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From Three at 4:43 And here comes my friend, limping on his heavy boot, the heel come off. A cobbler's shop appears, and I buy the black nails, the dwarf's hammer, glue and strapping. I work hard on it, bending there until he speaks and walks on. But as he is dead, his voice and step make no sound. In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies—all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. War Bird gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in “1861,” our “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”
"Gewanter's poetry offers a sense of obstacles, and of obstacles not overcome but ridden and thus dealt with, and is nowhere better illustrated than in 'Conduct of Our Loves.' Read this poem in the book store and you will want to buy the book."—Thom Gunn
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
The Sleep of Reason plunges us into a macabre world where good impulses bring on evil consequences—a world not unlike our own. In David Gewanter's alternately delightful and startling poems, allegory comes alive and stalks a bookstore's musty aisles, comedians eviscerate their families for a laugh, lovers love each other for withholding affection, and theaters collapse on audiences hungry for spectacle. Amidst such surreal subjects, Gewanter's delicate musicality and keen sense of humor sparkle; his inquisition regarding a fallen world becomes a dark comedy of errors haunted by the most unexpected characters—from JFK Jr. to Tacitus, Redd Foxx to General Motors, Mariah Carey to 100 rabbits with herpes. An offbeat satire for an off-kilter age, The Sleep of Reason offers an incisive guide to moral behavior in an immoral world.
Trial by Ordeal takes a sharp look at central aspects of the critical reception of Thomas Hardy. It demonstrates how critical appropriations of Hardy's work often provide a simplifying, conventional, or conservative image of the writer, which a sophisticated view of his creative intentions by no means confirms. Edward Neill discusses the dangers inherent in interpreting Hardy's writings in terms of his life; the limitations of criticism that views his work as nostalgic reaction; approaches to the poetry; and the critical response to Jude the Obscure.
Biodiversity has become a buzzword in the environmental movement and in science, and is increasingly being taught in university degree courses. This new text is designed as a primer, giving non-specialists an introduction to the historical context, current debates, and ongoing research in this subject.
This book offers a new history of a major medieval genre, affective meditations on the Passion. It argues that women were instrumental in the creation of this genre, and it illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion.
The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, it is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.
What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.
Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero—the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence—has become omnipresent in America’s narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political hegemony. In Total Mobilization, Roy Scranton cuts through the fog of trauma that obscures World War II, uncovering a lost history and reframing the way we talk about war today. Considering often overlooked works by James Jones, Wallace Stevens, Martha Gellhorn, and others, alongside cartoons and films, Scranton investigates the role of the hero in industrial wartime, showing how such writers struggled to make sense of problems that continue to plague us today: the limits of American power, the dangers of political polarization, and the conflicts between nationalism and liberalism. By turning our attention to the ways we make war meaningful—and by excavating the politics implicit within the myth of the traumatized hero—Total Mobilization revises the way we understand not only World War II, but all of postwar American culture.