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Seamus Heaney and American Poetry (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Christopher LavertyThis book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney’s achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney’s education at Queen’s University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney’s ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney’s poetry.
Seamus Heaney and the Language Of Poetry
by Bernard O'DonoghueThis book scrutinizes Heaney's language in order to examine his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics. The author, himself a poet, works chronologically through the poetry and discusses it in light of Heaney's writings on the appropriate language of poetry. Chapters also look at Heaney's language and at the government of the tongue.
Seamus Heaney's Gifts
by Henry Hart“The fact of the matter,” Seamus Heaney said in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review, “is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry.” Throughout his career, Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry came to him from a mysterious source like a gift of grace. He also believed that the recipient of this sort of boon had an ethical obligation to share it with others. Seamus Heaney’s Gifts, by the noted scholar and poet Henry Hart, offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney’s preoccupation with gifts and gift-exchange. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney’s papers, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a richly detailed study of Heaney’s life and work that foregrounds the Irishman’s commitment to the vocation of poetry as a public art to be shared with audiences and readers around the world. Heaney traced his devotion to gifts back to the actual present of a Conway Stewart fountain pen that his parents gave him at the age of twelve when he left his family farm in Northern Ireland to attend a private Catholic secondary school in Londonderry. He commemorated this gift in “Digging,” the first poem in his first book, and in two poems he wrote near the end of his life: “The Conway Stewart” and “On the Gift of a Fountain Pen.” Friends and doctors had warned him that his endless globetrotting to give lectures and poetry readings had damaged his health. Yet he felt obligated to share his talent with audiences around the world until his death in 2013. As Hart shows, Heaney found his first models for gift-giving in his rural community in Northern Ireland, the Bible, the rituals of the Catholic Church, and the literature of mystical and mythical quests. Blending careful research with evocative commentaries on the poet’s work, Seamus Heaney’s Gifts explains his ideas about the artist’s gift, the necessity of gift-exchange acts, and the moral responsibility to share one’s talents for the benefit of others.
Search Party: Collected Poems
by William MatthewsFrom the prize-winning poet: &“A stunning volume . . . A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating.&” —Booklist When William Matthews died, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.
Search and Rescue: Poems
by Michael ChitwoodIn Search and Rescue, Michael Chitwood seeks what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, the poet meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand. Water anchors the collection with the title poem, which explores the history of a large manmade lake and how it changes the surrounding mountain community. Displaying keen narrative skills and an engaging voice, the poems in Search and Rescue pay homage to Whitman and Dickinson, to Heaney and Wright, in pursuit of the everyday grace of Appalachian culture and the natural landscape.
Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet
by Philip FreemanAn exploration of the fascinating poetry, life, and world of Sappho, including a complete translation of all her poems. For more than twenty-five centuries, all that the world knew of the poems of Sappho—the first woman writer in literary history—were a few brief quotations preserved by ancient male authors. Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. But within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt. As recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around the world. The poems of Sappho reveal a remarkable woman who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the vibrant age of the birth of western science, art, and philosophy. Sappho was the daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother, a lover of women, and one of the greatest writers of her own or any age. Nonetheless, although most people have heard of Sappho, the story of her lost poems and the lives of the ancient women they celebrate has never been told for a general audience. Searching for Sappho is the exciting tale of the rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry and of the woman and world they reveal.
Seascapes
by Judith ShepardA collection of poems by Judith Shepard, co-publisher at The Permanent Press.
Season Songs
by Ted HughesThis is a wonderful collection of poems, by Ted Hughes the poet working with a subject matter he had mastered and revisited for most of his life: the world of animals, plants and nature.
Seasonal Velocities: Poems, Stories, and Essays
by Ryka AokiThis book invites the reader on a fragile and furious journey along the highways and skyways of discovery, retribution, and resolve. The writer has consistently challenged, informed, and enthralled queer audiences across the United States, through her poetry, essays, stories, and performances.
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Brenda HillmanFire? its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms?is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes?Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water?have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.
Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (American Poets Continuum)
by Matthew ShenodaWeaving narratives of ancient and contemporary Egypt while exploring ecological shifts of the Nile Valley, Matthew Shenoda is a voice at the crossroads of the African continent and its diasporas. Amiri Baraka says, "Matthew Shenoda’s poetry will open your mind to another world that exists inside and outside of your own." Winner of the 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection, Somewhere Else, Shenoda is a younger poet with his eyes set on the larger issues of history, politics, and culture.Matthew Shenoda lives in Los Angeles, California. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at Goddard College.
Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
by Carolyne WrightSeasons of Mangoes and Brainfire recreates Carolyne Wright's time in Allende's Chile and on other travels through Latin America. It won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry, and American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Sebald's Vision
by Carol JacobsW. G. Sebald's writing has been widely recognized for its intense, nuanced engagement with the Holocaust, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII, and other episodes of violence throughout history. Through his inventive use of narrative form and juxtaposition of image and text, Sebald's work has offered readers new ways to think about remembering and representing trauma. In Sebald's Vision, Carol Jacobs examines the author's prose, novels, and poems, carefully illuminating the ethical and aesthetic questions that shaped his remarkable oeuvre. Through the trope of "vision," Jacobs explores aspects of Sebald's writing and the way the author's indirect depiction of events highlights the ethical imperative of representing history, while at the same time calling into question the possibility of such representation. Jacobs's lucid readings of Sebald's work also consider his famous juxtaposition of images and use of citations to explain his interest in the vagaries of perception. Isolating different ideas of vision in some of his most noted works, including Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and After Nature, as well as in Sebald's interviews, poetry, art criticism, and his lecture Air War and Literature, Jacobs introduces new perspectives for understanding the distinctiveness of Sebald's work and its profound moral implications.
Sebald's Vision (Literature Now)
by Carol JacobsW. G. Sebald's writing has been widely recognized for its intense, nuanced engagement with the Holocaust, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII, and other episodes of violence throughout history. Through his inventive use of narrative form and juxtaposition of image and text, Sebald's work has offered readers new ways to think about remembering and representing trauma.In Sebald's Vision, Carol Jacobs examines the author's prose, novels, and poems, illuminating the ethical and aesthetic questions that shaped his remarkable oeuvre. Through the trope of "vision," Jacobs explores aspects of Sebald's writing and the way the author's indirect depiction of events highlights the ethical imperative of representing history while at the same time calling into question the possibility of such representation. Jacobs's lucid readings of Sebald's work also consider his famous juxtaposition of images and use of citations to explain his interest in the vagaries of perception. Isolating different ideas of vision in some of his most noted works, including Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and After Nature, as well as in Sebald's interviews, poetry, art criticism, and his lecture Air War and Literature, Jacobs introduces new perspectives for understanding the distinctiveness of Sebald's work and its profound moral implications.
Secession/Insecession (Literature in Translation Series)
by Erín Moure Chus PatoSecession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erín Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: "A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let's call it the intranslatable." In Secession/Insecession, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history. Chus Pato's Secession was chosen as 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).
Second Childhood: Poems
by Fanny HoweThe new poetry collection by Fanny Howe, whose "body of work seems larger, stranger, and more permanent with each new book she publishes" (Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize citation)People want to be poets for reasons that have little to do with language.It's the life of the poet that they want.Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.Some people's lives are more poetic than a poem,and Francis is certainly one of these.I know, because he walked beside me for that short timewhether you believe it or not. —from "Outremer"Fanny Howe's poetry is known for its lyricism, fragmentation, experimentation, religious engagement, and commitment to social justice. In Second Childhood, the observing poet is an impersonal figure who accompanies Howe in her encounters with chance and mystery. She is not one age or the other, in one time or another. She writes, "The first question in the Catechism is: / What was humanity born for? / To be happy is the correct answer."
Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation (Perspectives on Translation)
by Barbara FolkartThe translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as the chances of "replicating" in another language the one-off resonance of music, imagery, and truth values of a poem are vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of mapping over into the target language the surface features or semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own right. These essays focus on the poetically viable translation - the derived poem that, while resonating with the original, really is a poem. They proceed from a writerly perspective, eschewing both the theoretical overkill that spawns mice out of mountains and the ideological misappropriation that uses poetry as a way to push agendas. The emphasis throughout is on process and the poem-to-come. Published in English.
Second Fleet Baby
by Nadia RhookSecond Fleet Baby examines birth and motherhood, drawing on the playful energies and powers of 18th and 19th century ‘convict chicks', including Rhook's own ancestor, who was transported from England to Eora land on the Lady Juliana as part of the notorious 1789 Second Fleet.How might a settler reconcile the violence bound up with their role populating stolen land with the love and euphoria that can flow from parenthood? Intergenerational ties are traced through the soft weapons of the body, connecting the intimacies of nation-making with the politics of reproduction in lavishly personal ways.
Second Grade, Here I Come! (Here I Come!)
by D.J. SteinbergGo back to school for second grade—and get ready to go with these fun and silly poems!D. J. Steinberg's heartfelt, relatable, and silly poems bring to life the highlights of second grade—reading those big-kid books, trying out for the school play, and even dance breaks to wiggle "arms and legs and kaboodles. . . like a big bunch of second-grade noodles!" Covering an entire school year of holidays, memorable moments, and important life lessons, this is perfect for soon-to-be second graders!
Second Language: Poems (Poems Ser.)
by Lisel MuellerSecond Language is the fourth volume of work from the highly acclaimed poet Lisel Mueller. The second language of the title, English, supplanted Mueller’s native language when she came to the United States from Hitler’s Germany at age fifteen. But other second languages are at work here as well. The poems in this collection have to do with memory and metaphor, two forces that enable us to interpret our experience. Each is in a sense a second language, and in Mueller’s employ each gains expression in an imaginative and humanistic voice. In “English as a Second Language,” the various meanings of Second Language come together lucidly and effectively.
Second Nature
by Chaun BallardWinner of the 23rd annual Poulin Prize Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban. Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation. Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression. Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.
Second Nature: Poems
by Margaret Gibson“Learn of the green world what can be thy place,” wrote Ezra Pound. In Second Nature, her tenth collection of poems, Margaret Gibson takes Pound’s stern counsel to heart. With stunning clarity, these poems move from acute observation to an empathy, participation, and intimacy that continues Gibson’s search to experience the “one body” of the world in direct encounter and to translate that encounter into words. As Emerson tells us, the Spirit moves throughout Nature and through us—our art is, therefore, second nature. Whether Gibson’s poems take us to Greece and to “a writing desk no larger than a page of light” or whether they explore the woods that surround her house, all of the poems arise from the desire to embrace a “fierce, clear-eyed attention” and to be open to revelation. Her poems re-imagine watchfulness, seeing beyond surfaces, listening to what is innermost. Second Nature gives us poems that are a ripening of years of poetic and spiritual practice—simply Gibson at her best.
Second Space
by Czeslaw MiloszNobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in."Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Milosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: "Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth."