Böcker i New Directions Paperbook-serien

In 1944, New Directions brought out Thomas Merton's first book of verse. By the time of his tragic, untimely death in 1968, Father Louis (as he was known at the Trappist monastery where he lived for twenty-seven years) had published upwards of fifty books and pamphlets, including several more collections of poetry. All of these poems have been assembled in a single, definitive volume (first published by New Directions in 1977) which includes much additional unpublished or uncollected material drawn from the archive of the Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, or supplied by the poet's friends and associates. Brought together in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton are: Early Poems (1940-42, published posthumously in 1971), Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), The Tear of the Blind Lions (1949), The Strange Islands (1957), Original Child Bomb (1962), Emblems of a Season of Fun (1963), Cables to Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (completed in 1968 and published posthumously). These are followed by Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems, a book which Merton completed shortly before his death. There are also sections of uncollected poems, humorous verse, poems written in French, with some English translations, Merton's translations of poetry from various languages, drafts and fragments, and a selection of concrete poems. With the availability of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton as a New Directions paperbook, an ever wider audience may more fully appreciate the impressive range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision.

Stitching Porcelain, Deborah Larsen's first book of poetry, is a narrative-lyric sequence based on the life of Matteo Ricci, the resourceful Jesuit who entered China in 1583 and stayed for a quarter century. Pondering cultural accommodation as well as faith, many of the poems center on actual events: Ricci's dressing as a Buddhist; his awe-inspiring map (with China shrewdly centered); his prostration before an empty Dragon Throne. Other events the poet imagined. (In the title room, Ricci addresses a love lyric to China: "Your porcelain is so fine, so thin,/a brass wire can repair it . . . /Once I saw you beneath the bamboo/ . . . bent back/from the world, stitching porcelain.") With a felicity rare in a debut volume, Larsen's opalescent poetry works in perfect counterpoint to the strange and brilliant Ricci.

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."

An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. "A Draft of XXX Cantos" (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos' essential themes and provides the surest entry into Pound's encyclopedic masterpiece.

The British poet Stevie Smith, as her many readers well know, sprinkled her drawings throughout her poetry collections. In this sketchbook, Some Are More Human Than Others, she did the opposite--she spiced her drawings with words. Together they resound with what Robert Lowell described as Smith's "unique and cheerfully gruesome voice" and open up a little world of peculiar experience: something somber and something gay, innocent and cruel--truths of our world trapped off guard.

Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands is Hayden Carruth's fourth book of poetry with New Directions. This is a full and rich collection which has been separated into two parts. Part one offers a varied wealth of poems, remarkable as always for their meditative powers and for their "principled alertness..." (NYTBR). The seccond part is one long poem, "Mother," a work of fierce emotion addressing the long life and slow torturous death of Carruth's own mother.

With some changes in the contents-most notably the addition of sixteen recently discovered poems-Last & Lost Poems is a paperbound version of the highly praised 1979 Vanguard Press publication. That book disclosed that between 1958 and 1966, despite his disintegrating life, Delmore Schwartz was indeed working and producing poems full of the special magic that had propelled him early on into the literary limelight. Commenting on it, Richard Wilbur hailed Last & Lost Poems as "a valuable book... Schwartz sounds like no other voice in our time--rhapsodic yet philosophic; self-conscious; self-forgetting; unguarded; rejoicing or insisting on obligation to rejoice... Wonderfully free and energetic.""This posthumous collection will perhaps help to re-establish Delmore Schwartz as one of the major twentieth-century American poets."-John Ashbery"Delmore's genius survives in the sound of his words, in his hypnotizing lines."-Jonathan Galassi, The New York Review of Books"The greatest man I ever met."-Lou Reed

In Curve Away from Stillness, John Allman affirms the connections between poetry and science. They are, he says, as "old as the ones between poetry and cosmology, beauty and knowledge, pleasure and speculation." In reading this collection of "Science Poems," we are reminded of a philosophical tradition in literature that, with Lucretius, sees in the power of love the binding force of the universe. Allman's poems, however-meditations on "Physics," "Chemistry," "Biology," essential "Principles," the "Planets"-are grounded in the science of our time, in all its elegance and awesomeness.Curve Away from Stillness is Allman's fourth book of poetry, his third with New Directions. His previous publications include Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape (1986), speculative reflections on art and nature; the "historical epiphanies" of Clio's Children (1985); and Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton University Press, 1979).

Gustaf Sobin's Voyaging Portraits is the newest collection by the American poet and longtime resident of Provence. The voice of these poems is the voyager, moving across a landscape that is both physical and existential, and the portraits it continually casts hover at the precarious limits of language. The book is laid out in five sections. "Of Neither Wind nor Anemones," set in the Mediterranean basin, introduces the work's major theme: the poem's quest for its own hidden imagery across the shifting ground of the evocable. "Against a Bleached Viridian," located in the hills of Provence (with its suns, moons, snails, pathways, its vineyards and orchards), depicts a nature menaced by asphyxia. "A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables" traces the author's early years in self-elected exile. "Along America's Edges" extends to the metaphoric rim of North America. The locale of the conclusion, "Of the Four-winged Cherubim as Signature," is Italy, among the accumulated layers of Western culture.

Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape, John Allman's third collection of poems, is a book as remarkable for its lyricism as it is for its capaciousness, for there seems to be no area of thought, no branch of learning, no dark region of the mind into which the poet is unwilling to delve. His recent Clio's Children: Dostoevsky at Semyonov Square and Other Poems is a reminder, as the title implies, that history is a narrative art. In his newest book, Allman reflects on art and nature, love and death-the dualities that animate our common humanity. The poems in Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape look back, at one level, to the mutable, mythic cosmos of Ovid as well as Lucretius' universe of benign random change. But to these ancient considerations Allman brings the insights, indeed the language of modern science and evolution, creating a speculative aesthetic appropriate to the awesome possibilities of the atomic age."I would say," Allman observes, "that Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape is about nature; that the poems speak in the complementary idioms of art and science in an attempt to comprehend nature; that love recapitulates all life forms; and that love, finally, is the only ground we stand on, the only steadiness beneath us, earned by us, yet strangely given, as we sing of glory and grief."John Allman's previous books of poems are Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton University Press, 1979) and Clio's Children (New Directions, 1985). He is a professor of English at Rockland Community College, State University of New York.

So cleverly and wittily are the stories told that we sense we belong in the charmed café society of post-1918 Britain, and life seems, as Ernest Jones says in his critical introduction, "a Nirvana in which homosexuals are the ultimate chic and in which... almost everyone turns out to be at least bi-sexual." In Vainglory, Mrs. Shamefoot, who "almost compels a tear," embraces the quest for a cathedral stained-glass window "that should be a miracle of violet glass." In Inclinations, Miss Brookomore, filled with longing for her companion, the "sunny" Miss Mabel Collins, travels to Greece where Mabel, rather treacherously, acquires a husband and baby. And in Caprice, Miss Sinquier flees her rural parents and the comfort of her black slippers ("all over little pearls with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes") to pursue an acting career in bohemian London. To quote Mrs. Shamefoot describing a novelist clearly meant to be Firbank: "He has such a strange, peculiar style. His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way. If one should by chance turn about it's usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to beckon. And they seldom really touch." Originally published in 1951, Three More Novels by Ronald Firbank is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook.

America's paved-over landscape dotted with its oases of shopping malls and franchise strips is the setting for Hayden Carruth's Asphalt Georgics, a new collection of thirteen poems in the common speech of Upstate New York. Here are the voices of Charlie Spaid, talking of the death of his landlady, Marge; of Septic Tanck, musing on his own peculiar name; of old Capper Kaplinski, still watching the girls pass by; of Art and Poll, back in the old neighborhood. What they tell about their lives is hardly what they themselves would ever expect to read in the pages of a book of poetry. Yet to capture the rhythms of their very colloquial language, Hayden Carruth has invented a new verse form, his Georgics-quatrains in strict syllables and rhyme, though with no accentual pattern--which achieve by their special artifice a classic and earthy elegance.

At Heaven's Gate, Robert Penn Warren's second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author's years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All The King's Men. Other formative elements, as he has said, "came originally out of Dante by a winding path." During the winter of 1939-40 in Rome, where the first half of the book was written, one of the most touching characters, a "Christ-bit mountaineer," and his part of the story literally came full-blown to the author in a typhus-induced delirium. At Heaven's Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of an unscrupulous speculator who has created a financial empire in the South, and the three men with whom she tries to escape the dominance of her father and her father's world. The background is the capital of a Southern state in the late twenties and the promoters and politicians, the aristocrats and poor whites, the labor organizers and the dispossessed farmers, the backwoods prophets and university intellectuals who are drawn into its orbit. Warren's picture of the South is as fresh, dramatic, and powerful today as it was when the book was first published. Its plot structure is a tour de force.

This book (originally published in 1972 by The Seabury Press as The Orchid Boat) is the first representative collection of the poetry of Chinese women to appear in English. Unlike Japan with its long tradition of women writers, poetry by women did not become fashionable in China until the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), although poems from earlier centuries that do in fact survive will quickly dispel any stereotyped views. Included here are samplings from the legendary earliest poetry of courtesans, palace women, and Tao priestesses to works by contemporary Chinese women living in both the East and West. Appendixes include notes on the poems, an introductory essay on Chinese women and literature, a table of historical periods, and a bibliography.

New Directions has long published poet William Carlos Williams' entire body of short fiction as The Farmers' Daughters (1961). This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, "The Farmers' Daughters" (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams' immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams' portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

Subtitled "The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet," this unique volume was the result of a series of informal conversations in the mid-1950s between Dr. Williams, his wife, and Edith Heal, then a student at Columbia University. In the relaxed atmosphere of the Williams home in Rutherford, New Jersey, the three discussed, chronologically, the poet's works as collected on his very own library shelves. "There was an air of discovery about the whole procedure," Miss Heal writes in her introduction, "the poet's excited 'Why I'd forgotten this dedication,' the unexpected appearance of reviews that had been tucked away in the pages of the books, pencilled corrections in the text, scrawled first drafts on prescription blanks." I Wanted to Write a Poem is, then, a brief "talking" bibliography, alive with the Williamses' memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being--in Miss Heal's words, "a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world."

The three sequences in the book-"Logging," "Hunting," "Burning"-show the remarkable cohesiveness in Snyder's writings over the years, for we find the poet absorbed, then as now, with Buddhist and Amerindian lore and other interconnections East and West, but above all with the premedical devotion to the land and work.

Speaking of his own work, Robert Duncan (1919-1987) said: "I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my faculties at large." The Opening of the Field, his first major collection, was originally brought out in 1960; in it, Duncan introduced his "Structures of Rime," the open series he continued in his subsequent collections, Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before the War (1983), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). "Structures of Rime" affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in "The Structure of Rime I" he declares: "O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be."

Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York's famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba's Children, written three years before Arthur Miller's Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting - the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950's. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.

Hard Candy contains Tennessee Williams's short stories written after the publication of his first collection of short fiction, One Arm, and before the stories appearing in The Knightly Quest. These volumes have established him as an original, compelling, and honest master of the short story. The stories in Hard Candy display Mr. Williams's mastery of several very different styles. "Three Players of a Summer Game," for instance, is as powerful and moving a study of the disintegration of an individual as A Streetcar Named Desire. The delicate and luminous nostalgia of "The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin" will remind readers of The Glass Menagerie. Other stories, like "Two on a Party," are more colloquial and brittle; and one--"The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly"--is an excursion into ironical fantasy. Yet each of the stories demonstrates, in its different way, the characteristic blend of psychological penetration with compassion and understanding that has marked Tennessee Williams's successes in the theater.

The verse and criticism which he produced during the early years of the twentieth century very largely determined the directions of creative writing in our time; virtually every major poet in England and America today has acknowledged his help or influence. Pound's lyric genius, his superb technique, and his fresh insight into literary problems make him one of the small company of men who through the centuries have kept poetry alive-one of the great innovators.This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works-the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem.

This anthology is Ezra Pound's own choice of the poetry of various ages and cultures-ranging from his translations of the Confucian Odes up to E. E. Cummings-which he considered the finest of its type. It is a statement by example of the "Pound critical canon" and, as such, a short course in the history of world poetry, useful alike for the student and the general reader. Nearly a hundred poets are represented, a number of them in Pound's own translations, with emphasis on the Greek and Latin, Chinese, Troubadour, Renaissance, and Elizabethan. Of particular interest are the notes on certain of the poems and poets which Pound supplied in comment on his selections.

Because Harry Levin's view is large, as opposed to the many necessary exegeses and close textual studies, he leads the reader easily into the delights to be found in Joyce, from the comparatively simple prose of Dubliners, through Ulysses and into the complexities of Finnegans Wake. The insight and brilliance of this "critical introduction," first published by New Directions in 1941, make it as rewarding for the expert as the student. For this revised edition, Mr. Levin, who is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, has made revisions and added a new preface and a long "postscript" which he calls "Revising Joyce." He examines the works that have come to light in the last few years and some of the important later biographical writings about Joyce.

Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."

One of the most extraordinary events of the late nineteenth century in Paris was the opening on December 11, 1896, at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi. The audience was scandalized by this revolutionary satire, developed from a schoolboy farce, which began with a four-letter word, defied all the traditions of the stage, and ridiculed the established values of bourgeois society.Barbara Wright's witty translation of this riotous work is accompanied with drawings by Franciszka Themerson. Two previously untranslated essays in which Jarry explains his theories of the drama have also been included.

But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

"Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity . . . is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?" Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel The Blood Oranges is boldly asserted by its narrator, Cyril, the archetypal multisexualist. Likening himself to a white bull on Love's tapestry, he pursues his romantic vision in a primitive Mediterranean landscape. There two couples-Cyril and Fiona, Hugh and Catherine-mingle their loves in an "lllyria" that brings to mind the equally timeless countryside of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Among the great figures who pioneered the modern movement in world literature, none showed himself more versatile than France's Jean Cocteau. Poet, novelist, critic, artist, actor, film-maker, Cocteau was also one of the greatest dramatists Europe has produced, with over a dozen plays which are frequently revived, not only in France, but in translation in many other countries. For this collection, fine translations of four full-length plays, one short play, and the "Speaker's Text" for the Cocteau-Stravinsky opera Oedipus Rex have been selected. The longer plays (The Infernal Machine, Orpheus, Bacchus, Knights of the Round Table) are re-creations of classic myth and legend-poetic and highly original interpretations of certain timeless themes which have inspired great drama through the ages. The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party is, by contrast, merely a "curtain-raiser," but remarkable as un jeu d'esprit, revealing the wit and psychological penetration for which Cocteau is famous.