You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Though best known as poets, Adam Zagajewski (born 1945), Zbigniew Herbert (1924-98), and Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) wrote some of the most original prose of this century. It is this prose - remarkable for its cross-cultural complexity and interdisciplinary richness - that concerns Bozena Shallcross in Through the Poet's Eye. The travels undertaken by these Eastern European poets, who each journeyed to the West under different circumstances, give Shallcross her point of departure as she explores the connections between the sensory experience of travel and the revelatory perception of the visual arts manifest in their writings." --Book Jacket.
A collection of essays representing Anders's thinking over several decades, 'Between Fire and Sleep' offers a fresh understanding of modern Polish cultural identity.
These essays assess the nature of nuclear war literature from a variety of perspectives. Scholars, activists, novelists, poets, and teachers challenge nuclear ideologies and traditional readings of apocalyptic texts. Included: Holocaust literature of the 1950s, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, poetry and nuclear war, Riddley Walker, Fiskadoro, haiku and Hiroshima, Kopit's End of the World, O'Brien's The Nuclear Age, and Vonnegut's cataclysmic novels.
In Gratitude for All the Gifts explores the literary and cultural links between the bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the preeminent Eastern European poets of the twentieth century, including fellow Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Magdalena Kay opens new ground in comparative literary studies with her close analysis of Heaney's poetic work from the perspective of the English-speaking West's attraction, and especially Heane''s own attraction, to Eastern European poetry. While placing Milosz and Herbert in their cultural contexts and keeping an eye on the poems in their original Polish, this innovative and energetic study focuses on how Heaney encountered their work in translation. In Gratitude for All the Gifts thus allows us to see what happens when poetic forms, histories, and themes travel between countries and encourages us to understand cultural crossing not just thematically, but also in terms of form, voice, and aesthetic intent.
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois an...
The collection of essays The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of the Modernist Avant-garde refigures the critical and historical picture of the modernist avant-garde by introducing a variety of less-commonly discussed geo-artistic sites and dynamics. The contributors explore the multifaceted relations established between the avant-garde “centers” (France, Germany, England, and others) and their counterparts in the cultural “periphery” (Greece, India, Japan, Poland, Quebec, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia), as well as the unique artistic and literary dialogues which these encounters engendered. The primary concern of the anthology is the set of relations established betw...
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Traces the course of Polish poetry from Norwid to the New Wave, virtually the whole of this century.--Polish Heritage. "Informative and engaging...Composed of three distinctly structured sections. The first, the most ambitious...consists of two essays by Czerniawski that together attempt to provide a background for the rest of the contributions...In Part 2, seven English writers comment on a single Polish poem that is particularly meaningful to them. These are light but intriguing...The third section is composed of ten solid essays in literary criticism by English writers who know Polish poetry only in translation and by emigre Polish writers and scholars. The blend of interests and perspectives is particularly effective and fascinating. Recommended for the general reader of poetry, graduate and upper-division undergraduate levels."--Choice.
In It Will Return, her most recent volume of poems, Julia Hartwig is in dialogue with other great artists—Keats, Rimbaud, Milosz, Beethoven, Ravel, Van Gogh—considering the implications of greatness. Alongside this expansive perspective, we find attention to the smallest details, composing quotidian moments that open out into unexpected meaning. For Hartwig, close attention to the material world is a kind of spiritual undertaking. Like her Nobel Prize–winning contemporary Wislawa Szymborska, she writes poems that appear simple but are somehow all the more capable of yielding profound insights. It Will Return reflects Hartwig’s firsthand involvement in Polish history and culture, and its poems are sensitive to the calamities of Poland’s tumultuous twentieth century. But It Will Return is a human collection before it is a national one, and these political motifs form the backdrop for more universal dramas.
An anthology featuring 160 poets writing in 15 languages. By the standards of Western Europe, the subjects are heavy on social and political issues, which only reflects the difference between the two Europes.