John Gery - Böcker

Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of Pure Spirit presents the life and writings of Armenian poet Hmayeak Shems (1896-1952). The Armenian Genocide of 1915 devastated Shems, who lost his family and home. For eight years he wandered in exile, his voice extinguished by anguish. Yet from debilitating isolation, Shems found a lyrical mastery of Armenian identity and modern spirit. Incontrovertibly shaped by his people's tragic history, Shems speaks simply yet profoundly. Illuminated by his poetry, this biography chronicles his travels, encounters, and thought to reveal a more compelling and complete portrait of Shems than previously known.Cover portrait of Hmayeak Shems by Ashot Zorian.

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country.There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country.There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

This volume gathers fifteen essays that offer new interpretations onPound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally.It includes authors from nine different countries and covers Pound’s work fromhis beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of thecentury through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator tothe first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on totranslations of The Cantos spanningthe last fifty years. Although, in our own era, such terms as “cross-culturalthinking,” “globalism,” “transnationalism,” and “internationalism” remain fluidand can often stir controversy in literary studies, especially in discussion ofthe impact of modernism, the place of Ezra Pound as a prominent modernist figureworldwide has remained unquestioned throughout the last century.