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"The "breathing place" - individual, bespoken - is where the world enters uninvited, where "fair is only an experiment," where poetry's resistance has "slackened, gray, with some rain," where "the garden is a gulf in the intercom, where "today's word from Delphi / is delphinium, expensive / blue word, dust payment due tomorrow," where "seven of my sweet loves drove off of cliffs . . ." - in short, a place of jolts and wrongs, if also of opportunities: "Engage / Lower your oars for the recommencing." It is met here by a style of nervous immediacy, a style built for alertness, not comfort, ready to shove the English language around Americanly, as Gertrude Stein encouraged and Dickinson mastered, and, further, to break out of reality, that already known"--
Calvin Bedient's fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The multiple in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful--witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly--the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn't really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that is not-one . . . the rhapsodic is the avenue to the truth, as Alain Badiou says, the quality of the rhapsodic in The Multiple is as cacophonous and unforgiving as it is lyrical and hooked. The truth is extreme, this aggressively uncensored book says, as it battles to give equal power to a savage voice and a soaring voice. Strong in their invisible architecture, these are poems of wild openness and sheer aliveness.
In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient’s third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient’s signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn’t let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.
The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.
The styles, themes and achievements of postwar British poets are cited
Presents a collection of ten critical essays on Williams's play "A Streetcar Named Desire" arranged in chronological order of publication.
Celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this important and influential book series