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Tourist in Hell (Phoenix Poets)
by Eleanor WilnerEleanor Wilner’s poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry. As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint. The poems describe “a sordid drama” in which the players wear “eyeless masks,” and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving “the art that” in both senses “keeps nothing at bay,” swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope. “It is a relief to come across work in which a moral intelligence is matched by aesthetic refinement, in which the craft of the poems is equal to their concerns.”--Christian Wiman, Poetry
The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process
by Eleanor Wilner Maurice ManningThe venture of this inviting collection is to look, from the many vantages that the 35 poets in this eclectic anthology chose to look, at what it was—knowing that a poem can’t be conceived in advance of its creation—that helped their poems to emerge or connected them over time. The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetrypermits an inside view of how poets outwit internal censors and habits of thought, showing how the meticulous and the spontaneous come together in the process of discovery. Within are contained the work and thoughts of: Betty Adcock Joan Aleshire Debra Allbery Elizabeth Arnold David Baker Rick Barot Marianne Boruch Karen Brennan Gabrielle Calvocoressi Michael Collier Carl Dennis Stuart Dischell Roger Fanning Chris Forhan Reginald Gibbons Linda Gregerson Jennifer Grotz Brooks Haxton Tony Hoagland Mark Jarman A. Van Jordan Laura Kasischke Mary Leader Dana Levin James Longenbach Thomas Lux Maurice Manning Heather McHugh Martha Rhodes Alan Shapiro Daniel Tobin Ellen Bryant Voigt Alan Williamson Eleanor Wilner C. Dale Young
Betjeman: A Life
by A. N. WilsonJohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million copies. Television audiences loved his quirky evocations of landscape and architecture. As Poet Laureate, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. For much of his fifty year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a Field Marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused.This book is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to Betjeman's private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. It is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer.
Dante in Love: A Biography
by A. N. WilsonWith a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's comprehension of the creative process, A. N. Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers.In Dante in Love, A. N. Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of Dante's great poem. He explains how the Italian States were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. He explores Dante's preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology and the great Christian philosophers which inform every line of the Comedy. Dante in Love also lays bare the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice, whom he barely knew.
Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)
by C. WilsonThis exciting collection represents a range of scholarly approaches and include close textual study, comparative readings, and broad cultural analysis. Contributors to this collection include Bernard Beatty, Peter Cochran, Marilyn Gaull, Charles E. Robinson, Andrew Stauffer, and Timothy Webb.
Edward Thomas: A Biography
by Dr Jean Moorcroft WilsonAlong with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues.Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry. This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius.
The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science and the Imagination
by E. WilsonAt the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life
by Frances WilsonThe prize-winning biography of Wordsworth's beloved sister, champion, muse who was at the heart of the Romantic movement in Britain - reissued to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Dorothy's birth.'Genius ... Its own kind of heaven.' New York Times 'A most beautiful, deep, and humble study of incredibly complex people.' Oliver Sacks Dorothy Wordsworth is an enigma. William's beloved sister was his muse, champion, and most valued reader. She is mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as 'all fire and ardour'. Dorothy sacrificed a traditional life to share in her brother's world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between siblings, culminating in Dorothy's collapse on William's wedding day - after which the woman who once strode the hills in all weathers retreated inside the house for the last three decades of her life.In her magisterial biography, Frances Wilson uses the compressed emotion of Dorothy's journals to evoke the rich interior world of a woman determined to live on her own terms - one who deserves her own place in the history of the Romantic movement. 'Intelligent and intriguing ... A portrait of a peculiar, passionate, yet meticulous woman which is hauntingly strange.' Sunday Telegraph'Passion is the keynote of Wilson's fine biography ... Brims with the personality of [an] extraordinary woman ... Thrilling.' Sunday Times'This beautiful, wise biography draws Dorothy from her hiding places. She emerges as a passionate figure.'Daily Telegraph'Gripping ... Bold, witty, scholarly and speculative.' Margaret Drabble
Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture
by Frances WilsonThis collection of essays by leading Byronists explores the development of the myth of Byron and the Byronic from the poet's self-representations to his various appearances in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and in drama, film and portraiture. Byromania (as Annabella Milbanke named the frenzied reaction to Byron's poetry and personality) looks at the phenomena of Byronism through a variety of critical perspectives, and it is designed to appeal to both an academic and a popular readership alike.
Green Glass Beads: A Collection of Poems for Girls
by Jacqueline Wilson'The joy for me is that this is my anthology, and I love every single poem in this book.' Jacqueline Wilson This is a gorgeous, stunningly produced collection of classic and modern poems that girls will turn to again and again throughout their lives. Jacqueline has taken great delight in selecting and arranging her favourite poems for this book, and you can hear her voice in the beautiful poems she has chosen, making it a truly personal collection. There are poems that will make you smile, laugh, frown and cry, and poems that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
A Preface to Ezra Pound
by Peter WilsonProvides an introduction to the life and works of Ezra Pound, a major modernist poet, theorist and literary critic. Throughout his life Pound was regarded by many to be a contentious and controversial figure, and since his death in 1972, theoretical, literary, political and biographical comentators have done much to perpetuate this view. Peter Wilson's survey, however, presents a balanced view of his life and work allowing the reader to judge for themselves. The major sections of the book offer introductions to the complex life and work of Pound, outlining the various cultural, political and literary issues which are important to a full understanding of his place in twentieth century English literature. Critical commentaries are then given on all of Pound's major poetry, adopting some analytical techniques from stylistics. Brief biographies of important figures in Pound's career, and in the development of literary modernism are provided. A gazeteer, glossary, and suggestions for further reading complete the book.
A Preface to Ezra Pound
by Peter WilsonProvides an introduction to the life and works of Ezra Pound, a major modernist poet, theorist and literary critic. Throughout his life Pound was regarded by many to be a contentious and controversial figure, and since his death in 1972, theoretical, literary, political and biographical comentators have done much to perpetuate this view. Peter Wilson's survey, however, presents a balanced view of his life and work allowing the reader to judge for themselves. The major sections of the book offer introductions to the complex life and work of Pound, outlining the various cultural, political and literary issues which are important to a full understanding of his place in twentieth century English literature. Critical commentaries are then given on all of Pound's major poetry, adopting some analytical techniques from stylistics. Brief biographies of important figures in Pound's career, and in the development of literary modernism are provided. A gazeteer, glossary, and suggestions for further reading complete the book.
Collier Laddie
by Rab WilsonForty years on from the 1984–85 UK Miners' Strike, the largest union-led industrial action in the 20th century, Rab Wilson – a former miner deeply entrenched in the strike – delivers a powerful narrative through his mining poems and strike diary, addressing contemporary social and economic issues in Scotland and the UK then and now. Having toiled in Scotland's mining industry for eight years, Rab provides an authentic voice that resonates with the struggles faced during the strike, vividly captured from his involvement between 12 March 1984 and 5 March 1985. This book serves as a testament to the working-class struggle, offering a unique perspective on the historical significance of Scotland's mining industry, skillfully expressed by a poet intimately connected to it. Rab Wilson emerges as an essential chronicler, ensuring the legacy of the miners' challenging strike endures in the pages of this evocative and timely work. Collier Laddie is an ode to resilience, solidarity and the enduring legacy of those who fought for justice during a pivotal moment in industrial history.
Zero Hours
by Rab WilsonCeci n'est pas Stonehenge’, this is the cosmos,distilled to elemental rock and stone,depicting that interstellar collision,four billion years away, a chaosof realignment unimaginable,when all the worlds we knew or didn’t knowosmotically pass through each other like ghosts,to form new galaxies intangible.Written mostly in Scots, Rab Wilson’s new collection is a timely comment on our climate of zero hours contracts and benefits sanctions. From social issues to politics, from the sublime to the absurd, Wilson homes in on the unique aspects of life in Scotland and sets out his poetic manifesto for our country’s future.Rab Wilson is a widely published Scots poet, and has performed his work to all kinds of audiences throughout Scotland.
Christopher Marlowe (Longman Critical Readers)
by Richard WilsonChristopher Marlowe has provoked some of the most radical criticism of recent years. There is an elective affinity, it seems, between this pre-modern dramatist and the post-modern critics whose best work has been inspired by his plays. The reason suggested by this collection of essays is that Marlowe shares the post-modern preoccupation with the language of power - and the power of language itself. As Richard Wilson shows in his introduction, it is no accident that the founding essays of New Historicism were on Marlowe; nor that current Queer Theorists focus so much on his images of gender and homosexuality. Marlowe staged both the birth of the modern author and the origin of modern sexual desire, and it is this unique conjunction that makes his drama a key to contemporary debates about the state and the self: from pornography to gays in the military.Gay Studies, Cultural Materialism, New Historicism and Reader Response Criticism are all represented in this selection, which the introduction places in the light not only of theorists like Althusser, Bataille and Bakhtin, but also of artists and writers such as Jean Genet and Robert Mapplethorpe. Many of the essays take off from Marlowe's extreme dramatisations of arson, cruelty and aggression, suggesting why it is that the thinker who has been most convincingly applied to his theatre is the philosopher of punishment and pain, Michel Foucault. Others explore the exclusiveness of this all-male universe, and reveal why it remains so offensive and impenetrable to feminism. For what they all make disturbingly clear is Marlowe's violent, untamed difference from the clichés and correctness of normative society.
Christopher Marlowe (Longman Critical Readers)
by Richard WilsonChristopher Marlowe has provoked some of the most radical criticism of recent years. There is an elective affinity, it seems, between this pre-modern dramatist and the post-modern critics whose best work has been inspired by his plays. The reason suggested by this collection of essays is that Marlowe shares the post-modern preoccupation with the language of power - and the power of language itself. As Richard Wilson shows in his introduction, it is no accident that the founding essays of New Historicism were on Marlowe; nor that current Queer Theorists focus so much on his images of gender and homosexuality. Marlowe staged both the birth of the modern author and the origin of modern sexual desire, and it is this unique conjunction that makes his drama a key to contemporary debates about the state and the self: from pornography to gays in the military.Gay Studies, Cultural Materialism, New Historicism and Reader Response Criticism are all represented in this selection, which the introduction places in the light not only of theorists like Althusser, Bataille and Bakhtin, but also of artists and writers such as Jean Genet and Robert Mapplethorpe. Many of the essays take off from Marlowe's extreme dramatisations of arson, cruelty and aggression, suggesting why it is that the thinker who has been most convincingly applied to his theatre is the philosopher of punishment and pain, Michel Foucault. Others explore the exclusiveness of this all-male universe, and reveal why it remains so offensive and impenetrable to feminism. For what they all make disturbingly clear is Marlowe's violent, untamed difference from the clichés and correctness of normative society.
Enter the Water
by Jack Wiltshire'A dark-light beauty' Ali Smith'Totally compelling, Enter The Water pulls you along like a current. Gentle, deft, spacious yet searingly vivid, it wanders like our narrator and shows us both nature and the city through new eyes . . . This book will sneak up on you and leave its music long ringing in your ears' Cecilia Knapp'Enter the Water is both visceral and perceptive, a discomfort formulated in great tenderness and pain' Bhanu Kapil 'Enter the Water has horizons and wit and allusion and rhyme and disenchanted politics and birds, and lines that hit the reader right in the heart . . . The writing is original and perfectly pitched . . . A significant debut' Ian Pattersoni sat in a chapel the other night in my big gay coat talking to a god whose answer is only sometimes no no that was a lie the house of god was closed the night i needed him i sat outside on the granite steps of a fountain happily pouring itself an eternal supplyENTER THE WATER follows a young man who becomes homeless when he is evicted from his flat in Cambridge during the turbulent early months of 2022. As the wind stirs, our narrator embarks on a journey from his park bench out towards the coast, wrapped in his 'big gay coat', accompanied by his pigeons, a blackbird and Storm Eunice - 'Nature' in colourfully alive and playful forms. Along the way he searches for a beauty inherent to all of us, and then calls us to reclaim it. ENTER THE WATER is a story invested in care - care towards the environment; towards the political realities of recession and the war in Ukraine; towards the dynamic self, the human whose love for swimming becomes synonymous with self-acceptance and survival; and to everyone, managing to manage. Walking along the edges of our troubled current affairs, animated by a spirit of cheerful protest, this book is an offering and an urgent invitation to exit and re-enter our world - and to celebrate our capacity for courage in times of suffering.
The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine
by Christian Wiman Don ShareWhen Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. “May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. Poetry’s archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine’s centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive—or even to offer the most familiar works—they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” precedes “Prufrock,” casting Eliot’s masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry’s letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices. The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.
Memories of a Swedish Grandmother: Spotlight: Poetry (Spotlight)
by Sarah Windebank‘This dazzling series shows that if the barriers can be vaulted there is true beauty to be had from the lesser-walked streets of literature. These works are both nourishing and inspiring, and a gift to any reader.’ —Kerry HudsonFeminist, philosophical and linguistically playful poems on identity, motherhood and the family from the perspective of someone with a mixed cultural heritage.In her debut collection, Sarah Windebank explores her Swedish roots, and especially the influence of Mormor, her grandmother, who brought her up until she was fifteen. Growing up in a household where her mother and grandmother always spoke to each other in a foreign language, but never taught her, she picked up ‘glittering fragments, rather like a magpie’. With nods to Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, this is an immersive collection of poetry full of accent and domestic detail, at once foreign and familiar.Spotlight Books is a collaboration between Creative Future, New Writing South and Myriad Editions to discover, guide and support writers who are under-represented due to mental or physical health issues, disability, race, class, gender identity or social circumstance.
Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels
by R. H. WinnickIn Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published. Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique. Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems. The new textual parallels Winnick has identified point most often to the King James Bible and to such canonical authors as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. But they also point to many authors rarely if ever previously cited in Tennyson editions and studies, including Michael Drayton, Richard Blackmore, Isaac Watts, Erasmus Darwin, John Ogilvie, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Wilson, and—with surprising frequency—Felicia Hemans. Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is thus a major new resource for Tennyson scholars and students, an indispensable adjunct to the 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems edited by Christopher Ricks.
Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels (PDF)
by R. H. WinnickIn Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published. Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique. Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems. The new textual parallels Winnick has identified point most often to the King James Bible, and to such canonical authors as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. But they also point to many authors rarely if ever previously cited in Tennyson editions and studies, including Michael Drayton, Richard Blackmore, Isaac Watts, Erasmus Darwin, John Ogilvie, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Wilson, and—with surprising frequency—Felicia Hemans. Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is thus a major new resource for Tennyson scholars and students, an indispensable adjunct to the 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems edited by Christopher Ricks.
A Preface to Donne
by James WinnyProbably the most famous of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times.