University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Literature and Literary Criticism: Poetry

Thresherphobe

Mark Halliday — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life’s emotional mysteries—both dire and hilarious—from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetual frustration of our cravings for ego-triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday’s voice-driven poetry wants to find insight—or at least a stay against confusion—through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can; let posterity (if any!) say we rambled truly.

Mutability

Andrea Brady — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two. In poems and prose, these scripts offer a “model of duplicity,” revealing how the beginnings of language, the spaces which open up through movement, the undeniable possibility of harm, and the unbearable intimacy between mother and child challenge the premise of individual autonomy. Seeking “a writing of honest particularity, not clean, in a form which would catch rather than cauterize this pouring,” Mutability brilliantly captures the experience of motherhood.

At the same time, Brady explores the child-space, a utopian place of discovery and adaptation, as an arena of risk, violence, possession, and privation. Carefully observing the consequences of “the beginning of all possibility, and the beginning of its finitude,” the book notes the child’s discovery of being a new person to “the discovery of an exit.” Brady’s unique and moving book celebrates and investigates life’s most essential relationship.

Quorum

William Fuller — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Quorum, the latest book from William Fuller, is a collection of vivid detours and deadpan visions arranged into forty-five sonnet-like poems. Employing an ear “that hears not what the eye / sees not, in detail,” the poet makes his rounds through a menagerie of abstract persons and personified abstractions, carefully feeding them “their weight in flowers,” to achieve the idiosyncratic consistency of a world transected by allusive filaments of “clouds that don’t exist.” Metaphysical wit freezes up the system and then gives it a liquidity. But “there’s a trace of something else that slips in,” which the poet seems at pains to not identify. If it’s not quite song, neither is it simply irony, nor is it a desire to exceed these, although all are required to make a quorum.

"Fuller’s work is engaging on a deep level like only the great works are. [D]efinitely one of the best books that I have come across lately and is one that should be on any reader’s shelf."—William Allegrezza on Watchword

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Eleanor Johnson — Sat, 11 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.

Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Theme of Farewell and After-Poems

Milo De Angelis; Susan Stewart; Patrizio Ceccagnoli — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Milo De Angelis, born in 1951, is one of the most important living Italian poets. With this volume, Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli bring to English readers for the first time a facing-page edition of his most recent work: his book-length elegy, Theme of Farewell, and the subsequent poems of That Wandering in the Darkness of Courtyards. These two books form a sequence narrating the illness and premature death, in 2003, of the poet’s wife, the writer Giovanna Sicari, a celebrated poet in her own right; they also trace De Angelis’s turn from grief, through time, back to the world. Immediate, perceptive, and woven from the fabric of everyday life in contemporary Milan, the poems never depart from universal human emotions of despair and awakening. Throughout his long career, De Angelis has renewed lyric poetry with the sheer intensity of his forms and insights, and the volumes offered here have won some of the most important Italian literary awards, including the coveted Premio Viareggio.

These inexorable and beautifully crafted translations will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Italian literature, students of contemporary poetry and literary translation, and those who work in comparative literature. Above all, they are bound to speak to any reader in search of a poet writing at the height of his powers of expression.

English-Language Poetry from Wales, 1789-1806

Elizabeth Edwards — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This anthology presents a selection of poetry from Wales written in English in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. Arranged chronologically, it brings together a wide selection of little-known texts, some of which are published here for the first time. A comprehensive introduction sets the poems in their cultural and historical contexts, while detailed endnotes give concise biographies of the writers—where known—and explain specific references within the texts.

Reckitt's Blue

John Wilkinson — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

An iconic work of Western art, Fragonard’s L’escarpolette, or The Swing, is often reproduced and its famous foreground image of a young woman losing her slipper mid-swing is widely familiar. In Reckitt’s Blue, John Wilkinson explores that well-known scene in a sequence of poems that engages with the image of the flying slipper.

Though born out of visual encounters with art, the title poem of this book also examines artifacts that evoke a violent encounter, weaponry and domestic and ritual objects from the Jolika collection of Papua New Guinean materials in San Francisco's de Young Museum. It is here that Wilkinson’s concentrated lines evidence what the critic Simon Jarvis has called Wilkinson’s “unfree verse,” that reaches into new and unexpected territory in both style and theme. This combination of sensual beauty, intellectual ambition, and political acuity is like nothing else in contemporary English-language poetry. The ‘Tornada’ that separates and stitches together these sequences meditates on fire, clay and glaze, on violence and reflective stillness.

“John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry.”—Patrick McGuinness

Dreams of Waking

Vincent Barletta; Mark L. Bajus; Cici Malik — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers.

With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.

Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni

Vittorio Sereni; Marcus Perryman; Peter Robinson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

One of the most important Italian poets of the last century, Vittorio Sereni (1913–83) wrote with a historical awareness unlike that of any of his contemporaries. A poet of both personal and political responsibility, his work sensitively explores life under fascism, military defeat and imprisonment, and the resurgence of extreme right-wing politics, as well as the roles played by love and friendship in the survival of humanity.

The first substantial translation of Sereni’s oeuvre published anywhere in the world, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is a unique guide to this twentieth-century poet. A bilingual edition, reissued in paperback for the poet’s centenary, it collects Sereni’s poems, criticism, and short fiction with a full chronology, commentary, bibliography, and learned introduction by British poet and scholar Peter Robinson.

Recalculating

Charles Bernstein — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years. As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.

The collection’s title, the now–familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, “The pen is tinier than the sword.” In these poems, Bernstein makes good on his claim that “the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.” In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein’s work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick.

Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange—and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.

Upriver

Carolyn Kremers — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

There is a triumphant and satisfying feeling the first time one returns to a once-unfamiliar place and finally feels like it is home. When strangeness is shed and familiar patterns emerge, there is a deep sense of comfort that is the reward for those who venture into new places. When Carolyn Kremers moved alone to Alaska to teach in Tununak, a village on the Bering Sea, she faced the challenge of making a place for herself in the remote coastal town. Struck by both a sense of adventure and a painful longing for the familiar, she was forced to confront what it really meant to feel at home.

Upriver picks up on the story where Kremers’s previous book, Place of the Pretend People, left off, further exploring what it means to truly love a place and how it feels to return, like a salmon swimming upriver. Setting her story in four distinct locations—Tununak, the Alaska Interior, the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, and Fairbanks—Kremers uses poetry, music, Yup’ik language, and much more to tell her story. Infused with a sense of spirituality, the book will resonate with anyone who has found a new home beyond the familiar.