Harry Thomas – författare

Although best remembered today for his novels, Thomas Hardy thought of himself as a poet forced by circumstance to write fiction for a living. This generous selection of nearly two hundred poems includes such familiar pieces as "During Wind and Rain," "Channel Firing," "Afterwards," "The Darkling Thrush," and "The Oxen," but it will also acquaint readers with many less-celebrated works, among them "To Lizbie Browne," "After the Last Breath," "My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound," "The Haunter," "Old Furniture," "A Procession of Dead Days," "The Harbour Bridge," "At a Country Fair," "Last Love-Word," "Waiting Both," and "Proud Songsters." With an introduction and annotations by Robert Mezey, this Penguin Classics edition will help readers to recognize Hardy as one of the greatest English poets of this century.

The five interviews in this book were conducted by students in “The Art of Poetry,” a course that Harry Thomas taught for several years. The students’ depth of knowledge and keenness of insight into the poets’ work is an affirmation of American education. The poets respond to the students with a frankness and feeling of fraternity that mounts at times to a sort of communion.The poets take up a great range of matters in the interviews the nature of artistic creation, the varieties and difficulties of poetic translation, poetry and politics, religion, popular culture, the contemporary readership for poetry, and the experience of living as a poet in a country not your own. They speak with familiarity and enthusiasm of a number of writers, including Eliot, Joyce, Rilke, Brodsky, Pound, Ovid, Dante, Ralegh, Wordsworth, Keats, Mandelstam, and Wilde. One of the delights of reading these interviews is to observe the poets responding to the same matter for instance, Seamus Heaney speaking of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem, “The World,” and Robert Pinsky speaking at length of Seamus Heaney’s essay, in The Government of the Tongue, on Pinsky’s translation. This is an intimate look into the minds of five of our most celebrated contemporary poets and an invigorating meditation on some of our most human concerns.

The five interviews in this book were conducted by students in “The Art of Poetry,” a course that Harry Thomas taught for several years. The students’ depth of knowledge and keenness of insight into the poets’ work is an affirmation of American education. The poets respond to the students with a frankness and feeling of fraternity that mounts at times to a sort of communion.The poets take up a great range of matters in the interviews the nature of artistic creation, the varieties and difficulties of poetic translation, poetry and politics, religion, popular culture, the contemporary readership for poetry, and the experience of living as a poet in a country not your own. They speak with familiarity and enthusiasm of a number of writers, including Eliot, Joyce, Rilke, Brodsky, Pound, Ovid, Dante, Ralegh, Wordsworth, Keats, Mandelstam, and Wilde. One of the delights of reading these interviews is to observe the poets responding to the same matter for instance, Seamus Heaney speaking of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem, “The World,” and Robert Pinsky speaking at length of Seamus Heaney’s essay, in The Government of the Tongue, on Pinsky’s translation. This is an intimate look into the minds of five of our most celebrated contemporary poets and an invigorating meditation on some of our most human concerns.

For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them— and poets have long chronicled the relationship. In this collection, Robert Frost’s “Birches,” Marianne Moore’s “The Camperdown Elm,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars,” and Zbigniew Herbert’s “Sequoia” stand tall beside Eugenio Montale’s “The Lemon Trees,” Yves Bonnefoy’s “The Apples,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Plum Tree,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Almond Tree,” and A. E. Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or ?owering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.

This volume contains the notes of lectures given at the school on "Nonlinear Dy­ namics in Solids" held at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, 2-6 October 1989 under the patronage of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Nonlinear dynamics has become a highly active research area, owing to many interesting developments during the last three decades in the theoretical analysis of dynamical processes in both Hamiltonian and dissipative systems. Research has been focused on a variety of problems, such as the characteristics of regular and chaotic motion in Hamiltonian dynamics, the problem of quantum chaos, the forma­ tion and properties of solitary spatio-temporal structures, the occurrence of strange attractors in dissipative systems, and the bifurcation scenarios leading to complex time behaviour. Until recently, predictions of the theory have been tested predominantly on insta­ bilities in hydrodynamic systems, where many interesting experiments have provided valuable input and have ledto a fruitful interaction between experiment and theory. Fluid systems are certainly good candidates for performing clean experiments free from disturbing influences: with fluids, compared to solids, it is simpler to prepare good samples, the relevant length and time scales are in easily accessible ranges, and it is possible to do measurements "inside" the fluid, because it can be filled in after the construction of the apparatus. Further, the theory describing the macroscopic dynamics of fluids is well established and contains only very few parameters, all of which have well-known values.

This volume contains the notes of lectures given at the school on "Nonlinear Dy­ namics in Solids" held at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, 2-6 October 1989 under the patronage of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Nonlinear dynamics has become a highly active research area, owing to many interesting developments during the last three decades in the theoretical analysis of dynamical processes in both Hamiltonian and dissipative systems. Research has been focused on a variety of problems, such as the characteristics of regular and chaotic motion in Hamiltonian dynamics, the problem of quantum chaos, the forma­ tion and properties of solitary spatio-temporal structures, the occurrence of strange attractors in dissipative systems, and the bifurcation scenarios leading to complex time behaviour. Until recently, predictions of the theory have been tested predominantly on insta­ bilities in hydrodynamic systems, where many interesting experiments have provided valuable input and have ledto a fruitful interaction between experiment and theory. Fluid systems are certainly good candidates for performing clean experiments free from disturbing influences: with fluids, compared to solids, it is simpler to prepare good samples, the relevant length and time scales are in easily accessible ranges, and it is possible to do measurements "inside" the fluid, because it can be filled in after the construction of the apparatus. Further, the theory describing the macroscopic dynamics of fluids is well established and contains only very few parameters, all of which have well-known values.

Structural Phase Transitions II, like its predecessor (Topics in Current Physics, Vol. 23), presents selected methods and recent advances in the experimental investigation of phase transitions in solids. The two chapters in this volume deal with electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and with nuclear magnetic and nuclear quadrupole resonance (NMR-NQR). Both techniques are particularly sensitive to local properties. The chapter on EPR concentrates largely on the investigation of static properties, including mean-field behaviour, critical and multicritical phenomena, whilst NMR is shown to be a powerful tool for studying nonlinear dynamics, incommensurate transitions, and disordered systems. This book will serve as an excellent introduction to the methodology and applications of EPR and NMR-NQR for all those wishing to become acquainted with these important tools for studying structural phase transitions.

Structural Phase Transitions II, like its predecessor (Topics in Current Physics, Vol. 23), presents selected methods and recent advances in the experimental investigation of phase transitions in solids. The two chapters in this volume deal with electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and with nuclear magnetic and nuclear quadrupole resonance (NMR-NQR). Both techniques are particularly sensitive to local properties. The chapter on EPR concentrates largely on the investigation of static properties, including mean-field behaviour, critical and multicritical phenomena, whilst NMR is shown to be a powerful tool for studying nonlinear dynamics, incommensurate transitions, and disordered systems. This book will serve as an excellent introduction to the methodology and applications of EPR and NMR-NQR for all those wishing to become acquainted with these important tools for studying structural phase transitions.