Bokus
Helen Hennessy Vendler - Soul Says, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 1996

Soul Says

On Recent Poetry

Av Helen Hennessy Vendler

359 kr

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Beskrivning
“Vendler again demonstrates—if proof were needed—why she is the finest poetry reviewer in the country.”—Boston GlobeThe renowned critic of Stevens, Keats, and Herbert turns an incisive gaze to her contemporaries, from Louise Glück to Rita Dove.Lyric poetry, says the incomparable Helen Vendler, is defined by immediacy. If the novel aspires to represent life in all its complexity, with characters woven into their manifold historical and sociological contexts, lyric captures the human being in the here and now: as a fragment, an eruption, or a “set of warring passions independent of time and space.” Fiction constructs selfhood, but poetry gives us the soul. Drawing its title from a poem by Jorie Graham, Soul Says collects twenty-one of Vendler’s best essays on the force, beauty, and formal intricacies of late-twentieth-century verse. Whether meditating on Graham’s roving cinematography of the mind, anatomizing the inversions of classical elegy in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” or exploring Charles Simic’s sinister landscapes, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and helps readers appreciate the depth and richness of even the simplest texts. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, pulsing with musicality, uses arrangement, pacing, and metaphor to illuminate the hidden corners of inner life. Inner life cannot be entirely disentangled from the history: Rita Dove cannot write as if she were unencumbered by her life as a Black woman in America any more than Seamus Heaney can avoid his experience as a Northern Irishman who lived through the Troubles. But Vendler’s painstaking attention to form—Dove’s angular stanzas, Heaney’s organicism—brilliantly reveals how such great poets exceed the sum of their biographical parts. To read their poetry is to see their lives transfigured, and, in the process, to reconsider our own.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 1996-10-01
  • Mått: 156 x 235 x 19 mm
  • Vikt: 408 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 284
  • Förlag: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 9780674821477
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Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Recensioner i media

[review of Soul Says, The Given and the Made, and The Breaking of Style]Helen Vendler is justly admired as the author of critical studies of George Herbert, Keats, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Her current project is a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She is also the most influential reviewer of contemporary poetry in English: her reviews of new books of poetry appear frequently and forcefully in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Parnassus, and other journals. Soul Says...is a collection of her recent reviews...[H]er gifts are so immense...The new books have a number of such [acute] analyses, continuously alert to the detail of the poems...One of the pleasures of reading Vendler's criticism is that of seeing a poet's achievement lavishly appreciated...The most valuable chapters in the three new books are those in which Vendler leads us through difficult poems...After [she does so], the poem is still to be read, and read again, word by word, line, sequence, image cut into image. We have to get back from the discursive model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work.

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