Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single", or can it accommodate the "impurities" Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions to which Marjorie Perloff addresses herself in the essays collected here. The first group of essays deals with Pound's own poetics as that poetics related to two of his great contemporaries, Stevens and Joyce, as well as to the visual arts of his day. The second group deals with the more technical aspects of verse and prose. In the last four essays, Perloff takes up broader issues, including the current pessimism about the state of poetry, and the work of experimental poets and conceptual poets.

A guidebook of the terms and forms of poetry and an outline of English poetry to assit in comprehension and appreciation

Text: English, Italian (translation)

Miriam Waddington's career as a writer began in the 1940s. In the years since, she has produced a body of work that has made her one of the most widely read poets in Canada. Her ninth collection-the first since Driving Home in 1972-is about light and silence, about places, and, most importantly, about solitude without loneliness, space without emptiness, death without fear. Her verbal discipline, imagery, warmth, toughness, and humour; her multicultural sympathies; her optimism and honesty-all are qualities that make her poetry fresh and intimate.

A collection of thirty poems with illustrations and brief introductory remarks.

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw , applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

This collection of poems on a colourful cast of characters includes a Cantonese grandfather who repaired ships under water, but now refuses to go into the sea, and a mother who arranges a wedding between her long-dead daughter and the deceased boy who attended her viewing ceremony.

Shunra is Aramaic for "cat." Schmetterling is German for "butterfly." In Yoel Hoffmann's new book, these and numerous other creatures, cultures, and languages meet in a magical shimmering hymn to childhood. Hoffmann traces his hero's developing consciousness of the ways-and-wonders of the world as though he were peering through a tremendous kaleidoscope: all that was perceived, all that is remembered, is rendered in fluid fragments of color and light. With remarkable delicacy and sweep, Hoffmann captures childhood from the amazed inside out, and without the backward-looking wash of grown-up sentiment. Instead, the boy's deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The Shunra & the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book, and one of the author's finest to date.

In this exciting interpretation of the Odyssey , the late renowned scholar Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

What is a city? Do people make cities or do cities make people? And can cities have second lives? We all inhabit cities, but what do they mean to us? What do we mean to them? Is the city a real thing in the 21st century? How do we integrate their pasts to their futures? What are the threats facing cities in the western world? These are just some of the questions posed by the fascinating studies in this book. Through essays, poems, psychogeography, short stories, and more, an array of today’s leading writers and thinkers join together to look at cities in the western world. Focusing on the two former industrial heartlands of Glasgow and Pittsburgh, this international and diverse collection is asking the big questions and getting the most creative answers. From Will Self’s psychogeography of Glasgow, to National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes’ stunning poetry, this collection will make you think, feel, fear, and fight for what part cities play in our daily lives. Bold, diverse, and daring, these pieces are a must for anyone who cares about where we live and what it means to live in the urban sprawl of now. Featuring: Will Self, Jane Mccaffery, Edwin Morgan, Ewan Morrison, Terrance Hayes, Allan Wilson, Louise Welsh, Kapka Kassabova, Gerald Stern, Doug Johnstone, Lori Jagielka, Hilary Masters, David Kinloch, Yona Harvey, Sharon Dilworth, Lee Gutkind, Richard Wilson, and many more.

From Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, this is a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon. Beginning with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, the book then supplies close-readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres from the Medieval period to the present. The Comic Mode in English Literature examines such texts as: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Austen's Emma Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Amis's Lucky Jim. Covering poetry, prose and drama, this comprehensive guide will be essential reading for students of comic writing, literary history and genre.

Mary Ellen Mark fell in love with the Indian circus in 1969, during her first trip to India. As she watched a huge hippopotamus walk around the ring with its mouth wide open, wearing a pink tutu, she was struck by the beauty and innocence of the show. She returned to India many times, and in 1989 and 1990 she devoted six months to photographing eighteen circuses, following them around the continent by train, plane, van, and auto-rickshaw. Secretive, highly competitive, and each a closed, self-sufficient society, the circuses embody what Mark calls "a poetry and a craziness that are still uncorrupted, and honest, and pure." Beautifully printed in tritone, this remarkable collection of photographs captures the texture of circus life outside of the ring - exhausting, humorous, poignant, and often bizarre - as well as the affection and devotion that the performers have for each other and their animals. Indian Circus is documentary photography at its finest. The photographs are not only compelling portraits of the performers, but also eloquent and poetic narratives about life in the Indian circus.