Life in the Forest is Denise Levertov's first major collection since the publication in 1975 of The Freeing of the Dust, winner of the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize, and is her eleventh book with New Directions, in a connection of nearly twenty years' standing. Ms. Levertov's work holds that tenuous yet inspiring ground between reflection and discourse. The dynamics of this sensitive balance is pointed up in Life in the Forest by a thematic grouping which invites internal association from poem to poem and section to section. "The poems I had been moving towards," she explains, "were impelled by two forces: first, a recurring need...to vary a habitual lyric mode; not to abandon it, by any means, but from time to time explore more expansive means; and second, the decision to try to avoid over use of the autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much American poetry-good and bad-of recent years."
The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), the late Raymond Queneau's tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country, in a translation by Barbara Wright. Critics are universally agreed that it and the later Zazie dans le métro (1959) show Queneau at his zaniest and most cheerful, and it is not surprising that both these novels have been made into popular and successful films. But as always with Queneau, beneath the apparent absurdities of plot and the bumbling of his rather ordinary characters, there is a precision of structure and purpose that, ironically enough, places the work of this earliest of new-wave novelists squarely in the tradition of the eighteenth-century roman philosophique. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Bru, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naif. Highly self-conscious yet reasonably satisfied with his lot, imbued with the good humor inherent in the naturally wise, Valentin meets the painful nonsense of life's adventures with a slightly bewildered detachment. As Barbara Wright so aptly writes: "Though The Sunday of Life is set in one of the most traumatic of recent periods--1936-40, the dark years leading up to the Second World War and including the fall of France... it nevertheless does indeed manage to be one of Queneau's happiest, sunniest, and most undated novels: it far transcends anything like a mere chronicle of times."
In the sixty poems that comprise The Freeing of the Dust, Denise Levertov continued to explore the personal and public themes that threaded through her work during the disastrous American involvement in Indochina. Relations with family and close friends are depicted with unique poignancy as she pits the at times terrifying concrete image against her vision of the ideal. Here we have poems that speak out of the direct tragedy of war, the result of Ms. Levertov's visit to North Vietnam in the fall of 1972, while others reflect the anguish and the exultation of what she has called the 'inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's.
"The modern novel in its most cogent and permanent form"--this has been the achievement of E. M. Forster; his masterpiece, A Passage to India, belongs with perhaps three or four other works in English at the pinnacle of literary craftsmanship in this century. Yet for many years Forster's genius was virtually unrecognized in America. Not until 1943, when Lionel Trilling's authoritative and discerning study was first published, did Forster find his way to a broad American audience. In this 1964 revision of the first paperbook edition, Mr. Trilling added a preface and brought the bibliography up to date. His book performs two services: it is a critical-biographical introduction to the master novelist and his works; it is in itself a primary document in the development of, contemporary American criticism. Here is criticism functioning at its best, deftly, surely, wittily, within a framework of the ideas which are basic to literary thought today.
"Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"--the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'Gone Beyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder's wife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder's previous collection of poems, The Back Country, this new volume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth... the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe..."
From the appearance in 1936 of Kenneth Patchen's first book, the voice of this great poet has been protesting war and social injustice, satirizing the demeaning and barbarous inanities of our culture-entrancing us with an inexhaustible flow of humor and fantasy. With directness and simplicity, he has restored the exaltation of romantic love to its ancient bardic place beside an awareness of God's living presence among all men.For this collection, assembled in his fifty-fourth year, Kenneth Patchen has drawn from the contents of twelve of his books. It provides the reader in many cases with the texts of poems no longer available even in rare editions.
In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller's contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller's life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that Miller's final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern." Earlier, H. L. Mencken had said, "his is one of the most beautiful prose styles today," and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that "what makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions." Included are stories, "portraits" of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is supplemented by a chronology from Miller's birth in 1891 up to the spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a part of which appears in this volume.
Since his work first appeared in Poetry, Robert Fitzgerald's controlled yet lyric voice, his intimacy with the classic tradition, have gained for him a distinguished reputation as poet and translator. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1965, Fitzgerald spends a part of each year with his family near Perugia, Italy, where he does most of his writing. He has received many honors in recent years, among them fellowship in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1962) and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963) and the first Bollingen Translation Award (1961) for his Odyssey.
Cid Corman writes, "For the vast majority of Italians and others to whom the name means anything, Matera is synonymous with abject poverty and backwardness. In fact, being the capital of its province, which occupies the lower and Eastern half of the region known today as La Basilicata, in the highlands inland between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic, it is relatively affluent in a world where degradation is the rule. It has a railway terminal, all the functionary establishments of authority, more than a dozen churches, and a growing middle-class. In the outlying areas, in the castle villages perched on remote mountains, is poverty undisguised, unmitigated, and kept quiet. I came to this community quite by accident, penniless, and stayed to teach there for a year and a half. What I saw, what I learned, what I felt, my relations to others there and that of earth and air, fire and water, to them and to myself, should be implicit, if not explicit, in these poems."
Concrete Poetry has been growing in many countries, from Brazil to Japan, and especially in England and Europe. Its ancestry goes back to pre-historic picture writing and the anagrams of early Christian monks; it has affinities with the oriental ideogram, and, in our century, with Apollinaire's Calligrammes, the work of Klee and Schwitters, and the experiments in "visual form" of Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and the Dadaists and Surrealists. Once Again is not so much an anthology, though it includes the work of 54 poets from 10 countries, as a group presentation, designed to be read as a consecutive "visual happening." It has been assembled by Jean-François Bory, an editor of the Paris magazine Approches and the author of Plein Signe, Height Texts + 1 and other "Concrete" books. Bory has provided an introduction which traces the history of the movement and analyzes its aesthetic. He also comments on individual poems.
An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marias is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Bront?, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented.Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marias has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marias remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."
It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties--a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams's most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics--the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams's unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."
This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas's trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The "lecturer" tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras's garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: "I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy." Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will "kill" its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."Excerpts:It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrowsthat are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum.- Lydia DavisBad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catchesunder the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped ona sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us likea snow-drift.- Eliot Weinberge
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", Sorting Facts is Susan Howe's masterful meditation on the filmmaker Chris Marker, whose film stills are interspersed throughout.An excerpt:Sorting word-facts I only know an apparition. Scribble grammarhas no neighbor. In the name of reason I need to record somethingbecause I am a survivor in this ocean.
That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim's modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential Arabic novels. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city.
Now in a gorgeous new paperback edition with full-color illustrations by Maira Kalman, Microscripts is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, a new call to action and a vivid picture of civilization moving towards its brink.
A sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate novel that presents a stunning series of flashes - scenes, moods, dreams, and weather- as the narrator wanders through Lima.
The first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S., poetry at the edge of impossibility.
Poet Forrest Gander's mesmerizing series of poems - hinging around a dance schematic - that captures and extends Eiko & Koma's performance with lyrical intensity and vividness
Long live Man! sings the poet Gregory Corso-despite atom bombs and computers, cold wars that get hot and togetherness that isn't, too many cars and too little love...and in these poems he celebrates the wonders (and the laughs and griefs) of being a man alive. Whether he is musing on antic glories amid the ruins of the Acropolis or watching a New York child invent games on the city's sidewalks, Corso is there in it, putting us into it, with the magic of vision, with the senses-awakening images, that transmute reality into something more-insights that let us share his joy and echo his shout of Long live Man!
Yoel Hoffmann's novel The Christ of Fish, revolving around its heroine Aunt Magda, offers a heart-stopping view into the soul of things. Hoffmann makes a beautiful, epiphanic mosaic out of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, still speaking German after decades in Israel, and a widow, Aunt Magda has "divided her life into two periods: 'When my husband was alive' and 'now.'" "Now," ever elusive and ever inclusive in Hoffmann's work, contains her childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, two stolen handbags, Bing Crosby, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer. Spontaneous and dreamlike, Hoffmann's images of reality shift in currents of "realness,"creating moments of absolute clarity -- life, seized as it is and of itself-- from the "cotton reels of memory." One reel concerns the title fish: "At the beginning of the fifties (Food was scarce in those days. Once a month, in exchange for government stamps, we ate a yellow chicken.) on Passover Eve, Aunt Magda's friend Berthe came to visit her and brought her from the Jordan Valley a large carp in a metal bucket....Aunt Magda filled the bath with water and put the carp in it. Two whole days the carp swam up and down the length of the bath. On the third day, Aunt Magda declared that the carp 'thinks just like we do,' and sent Uncle Herbert (an expert in Sanskrit) 'to put the fish back in the sea.'"
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