Search results for ""Author Samuel Hazo""

For over fifty years, Hazo’s poetry has meditated on themes of mortality and love, passion and art, and courage and grace in a style that is unmistakably his own. In this new collection, he offers his most candid reflections on the passage of time and the tenderness of the present moment.By turns convivial and introspective, these poems explore the complex synchronicity between life and art, and the connections between the personal and the political. With sharp clarity and deep emotion, Hazo continues his pursuitof wisdom and discovery through the act of expression.

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For over five decades, Samuel Hazo has taught his readers about literature and life with generosity and awareness, taking everyday experiences and translating them into songs at once familiar and surprising. In his poetry, fiction, essays, and plays, Hazo, in a style that is unmistakably his own, extols the wonderment and discovery that emerge in the act of writing, in the movement toward wisdom that results from the expression of feeling. The Stroke of a Pen is a collection of the occasional essays on a variety of subjects, from the relationship between poetry and public speech, to the pursuit of the literary life, to reading within a cultural context governed by power relations. Two essays focus on religion and literature, and the final five include a literary travel essay on Provence, a counterpointing one on the virtues of not traveling but remaining home, a lighter essay that extends the discussion of home to houses, a memory piece on the actor Gregory Peck, and a personal reflection on the author's retirement. Throughout, Hazo is belletristic in his approach, calling on such writers as T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, Jacques Maritain, and Nathan A. Scott, Jr., who deeply influences Hazo's thinking and writing in this entertaining collection.

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In Hazo’s latest collection, The Less Said, the Truer, he brings together new poems as well as selections from three previous books—They Rule the World (2016), When Not Yet is Now (2019), and The Next Time We Saw Paris (2020). The author’s poignant reflections on life and death, love and loss, and age and memory allow the poems to be deeply personal while also connecting with the everyday experiences of readers. Influenced by America’s incessant wars since 2003 and the militaristic influence they have had on society, Hazo offers insight that disrupts complacency and returns us to our true natures. In keeping with his poetic style, there are no "passenger words" in these poems. Every word counts.

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Samuel Hazo has won acclaim for his novels, plays, essays, and memoirs, but he is best known for his poetry. This is his thirtieth collection of poems.In When Not Yet Is Now, as in all his work, Hazo finds the quiet nobility in the quotidian. He speaks with subtlety and humor about the stuff of ordinary life and inevitable loss.Hazo served as Pennsylvania’s Poet Laureate from 1993 to 2003. He has won many awards and holds twelve honorary doctorates. Poet Dana Gioia notes that he “has been a constant and positive presence in the American poetry world for over half a century.”Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur praised Hazo’s poems as “a spare, sparkling flow of good talk . . . utterly engaging.”

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A collection of Hazo's selected poems spanning 50 years. Tackling themes of family, faith, and war, Hazo writes with immense lyricism and humanity.

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These essays focus on the absence of the poetic imagination in much contemporary poetry and criticism. The retreat of poets into craft, gender, race, and so on has made poetry seem more like sociology than literature. Such lack of insight can be attributed to forces in American society that place undue emphasis on technique and identity rather than talent and vision, currently evident as well in contemporary popular music, dance, and art. There is a similar imaginative deficiency in the teaching of literature and in political oratory and social commentary.The consequence where poetry is concerned is the acceptance and anthologizing of work that relies on novelty or shock for notice. We are left with mere appearances instead of essences. In this collection, Samuel Hazo calls for a return to forms of expression in which poet and reader engage in a conversation that speaks to the human condition, where less is more—The Power of Less.

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This book, written in 1957, arises from the encounter of two men: the American poet Samuel Hazo and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. They met on September 12, 1956, at Maritain’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. Hazo sought to engage Maritain’s diffuse writings in aesthetics by bringing them into conversation with the great voices of the English literary tradition, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Keats.Hazo was also striving to understand and articulate his own experience of the creative process. Then at the beginning of his writing life, he would later emerge as a leading voice in American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty collections, the winner of many awards, the founder of the International Poetry Forum, and a National Book Award finalist.The World within the Word is the only book about Jacques Maritain for which Maritain himself wrote a foreword.

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For over five decades, Samuel Hazo has taught his readers about literature and life with generosity and awareness, taking everyday experiences and translating them into songs at once familiar and surprising. In his poetry, fiction, essays, and plays, Hazo, in a style that is unmistakably his own, extols the wonderment and discovery that emerge in the act of writing, in the movement toward wisdom that results from the expression of feeling. The Stroke of a Pen is a collection of the occasional essays on a variety of subjects, from the relationship between poetry and public speech, to the pursuit of the literary life, to reading within a cultural context governed by power relations. Two essays focus on religion and literature, and the final five include a literary travel essay on Provence, a counterpointing one on the virtues of not traveling but remaining home, a lighter essay that extends the discussion of home to houses, a memory piece on the actor Gregory Peck, and a personal reflection on the author's retirement. Throughout, Hazo is belletristic in his approach, calling on such writers as T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, Jacques Maritain, and Nathan A. Scott, Jr., who deeply influences Hazo's thinking and writing in this entertaining collection.

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