Alice Quinn - Böcker

It would have pleased Walt Whitman, that poet of urban motion, to envision his words coursing by electrified rail through a diverse, global city of 8 million souls. Since 1992, with the presentation of an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the Poetry in Motion program—co-sponsored by MTA Arts & Design and the Poetry Society of America—has brought more than 200 poems, in whole or in part, before the eyes of millions of subway and bus riders, offering a moment of timelessness in the busy day. The poems are by an eclectic mix of writers, from Sappho and Sylvia Plath to W. H. Auden, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Nikki Giovanni, Patrick Phillips, and Aracelis Girmay. Each of the 100 poems gathered here has, in sixteen lines or less, the power to enliven the quotidian, provide nourishment for the soul, and enchant even the youngest among us.

This is a fascinating window giving on the private thoughts of one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. It follows on Carcanet's publication of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn, and Exchanging Hats, the poet's celebrated watercolours.Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) wrote frequently and intimately in her journals. They document the evolution of her work and illuminate another side of the private life that was the occasion of so many of her poems. This generous selection shows us, in many cases for the first time, the thoughts and passions of a figure unrivalled in her influence on American poetry, an influence registered by poets throughout the Anglophone world.Her prose has proven an essential complement to her poems; David Kalstone wrote in the New York Times that it would be read 'beside her poems, as Keats' letters are beside his... "The Sea & Its Shore" and "In Prison" [are] worthy of Kafka or Poe.' Of Alice Quinn's annotations, Sam Leith wrote in the Telegraph, 'Beautifully and fascinatingly annotated... you can see the great poems themselves emerging. A complete treasure-house.'