Gustaf Sobin – författare

Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled—the art of stalking the flies that lay their eggs directly over the truffles—every winter since childhood on his family estate in Provence. Since the death of his young wife, Julieta, the truffles have come to represent something far more than a delicacy for Cabassac's palate: they trigger an evocative sequence of dream visions in which he and his lost wife enter, on winter nights, a state of intimate and prolonged communion. As Cabassac becomes increasingly involved in his dream life with Julieta, he loses his hold on his teaching obligations, on managing his estate, on his waking life altogether. Set against the fading of traditional Provencal culture and an incandescent Mediterranean landscape, The Fly- Truffler celebrates a love that, by its very ardor, outlasts a lifetime. Reading group guide included.

Dying scriptwriter Philip Nilson spends his last days writing about a forgotten but critical moment in the life of Greta Garbo. He tracks that most elusive of film stars to an episode in Constantinople in 1924, where, under the tutelage of impresario Mauritz Stiller, Garbo emerges as one of the dominant icons of the twentieth century. Enthralled by the story, Nilson awakens to the memory of a long-forgotten first love that, he discovers, has held him in its grip for the better part of his life. This glowing novel is both a contemporary narrative celebrating a glorious moment in the history of cinema and an allegory touching upon the very meaning of existence.

Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected terrain: the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence itself: Artifacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons. As much travel writing as meditative discourse, Luminous Debris is enhanced by a prose that tracks, questions, and reflects on the materials invoked. Sobin engages the reader with precise descriptions of those very materials and the messages to be gleaned from their examination, be they existential, ethical, or political. An American expatriate living in Provence for the past thirty-five years, Gustaf Sobin shares his enthusiasm for his adopted landscape and for a vertical interpretation of its strata.In Luminous Debris he creates meaning out of matter and celebrates instances of reality, past and present.

Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalene - these tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobin's lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed "Luminous Debris", "Ladder of Shadows" picks up where the former left off: with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late Roman and early Christian ruins in his adopted region of Provence, sifting through iconographic, architectural, and sacramental vestiges to shed light on nothing less than the existential itself.

Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled every winter since childhood on his family estate. Since the death of his young wife Julieta, however, the truffles come to represent far more than a delicacy for his palette. They trigger now a series of dream visions in which he and his lost wife communicate.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest poems brought together in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems."Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson

Gustaf Sobin's Uncollected Poems brings under one set of covers some fugitive pieces that did not make it into his official posthumous Collected Poems (2010), together with some occasional works and two full-length volumes that stood outside the normal trajectory of his poetry: Articles of Light and Elation and Sicilian Miniatures, the former published in a bibliophile edition and the latter never distributed commercially. This Uncollected fills out the picture of the author's work more fully than ever before."Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson

It was the last chance Guy Fallows would give himself. A stunning 16th-century Provencal dovecote he'd found while hiking had given him both the inspiration and the material necessary to write a new novel. It had also led him to Solange Daubigny who'd inherited that seemingly weightless structure, years earlier. Together they found themselves enveloped in a clandestine affair: each Thursday, the elegant, highly sedate Solange flourished under the pseudonym of Frederique. As their passion grew, so did the tower in Fallows' novel.The dovecote also led Fallows to reconstitute its recent history. For, during the war years, it had been restored to its present glory by an obscure Italian stonemason, Guido Stampelli. How, though, had Solange's mother - who'd commissioned the work - paid for such labour, given that she'd been left penniless by her husband, despised collaborator who'd fled to West Africa?In Gustaf Sobin's consummate narrative one hypnotically absorbing love story reflects another. Like the limestone monument itself his novel soars to a power quite its own.Author of four novels, three of essays on Provence, and many volumes of poetry, Gustaf Sobin lived in Provence for over 40 years.

Venus Blue is a novel in pursuit of its own subject: a 1930s bush pilot and 'gorgeous vagabond' named Molly Lamanna. As the focal point of an intense devotion, Molly, nonetheless, defies description: the closer one gets, the more ambivalent she becomes. Discovered by Hollywood at the edge of an airstrip in the Mojave desert, she manages to elude not only those about her, but - as both amnesiac and pilot prone to long, self-absolving flights up the Californian coastline - herself as well. Set in film-noir chiaroscuro, the novel is narrated by a present-day Hollywood memorabilia collector, Stefan Hollander. Something in the enticing vacuity of Molly's aspect as she flickers across a late-night television screen arrests his attention. Soon after, he comes to possess a journal, a kind of confessional, bound in flamboyant sapphire, kept by the one who most avidly worshipped at Molly's shrine: Millicent Rappaport, herself a Hollywood beauty. Of all the veneration Molly would incite in the various broken or obliterated segments of her life, Millicent's alone would come closest to capturing the spirit, if not the heart, of this glorious escapee.

Gustaf Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable now for some two years. Given our long association with the author - his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published three chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s - we are delighted to be able to bring this major volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, amongst his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard."I can't think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse." -Michael Palmer "Sobin is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed." -Robert Duncan"Gustaf Sobin is sui generis, one of the deep figures of recent times. He is one of our dark and scintillating stars, his poetry a gift to our art now when there is a dearth of beauty and of myriadness of intelligence." -Michael McClure"Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid - and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson"This expatriate American poet is a national treasure." -Rain Taxi