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The first-ever biography of wilderness preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer, environmental pioneer, explorer, and caretaker of Minnesota and Ontario's boundary waters region.
Daniel Tobin's stunning new collection, Double Life, takes its name from a vision of humanity at once passionately earthbound and spurred by the metaphysical. These poems range from haunting meditations on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch to an astonishing polyphonic sequence based on the life of Father Bartolomeo de Las Casas, who died in 1566 and wrote the first bill of rights in the New World. Between these two longer orchestrations appear works both musically diverse and startling in their formal virtuosity, as attuned to Plato, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, and the natural world as to TV talks shows, the news, physics, movies, and fast-food restaurants. From the persona of an Irish-Catholic Brooklyn youth on a school trip to Spain to that of a grown man of the suburbs "hollowed by doubt... / it's only the observance / of words I keep now to stay the soul," Tobin shows us the search for a way to encompass the world, turning Christian motifs toward new meanings.
In his introduction to this edition of Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness, Michael A. Lofaro, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee and the author of The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone, assesses John Bakeless's achievement: "After fifty years his is still the standard by which all other biographies of the frontiersman are judged."
Over the past thirty years, narrative poems have made a comeback against the lyric approach to poetry that has dominated the past century. Drawing on a decade of conferences and critical seminars on the topic, The Contemporary Narrative Poem examines this resurgence of narrative and the cultural and literary forces motivating it. Gathering ten essays from poet-critics who write from a wide range of perspectives and address a wide range of works, the collection transcends narrow conceptions of narrative, antinarrative, and metanarrative. The authors ask several questions: What formal strategies do recent narrative poems take? What social, cultural, and epistemological issues are raised in such poems? How do contemporary narrative poems differ from modernist narrative poems? In what ways has history been incorporated into the recent narrative poetry? How have poets used the lyric within narrative poems? How do experimental poets redefine narrative itself through their work? And what role does consciousness play in the contemporary narrative poem? The answers they supply will engage every poet and student of poetry.