Yeats and the Logic of Formalism deals with formalism as a philosophy in Yeats's works and how that in turn affects both his art and his politics. Vereen M. Bell's understanding of ""formalism"" and ""philosophy"" stems from a meditation by Yeats in a manuscript note: ""Sometimes I doubt life's values behind my own thought. They should have been there before the stream began, before it became necessary for the work to create them."" In Bell's reading, formalism is not simply a philosophy of art but a philosophy of life as directed by art - an existential one at its source. While Bell understands that formalism is not a paradigm-shifting topic in today's theoretical debates, he does attempt to reconsider the concept's credibility in the context of other competing theoretical discourses. Bell invokes and elaborates upon Edward Said's reading of Yeats as a special kind of colonial subject. He revisits the issue of how much Yeats and Nietzsche have in common and tries to show, in the manner of J Hillis Miller, that the primordial is for Yeats what formalism ultimately sets itself against. ""Yeats and the Logic of Formalism"" mediates between older, more traditional readings of Yeats's work and recent theoretical, often antagonistic readings in an effort to restore a balanced perspective. The author centers most of his discussion on the poetry itself to provide a total reading of Yeats's work. Early in his career Yeats wrote: ""Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art."" Coded in the word Hope here - considering the cultural and historical circumstances under which Yeats worked - is what Bell believes is the meaning, existentially, of Yeats's career.

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individual's private engagement with experience and social normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.

The poems gathered here were composed by Donald Davie for his wife Doreen, to whom he was married and devoted for fifty years. The earliest of them were copied out by hand and presented to Doreen as a tribute on the occasion of her 54th birthday, and this agarlanda was then added to over the years. Of the 43 poems, ten are published here for the first time, two others in new versions. They span the five decades of the coupleas marriage, and because of this portray an enduring but complex relationship as it changes over time.
To some readers the poems will seem unusual as love poems because they do not idealize love and marriage. Their strength lies in their honesty and intimacy and in the openness to the pain and self-understanding that both ardor and conflict (aWe, we throve on frictiona) can produce. This is a relationship in which each knows the other too well to be assuaged by a sentimental lyricism.
For this special edition, twelve of Doreenas photographs from their travels together have been included, so that her sensibility may be present, too, as an artist in her own right. Donaldas handwritten poems are reproduced both in facsimile and in type.