a lifetimes of poems."William Pritchard
Paul Mariani has spent fifty years writing poetry that celebrates
the vibrant sacramentality of life in the twilight of Modernity,
and writing the lives of some of our greatest modern poets. This is
a life-spanning collection of his prose explorations of what it
means to be a person of wonder and imagination.
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