Download or read book The Prose Elegy written by John B. Vickery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional English poetic elegists offer both writers and readers hope. After lamenting an individual's death and confronting the mortality of all living things, these poets seek consolation from religion, philosophy, or culture for the inevitability of death. The modern prose elegy, however, follows a different path -- one that determinedly questions all possible resolutions. In The Prose Elegy, John B. Vickery continues the work he began in The Modern Elegiac Temper, which examined the form in British and American poetry. He now considers the works of American and British fiction writers from Henry James to Joan Didion and reveals how the elegy expanded into prose and why it evolved so as to deal not only with death but also with other forms of loss. Focusing on individual works, Vickery explores both the forms the elegy takes throughout the twentieth century and the skeptical and uncertain attitudes of writers struggling to confront the trauma of loss. He offers detailed interpretations of the elegiac components in the works of novelists James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, each of whom forged a distinctive style, as well as chroniclers of a pervasive stoicism, such as Malcolm Lowry and Joan Didion, and writers as nuanced as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and Ford Madox Ford.For these writers, Vickery shows, sorrow intrudes upon the personal, intellectual, and cultural aspects of daily living. By exploring how loss touches each of these areas, their books probe intellectual boundaries and discover new elegiac themes. Truman Capote and John Updike, for example, view memory -- which can disappear quickly -- as inherently sad. They therefore elegize memory. What consoles writers of the modern elegy changes too. In place of Milton's religion or Shelley's philosophy, twentieth-century writers also seek comfort from what also saddens them: family, marriage, and ideas of the self. In The Prose Elegy, Vickery convincingly demonstrates that the elegy remains a dominant mode throughout British and American literature -- with perhaps greater pertinence to our lives than ever before.
Download or read book Department of Elegy written by MARY. BIDDINGER and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-14 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger's poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present. "In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing."--Jennifer L. Knox "The Talking Heads once asked, 'How did I get here?' a rhetorical interrogation that happens at the very point where our past and present lives intersect. Time's fulcrum, and all its possibilities, even the imaginary ones, are the deep gothic heart that powers Mary Biddinger's DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY. This collection savors its sadness but never wallows in it, just as it asks the reader to take all the joys of the world and taste them. If an elegy is a song of mourning, these poems--with their abiding love for the human experience and a generous dollop of empathy--are an invitation to the most rollicking Irish wake you've ever attended. They remind us that we come together not only to mourn but also to celebrate the things that ask us to say goodbye."--Steve Kistulentz "Mary Biddinger's seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and--ultimately--hard-won expertise. The speakers' words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of 'Book' poems ('Book of Hard Passes,' 'Book of the Sea,' 'Book of Misdeeds,' 'Book of Transgressions,' 'Book of Disclosures,' 'Book of Mild Regrets'). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once '...your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'"--Erica Bernheim Poetry. Fiction.
Download or read book Appalachian Elegy written by Bell Hooks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems centered around life in Appalachia addresses topics ranging from the marginalization of the region's people to the environmental degradation it has endured throughout history.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy written by Karen Weisman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The single most comprehensive study of elegy, this Handbook offers groundbreaking scholarship, historical breadth, and responds to recent exciting developments in elegy studies: the explosion in interest in elegies about AIDS, cancer, and war; the reconsideration of the role of women; and elegy's relation to ethics, philosophy, and theory.
Download or read book American Elegy written by Max Cavitch and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Thomas Hardy s Elegiac Prose and Poetry written by Galia Benziman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.
Download or read book Elegy for April written by Benjamin Black and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quirke—the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist—is back, and he's determined to find his daughter's best friend, a well-connected young doctor April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional. Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April's trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April's murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred. Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.
Download or read book Elegy for an Age written by John D. Rosenberg and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2005-02-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.
Download or read book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era written by Tiffany Austin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.
Download or read book Elegy Landscapes Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime written by Stanley Plumly and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.
Download or read book Homeland Elegies written by Ayad Akhtar and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "profound and provocative" new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.
Download or read book City of the Future written by Sesshu Foster and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster's City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis. These poems are, in the poet's words: "Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation 'Wish You Were Here' postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can't live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can't live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future." Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.
Download or read book Seamarks written by Saint-John Perse and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elegy written by Larry Levis and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus's ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden - the horses, the migrant workers - are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work./ It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, /Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't".
Download or read book Chattahoochee written by Patrick Phillips and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The award is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise.
Download or read book The Room where I was Born written by Brian Teare and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Brian Teare's poetry is turning the lyric on its ear, along with the Southern Gothic, the fairy tale, the Old Testament--anything that gets in the way of his powerful voice gets pulled in, chewed up, spit out as a new and frightening (and sexy!) utterance. No one is safe in any of these poems, in any sense of the word. What a brave new voice, livid and gutsy and fresh. --D.A. Powell.
Download or read book Elegy for the Floater written by Teresa Carson and published by Laurel Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...in these poems, (there is) a family of 12 with the mother, father, and speaker as the prime characters....In a brilliant crown of sonnets, its most important character, the speaker's brother, who died a suicide, by drowning, fully emerges. The strictness of the form is never obtrusive--it just does its job...to give a frame, a tension, something for the powerful emotion to work off of or against, thus increasing its powerful sentiment...By writing this book...Teresa Carson has rescued her family and her brother. That a book of poems can do this is a miracle." --Thomas Lux "These poems...convey with beauty and power the emotions that pour from loss, love, trauma, reconciliation and healing. It is difficult in an academic article or a clinical process to capture the full measure of what it is we seek to heal. But in these powerful poems...one can connect to a fragment of the pain, and hope, of Teresa Carson. Her words can teach. Teresa Carson is wise. She shares her wisdom in this remarkable book." --Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Senior Fellow, The Child Trauma Academy
