Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisGarcía Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader André Breton, which focus on the marvelous, automatic creative processes, and sublimated depictions of reality, Lorca’s surrealist impulse follows a trajectory more in line with the theories of French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille (1897–1962), who was expelled from Breton’s authoritative group. Bataille critiques the lofty goals and ideals of Bretonian surrealism in the pages of the cultural and anthropological review Documents (1929–1930) in terms of a dissident surrealist ethno-poetics. This brand of the surreal underscores the prevalence of the bleak or darker aspects of reality: crisis, primitive sacrifice, the death drive, and the violent representation of existence portrayed through formless base matter such as blood, excrement, and fragmented bodies. The present study demonstrates that Bataille’s theoretical and poetic expositions, including those dealing with l’informe (the formless) and the somber emptiness of the void, engage the trauma and anxiety of surrealist expression in Spain, particularly with reference to the anguish, desire, and death that figure so prominently in Spanish texts of the 1920s and 1930s often qualified as “surrealist.” Drawing extensively on the theoretical, cultural, and poetic texts of the period, García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism offers the first book-length consideration of Bataille’s thinking within the Spanish context, examined through the work of Lorca, a singular proponent of what is here referred to as a dissident Spanish surrealism. By reading Lorca’s “surrealist” texts (including Poeta en Nueva York, Viaje a la luna, and El público) through the Bataillean lens, this volume both amplifies our understanding of the poetry and drama of one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century and expands our perspective of what surrealism in Spain means.Trade ReviewThe title of this meticulous endeavor reveals Richter's intent to consider Spanish surrealism via comparative analyses of García Lorca's artistic works. Richter references a plethora of acknowledged Lorcan scholars who attest to García Lorca's impact on the evolution of Spanish culture and art. The book reflects the current tendency to combine study of literature with study of science or of creative arts such as music and painting. . . .Richter illustrates the volume with six of García Lorca's drawings. Richter's detailed history underscores the unorthodoxy of Spanish surrealism. García Lorca's filmscript for Viaje a la luna and play El público classified as surreal and illustrate the eclecticism of García Lorca's artistic efforts. Abundant notes elucidate the evolution and variations of surrealism from its initial appearance to more recent times. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, professionals. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIllustrations Acknowledgments Permissions Abbreviations Note on Translations Introduction: Foundations for a Dissident Surrealism Chapter 1: Spanish Surrealism’s Absent Father: Sub-Realism from Juan Larrea to Federico García Lorca Chapter 2: Burning in the Void: An Aesthetics of Informe in Lorca’s New York Chapter 3: Truth, Mutation, and the Closure of Representation: Sovereign Identity in Lorca’s Retablillo and El público Chapter 4: Rotten Roses and Other Botanical Bereavements: Vanguardist Floral (Dis)arrangements and Lorca’s Doña Rosita Chapter 5: Lorca and Bataille Beyond Surrealism: Sonetos del amor oscuro and the Erotic Imperative Conclusion: An Ethics of Informe Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisThe Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues.The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.Charlotte Pence of Knoxville, Tennessee, is the author of The Writer's Path: Creative Exercises for Meaningful Essays. She is also the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition for her poetry chapbook The Branches, the Axe, the Missing.

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Book SynopsisMary R. Lefkowitz has extensively revised and rewritten her classic study to introduce a new generation of students to the lives of the Greek poets. Thoroughly updated with references to the most recent scholarship, this second edition includes new material and fresh analysis of the ancient biographies of Greece's most famous poets. With little or no independent historical information to draw on, ancient writers searched for biographical data in the poets' own works and in comic poetry about them. Lefkowitz describes how biographical mythology was created and offers a sympathetic account of how individual biographers reconstructed the poets' lives. She argues that the life stories of Greek poets, even though primarily fictional, still merit close consideration, as they provide modern readers with insight into ancient notions about the creative process and the purpose of poetic composition.Trade ReviewThis second edition is enriched by references to recent studies as well as by deeper analysis. * L'Antiquité Classique (Bloomsbury translation) *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Hesiod Homer Eight Archaic Poets Solon Simonides Pindar Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides Comic Poets Hellenistic Poets Conclusion Abbreviations Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA full survey and overview of the extraordinary flowering of Scottish poetry in the middle ages. The poetry written in Scotland between the late fourteenth and the early years of the sixteenth century is exceptionally rich and varied. The contributions collected here, by leading specialists in the field, provide a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the material. There are introductions to the literary culture of late medieval Scotland and its historical context; separate studies of the writings of James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay; and essays devoted to general themes or genres, including the historiographical tradition, religious verse, romances, and the legendary history of Alexander the Great. A final chapter provides bibliographical guidance on the major advances in the criticism and scholarly study of this poetry during the last thirty years. Contributors: PRISCILLA BAWCUTT, JULIA BOFFEY, JOHN BURROW, ELIZABETH EWAN, R. JAMES GOLDSTEIN, DOUGLAS GRAY, JANET HADLEY WILLIAMS, R. J. LYALL, ANNE MCKIMM, JOANNA MARTIN, RHIANNON PURDIE, NICOLA ROYAN.Trade ReviewOffers a comprehensive guide to early Scots vernacular literature. Illustrated with copious references, it should prove especially useful as a reference point for students and scholars from neighbouring disciplines.[...]This volume supplies a significant and rewarding introduction to the rich literary culture of late medieval Scotland. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY *Can be recommended to students, and others, with confidence. There are indeed some wondrously good essays in it, and...others would do well to match its execution and quality. * INNES REVIEW *A welcome addition to the Boydell & Brewer Companion list. [...] Will be valued by students and scholars alike for its excellent contribution to the field of Scottish literature. MEDIUM AEVUM The most significant publication this year in the world of Middle Scots poetry. * YEAR'S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES, 2008 *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Poets `of this Natioun' - Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams Late Medieval Scotland: a Study in Contrasts - `I will my proces hald': Making Sense of Scottish Lives and the Desire for History in Barbour, Wyntoun and Blind Hary - R James Goldstein `Mark your Meroure be Me': Richard Holland's Buke of the Howlat - Nicola Royan The Kingis Quair and other poems of Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 - Julia Boffey `Of Wisdome and of Guide Governance': Sir Gilbert Hay and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour - Joanna Martin Henryson's Morall Fabillis: Structure and Meaning - Roderick J Lyall Orpheus and Eurydice and The Testament of Cresseid: Robert Henryson's `fine poetical way' - Anne McKim Religious Verse in Medieval Scotland - Priscilla Bawcutt William Dunbar - John A. Burrow Gavin Douglas - Douglas Gray Medieval Romance in Scotland - Sir David Lyndsay - Janet Hadley Williams Guide to Further Reading Index of Manuscripts General Index

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Book SynopsisPoetry Wars is an account of the six-year battle at the National Poetry Society during the 1970s when this highly conservative institution and its journal Poetry Review were taken over by radical poets. The story is told from primary sources, including the Arts Council’s Records at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Eric Mottram Archive at King's College London, and the Barry MacSweeney Collection at Newcastle University, and from contemporary newspaper accounts. The story has never been made public before in documentary detail, though brief reference is often made to it in accounts of contemporary poetry, and anecdotes and hearsay about these events have been in circulation for over twenty years. The repercussions continue to reverberate, and struggles of the same nature continue in the Poetry Society and other cultural institutions today. The question of how an avant-garde ‘negotiates’ with the ‘centre’ it seeks to displace remains crucial, and this issue is of increasing importance to the study of literature and the arts in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.The book is in three sections: the first, ‘Chronology’ (chapters 1-5), tells the story of the events; the second, ‘Themes’ (chapters 6-9), considers the events from various thematic viewpoints, and includes a detailed chapter on the writing, teaching, and editing practice of Eric Mottram, and another on the characteristics of the ‘British Poetry Revival’ of the 1970s. The third section, ‘Documents’, reproduces a series of contemporary documents from the relevant archives, along with new summary data about the personalities involved.Table of Contents Foreword: Andrew Motion Preface: Robert Hampson Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction Chronology 1. The back story and moving in: 1951-1972 2. Editing under pressure: 1972-1975 3. The empire bites back: 1976 4. The Witt investigation: 1976 5. Endgame and aftermath: 1977-2005 THEMES 6. The ‘British Poetry Revival’: some characteristics 7. Eric Mottram as critic, teacher, and editor 8. The Poetry Society transformed 9. Taking a long view Documents Eric Mottram’s ‘Editor’s Note’ (1975) Manifesto for a Reformed Poetry Society (1975) The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1977) Eric Mottram, ‘Editing Poetry Review’ (1979-80) Mottram’s appointment and extensions at Poetry Review Data on issues of Poetry Review edited by Mottram Outline Chronology of ‘The Battle of Earls Court’ The Structure of the Poetry Society Membership of the General Council of the Poetry Society Relevant UK Poetry Organisations in the 1970s Alphabetical Who’s Who Sources General bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHere is a highly informative yet accessibly-written introduction to the life and works of the writer and political thinker Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), who as President of the Muslim League played a vital role in the birth of Pakistan, and is revered today as its spiritual founder. In discussing Iqbal's thought, and analysing his poetry and prose at some length, Mir suggests that Iqbal represents a paragon for modern Muslims, caught as they are between tradition and modernity. Iqbal's attempt to integrate Islamic and Western elements in his intellectual, artistic and political lives makes him a figure that Muslims may respect and emulate, since he declared his passionate loyalty to the religion of Islam while at the same time differentiating between the eternal, or essential, and the historical, or incidental, in the Islamic tradition.

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Book Synopsis"A Manner of Utterance" offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.

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Book SynopsisWhere poetry is dominated by amateurs, its key ideas are the ones that nobody owns. Underneath the glittering cavalcade of conscious and innovative art is another world of poetry without technique, protected from change. Can we find a history of what seems to be most inaccessible to time? Can we write a history of the unheard voices, articulate the unconscious and write a stylistics of the conventional? Most people who write poetry are untouched by theory and have no expectations of winning prizes. Is there a much deeper, inarticulate, pulse of style history, almost detached from reflexivity and concealed from view by an elite who write directly from theory? The 1950s now seem like a mystery, only remembered as the factory which produced all the rebels of the succeeding two decades. But its rejection of rhetoric opened the gates to the amateur poet, its existential preoccupation with authenticity gave the unknown poet a chit to justify writing for and about themselves alone. It seems as if the 1950s have never stopped. The return to them is an attempt to crystallise the unchanged, the underlying stock of linguistic practices which was damaged by all the changes that washed over it but was finally intact, indifferent, unlearning. A kind of safe world where dissidents didn't rush in to subvert the text at every minute and where there was a comforting shared feeling among literary people. An era of naivety, virtue-and Close Reading. Did Pop and protest poetry come out of the Church's inner crisis on discovering that urban youth had given up church-going and that its noble oratory seemed irrelevant to social issues? Existentialism looks at the concrete and close at hand and turns out to be looking at white goods, pass marks for the bourgeoisie. Inhibitions seemed to be part of the kitchen equipment. How would we recover such a history? Surely, by discarding names and isolating styles, entities recovered by emphasis from a vast amorphous mass of data. So we address the domestic anecdote, the Pop poem, the academic poem, the communalist poem, the Oxford Line, the late Christian poem. These foci allow us to define and reflect on what seemed to be transparent and anti-technical. They reach highlights, where we look at supremely gifted exponents of the styles. The mass of material is far greater than any classification can round up and frame. Looking for tensions within the material, we recover a break within the gatekeepers' rules. A trail through a static landscape leads to a legend about a crisis and the fall of a wall: an unmarked point during the 1980s where the restrictions failed to turn up for work and so the 1950s ended, giving way to a new regime of the 'post-modern' or 'deregulated'.

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Book SynopsisThis is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Caroline Bergvall, Jennifer Moxley and Andrea Brady carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography.

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Book SynopsisThese essays cover the range of George Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s.

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Book SynopsisThis book is concerned with the complex and uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry and poetics. Dealing with such major figures as Lorca, Rilke, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Niedecker, Duncan and Oppen and of more contemporary poets and poetry in the modernist and post-modernist lineage of Pound and Williams, the essays explore the work of these poets to see how it embodies our contemporary skepticism concerning language, representation and reality, showing that even as the poems depict or create values, they appear to be haunted by the possibility of inadequacy. Thus one of the book's major themes concerns how contemporary poets embody uncertainties, yet manage, in virtually the same breath, in the same line or stanza, to articulate both affirmation and doubt. Questions of form and meaning are discussed in the essays covering individual poets and their poems as well as in those which deal with contemporary avant garde movements, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry, poetics and considerations of the act of writing itself. As well, these essays try to say something about the literary environment of contemporary poetry.Poetry today is, for the most part, inflected by the American experimentalism of Walt Whitman, the "make it new" of innovators such as Pound and Williams and by infusions of European dada and surrealism into the poetic psyche. More recently, in avant-garde poetic movements, as in contemporary criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist thought have had much influence. These availabilities, this book hopes to show, have produced an unparalleled richness of poetry and thought about poetry, offering not only a reflection of our uneasiness but also an active shaping force which, through the power of poetic language, provides the hope of meaning for both history and experience.

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Book Synopsis"This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or "cusp" I'm concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed."-from Geraldine Monk's introduction to this volume

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Book SynopsisWhen Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

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Book SynopsisWhen in his seventieth year Roy Fisher published Interviews Through Time (2000), he added and Selected Prose, which meant in effect three pieces: 'Antebiography', 'Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher' and 'Talks for Words'. The enlarged second edition of Interviews Through Time (2013), a volume of interviews only, made it possible for those three pieces to join many others in this first substantial gathering of Roy Fisher's occasional prose writings. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013 brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, 'owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends'. Together they provide a unique guide to the complex sources and influences on such distinctive works such as City, The Ship's Orchestra, and A Furnace as well as Fisher's oeuvre of individual poems. As Peter Robinson notes in his editor's Introduction, these writings in their various ways provide 'essential aids to those ramblers' who 'choose to stray' among the poetry and imaginative prose of a key contemporary English poet.Table of ContentsAuthor Note Introduction Note on the Text I. Antebiography Meanwhile Antebiography Brum Born Talks for Words The Morden Tower My Trip to Brighton Six Towns Memoir of Richard Caddel At the Funeral of Stuart Mills License My Roving Hands II. Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher Poet on Writing Note on The Cut Pages Roy Fisher writes - Handsworth Compulsions Preface to A Furnace Birmingham's What I Think With: Programme Note Reply to Paul Lester Inside A Various Art Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher III. On Poets and Others Death by Adjectives David Prentice The Green Fuse Mary Fitton's Foreshores On John Cowper Powys' Letters Thomas Campion On a Study of Dada On Ezra Pound Debt to Mr Bunting At a Tangent On a Study of Robert Creeley On Kenneth Rexroth's An Autobiographical Novel Gael Turnbull Foreword to Spleen (Nicholas Moore/Baudelaire) Introduction to Jeff Nuttall's Selected Poems Concerning Joseph Brodsky Coat Hanger A Checklist of Roy Fisher's Occasional Prose by Derek Slade

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Book SynopsisIn 1993, say, the term Performance Writing, if used at all, suggested simply writing for performance. By 2011, when the author of this collection became the first Professor of Performance Writing, it had attained a much wider-indeed international-currency in discussions of contemporary writing, and had entered the curriculum of a range of courses well beyond its intense first conceptual and pedagogic development at the adventurous Dartington College of Arts. The task-and indeed the task of many of these essays-had been to fill out the terms for an approach to writing that looked beyond and beside literature for its sources, references and material practices. These other frames included: the rapid changes taking place within the technologies for producing, circulating and receiving text; a 'turn to writing' within other cultural practices, especially perhaps its integral presence within visual and sonic culture; the increasing textuality of the shared environment (words in public places, for example); and finally, philosophical preoccupations with the idea of performativity and its entailment with language.

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Book SynopsisThis companion volume to On Performance Writing, with implicated readings, brings together most of the essays-taking a deliberately broad view of that term so as to include, for example, two single-page visual essays and one sonnet-on the reading and writing of poetry by the poet and teacher, John Hall. The collection is in two parts. The first, starting with the often cited 'Writing and Not Writing', takes on, in the spirit of poetics, current issues for the category of poetry, considered both formally and contextually, and with particular interest in reading as a practice in which poems are actions and events rather than capturable things. The longer second part develops these thoughts through readings of specific, mostly contemporary, poems: the poets whose work is read are not intended to represent a proposed new canon. They have all, though, contributed significantly to a growing body of work in recent decades that brings together the social and bodily pleasures (and displeasures) of poetry with the ethical demands of truthfulness. They include Andrea Brady, Kelvin Corcoran, Allen Fisher, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, Peter Hughes, John James, Nicholas Johnson, R.F. Langley, Karen Mac Cormack, Peter Middleton, Geraldine Monk, Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, F.T. Prince, J.H. Prynne, John Riley, Peter Riley and John Wieners.

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Book SynopsisIn Spite of All is a memoir by a Portuguese poet, of another Portuguese poet: Alberto de Lacerda, an almost legendary figure in expatriate circles. Lacerda lived for many years in London, with sojourns also in Boston and in Austin, Texas, when lectureships took him away, but he always returned to his adopted city. A fine poet, Lacerda also had a talent for friendship, which is amply borne out by Luis Amorim de Sous'a touching memoir of his friend.

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."Table of ContentsIntroduction by Ian BrintonChapter 1: Summary & Introduction: Critical Reservations about "Modern" or Experimental Poetry Chapter 2: The Concept of Metre and the Relation of Prosody to MeaningChapter 3: Prose and Speech as Criteria for the Organisation of Poetic DiscourseChapter 4: The Influence of Humanist Notions of Organisation on Sixteenth Century PoeticsChapter 5: The Harmony of the World and the Harmony of Verse: an Idea in DegradationChapter 6: Sound and Sense: the Direct Action of Poetic Rhythm on the Passions and the Theory of ExpressionChapter 7: Natural Rhythmic Standards and the Demand for Prosodic VarietyChapter 8: Conclusion: Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of LanguageReport by J.H. Prynne

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Book SynopsisFirst published posthumously in 1978 by Manchester University Press, this volume turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defence of "all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different from prose." According to the author, such devices are responsible for poetry's most significant effect-not pleasure or ornament or some kind of special expressivity, but the production of "alternative imaginary orders."

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Book SynopsisPanegyric poetry, in both Arabic and Persian, was one of the most important genres of literature in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Jocelyn Sharlet argues that panegyric poetry is important not only because it provides a commentary on society and culture in the medieval Middle East, but also because panegyric writing was one of the key means for individuals to gain social mobility and standing during this period. This is particularly so within the context of patronage, a central feature of social order during these times. Sharlet places the medieval Arabic and Persian panegyric firmly within its cultural context, and identifies it as a crucial way of gaining entry to and movement within this patronage network. This is an important contribution to the fields of pre-modern Middle Eastern and Central Asian literature and culture.Trade Review'This is a work of very wide, very thorough and very impressive scholarship. Dr. Sharlet's use of primary sources is exemplary in its scope and in its ability to identify what is apposite to illustrate a given argument. Work on praise poetry is the great lacuna of modern scholarship on Middle Eastern medieval verse; it is an absolutely crucial genre (and indeed much of the rhetoric of other poetic genres in these cultures demonstrably derives from the rhetoric of praise poetry), and yet there are virtually no good discussions of what poets in this genre did, or how and why they did it. Dr. Sharlet's book is easily the most important contribution to our understanding of this important genre that I am aware of.' - Dick Davis, Chair and Professor of Persian, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University; 'Unlike many of her predecessors, who have studied patronage in the context of panegyric poetry or in passing as part of their analysis of narrative texts, in this book Sharlet undertakes to dissect the interplay of risk and success as the stuff not only of sponsored literature within a literary patronage system, but also as the instantiation of a form of social order. This is an ambitious, original, and important text - one that will set the bar higher for all who work in medieval Arabic and Persian literature.' - Margaret Larkin, Professor of Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, BerkeleyTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: The Rhetoric of Patronage: Building Possibilities Chapter 2: Panegyric Discourse: Elaborating on Possibilities Chapter 3: Awareness of Patronage Relationships in Panegyric Poetry Chapter 4: Connections of Interaction Chapter 5: Uncertainty and Flexibility in Patronage Chapter 6: Flexibility and Social Mobility in Patronage

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Book SynopsisJohn Manson's collection of letters to MacDiarmid, or to Christopher Grieve, or to Hugh or Chris or Christie or Hughie, is a major work. It is the fruit of a lifetime of dedicated scholarly research, meticulous, self-effacing study in libraries, most deeply in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library, and follows his initial co-editorship with David Craig of the first Penguin paperback edition of MacDiarmid's Selected Poems (1970), and his later co-editorship of The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems, with Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (2003). 'He is a fine poet and translator himself, and his small-press publications are to be sought out and read closely. However, this is a monumental achievement: a collection so rich in diversity, covering historical epochs, strata of human character, social engagement, political motivation and accomplishment, that it will take some time before its impact and value really sinks in and embeds itself in modern literary and political culture - especially in Scotland!' - from the Introduction by Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow.Trade Review'[A] magisterial selection by John Manson - one of the most assiduous and effective labourers in the MacDiarmid vineyard for no less than seven decades. The printed letters are accompanied by detailed and informative annotations, and the book is further enlivened by more than thirty period photographs and other reproductions. [It] offers testimony to the extraordinary breadth of MacDiarmid's intellectual circle.' Professor Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen 'Manson's industry, and his enthusiasm for MacDiarmid, are overwhelming. Not for the first time, [he] has unearthed material that alters our view of his hero.' Brian Smith, The New Shetlander, Voar Issue 2012. 'This is a fascinating book, one to keep within reach for stimulation or escape from the troubles of the day.' Paul Henderson Scott, Scots Independent newspaper, March 2012. 'Reading this meticulously researched collection of hundreds of letters .. opens a window on a whole period of ideological struggle for national recognition, socialism and opposition to imperialism and war.' Jean Turner, Morning Star, January 2012Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Hugh MacDiarmid: Put it to the Touch - An Introduction to Dear Grieve by Alan Riach. List of Abbreviations. Illustrations. Titles of Books Frequently Cited. Hugh MacDiarmid's Addresses. Note on the Text. The Letters - The 1920s; The 1930s; The 1940s; The 1950s; The 1960s; The 1970s. Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid which have previously appeared in print. Biographical List of Correspondents. Index

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Book SynopsisThe late Annemarie Schimmel drew exhaustively on an enourmous range of sources both ancient and modern to create this thorough survey of a unique body of literature. Travelling from continent to continent and across the centuries, this story of Islamic poetry encompasses a wide spectrum of traditions and cultures, from Arabic religious verse to the ecstasies of the persian Sufis and the popular folk poetry of India and Pakistan.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. Flowers of the Desert: The Development of Arabic Mystical Poetry 2. Tiny Mirros of Divine Beauty: Classical persian Mystical Poetry 3. Sun Triumphal - Love Triumphant: Maulana Rumi and the Metaphors of Love 4. The Voice of Love: Mystical poetry in the Vernaculars 5. God's Beloved and Intercessor for Man: Poetry in Honor of the Prophet Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography Notes Bibliography Index of Selected Quotations Index of Proper Names Index of Technical Terms

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Book SynopsisThe Angel of History bears witness to the moral disasters of our times: war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on memory – how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems are fragmented, discordant, reflecting the effects of such experience, but forming a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations we make to survive what is unsurvivable. It is divided into five sections dealing with the atrocities of war in France, Japan and Germany as well as Carolyn Forché's own experiences in Beirut and El Salvador. The title figure, the Angel of History – a figure imagined by Walter Benjamin – can record the miseries of humanity yet is unable either to prevent these miseries from happening or from suffering from the pain associated with them. Kevin Walker, in the Detroit Free Press, called the book 'a meditation on destruction, survival and memory'. Don Bogen, in The Nation, saw this as a logical development, since Forché’s work with her poetry of witness anthology Against Forgetting was 'instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic mediation on the broader contexts – historical, aesthetic, philosophical – which include [the 20th]…century’s atrocities,' wrote Bogen. And Steven Ratiner, reviewing the work for the Christian Science Monitor, called it one that 'addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the twentieth-century political landscape – and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit'.Trade Review"The "Angel of History" is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English."-- Calvin Bedient, "The Threepenny Review""The poignant "cri de couer" of this singular work most affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time."-- Robert Creeley"I don't think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting."-- James Merrill"A dark, richly textured, complicated work...["The Angel of History"] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing."-- Liz Rosenberg, "Boston Globe""Poetry of consummate beauty...reminiscent of Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'"-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

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