If you see something you'd like, click place an order.
New Books - 12/08
The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest ($39.95 Wesleyan) An absolute treasure. Laurels to Wesleyan University Press for the publication of this so welcome book (as well as the equally anticipated Jack Spicer collection mentioned below). Barbara Guest was one of the few women considered part of “The Poets of the New York School,” that astounding group that arrived on the literary scene in 1950s and included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. Her first book was published in 1960, her last in 2005, a year before she died at the age of 85. Throughout her lifetime her writing sustained its unique lyric vitality and incomparable imagery. She was, as Peter Gizzi writes in his thoughtful introduction, ahead of her time and her work asks us to reconsider tradition -- not as literature “that exists behind us…but as something we move toward.” Mysterious, even disjointed, humane, at times humorous, her poetry can be elegantly spare, at once archaic and contemporary, almost courtly -- “the air free of misdemeanor, at rest in the inns of our forefathers.” It gives us vignettes, glimpses, an essence of experience that is both acutely accurate and dislocated -- “Heavy violets there is no way / if the door clicks the cushion / makes murmur noise and the woman / on the sofa turns half in half out / a tooth slipping from velvet.” Here are the mind and the world both done honor.
The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks by Charles Simic ($14 Ausable) Drawn from his notebooks they may be, but to read these brief prose pieces might be better compared to sharing several bottles of wine with the sharp-eyed, irreverent, tender poet. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, Charles Simic came to America in 1953, working a variety of jobs as he studied and wrote poetry, eventually teaching it and last year serving as U.S. Poet Laureate. He writes as a child of war, an immigrant, an observer of culture and power, and as one with a passion for poetry. The entries, some reprinted from an earlier prose collection, the rest appearing in book form for the first time, range from several paragraphs to one sentence, from the autobiographical to the philosophical, from whimsical to touching to outraged to embracing. “I have a horror of minds who see all events as instances of universal rules and principles,” he writes. “I believe in the deep-set messiness of everything. I associate tidiness with dictatorship.” And out of this messy world comes his crisp, often haunting writing -- “The infinite riches of an empty room. Silence makes visible what now appears to be the most interesting grain of dust in the whole world.”
Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston ($14.95 Zephyr) This is Dycki’s (as he is known in Poland) first collection in English, drawn from his nine collections in Polish. These poems flow through a matter-of-factly magical layering and re-layering of images. They are often concerned with difficult issues of life -- schizophrenia, God, sex, and death – yet have a sweetness about them, a melancholy kindness. The death of Dycki’s mother and a friend’s suicide are recurrent subjects, not so much written about as continually experienced and contended with. In “Beginning of the Week,” death is an entity. At his town’s Monday market “death / tried to sell every trinket and buy each // one for a song and the old women chatted with death / oh how loudly they slummed with death / using first names you see my good friend / and all because of hand-mirrors aprons combs.” How wonderful these lovely, sad, at times funny poems have come into English.
My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer ($35 Wesleyan) Here it is, the highly anticipated collection of Jack Spicer’s poems, filling a void left after Black Sparrow Press’s The Collected Books of Jack Spicer went out of print. Nearly twenty percent of the work published here by editors Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian is newly collected. Spicer was his own kind of mystical poet. He believed he received poems the way a radio receives signals. And he didn’t accept the notion of authorship, refusing to copyright his work. Seven small press books were published before his death at the age of 40 in 1965. The respect for his work, and his influence on poets, has increased mightily over the years. Among his talents, Spicer was a marvel at describing a vision of poetry’s place and purpose. To wit, from his jazzy re-telling of the Gawain legend, “The grail is the opposite of poetry / Fills us up instead of using us as a cup the dead drink from.” His work seems new today, perhaps endlessly new, in the manner of great art. We’ll give him the last word with his short poem “Who Knew,” “Ghosts drip / And then they leap / The boy sang and the singing that I heard: / Wet shadows on a stick.”
And a few books in brief...
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell ($45 FSG) Here in one volume are thirty years of letters between these two legendary 20th-century American poets and close friends, an intimate glimpse into their shared literary and personal lives.
Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology translated and edited by David Hinton ($45 FSG) The highly regarded translator has gathered close to 500 poems from three millenia of Chinese literature. W.S. Merwin has called Hinton's work "a gift to our language."
Voices by Lucille Clifton ($16 paperback; $22.95 hardcover) The recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and many other honors presents her latest poetry collection, a meditative, graceful book laced with sorrow and praise.
One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds ($16.95 paperback; $26.95 hardcover) Visceral, fearless, and tender, Olds's ninth volume of poetry begins with a war series and then takes up her cycle of family poems, in this case with a focus on her mother and their complex relationship.
|
