Sam Hamill – författare

The Infinite Moment is a personal selection made by a poet known for his elegant translations from several languages, Chinese, Japanese, Estonian, Latin, and now ancient Greek. Drawing from the classic Lyra Graeca and The Greek Anthology, Sam Hamill has made new, American translations of poems in the thousand-year tradition that begins with Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anakreon in the 6th century C.E. The love poems, epigrams, and sly invective of over forty poets remind us once again of the deep wellspring of ancient Greece that nourished the roots of so many cultures.The Greek lyric poem was made to be performed with musical accompaniment, but like its modern descendent it seeks to articulate the experience of insight attained in the infinity of the moment. Says Hamill: "The fundamental experiences of humanity remain simultaneously universal and particular. The tears of Lymnos on the banks of the Akeron are the same tears Hitomaro shed a thousand years later on the shores of the Omi Sea."

Habitation collects the best poetry from a career spanning more than forty years by the distinguished northwest poet-editor-translator, Sam Hamill. Drawn from fifteen volumes of celebrated poetry, whether in brief haiku-like poems or long-ranging narratives, Habitation presents a lyrical voice is unique in American poetry today. Jim Harrison has declared, "Hamill has reached the category of a National Treasure," and Hayden Carruth has written, "[His] poetry is no less than essential.

Avocations collects the best of Sam Hamill's prose on poetry over the last 18 years, presenting insightful readings of Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Odysseas Elytis, Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, John Logan and many others together with critical commentary on poetry in translation and the practice of poetry in general.

Over the past twenty years, Sam Hamill has published over than thirty volumes of original poetry, essays, and translations of poetry from classical Chinese, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Latin and Estonian. As founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, he has made service to poetry a way of life for nearly a quarter century. But it is in his poetry, in his passionate, lucid insistence that poetry is an essential component of enlightenment, that he distin-guishes himself. "He teaches us" Larry Smith has written in Small Press, "that the 'Zen' poem is any poem that is truly alive to the moment." Selecting from among all his published volumes of poetry except the book-length Triada, and adding over fifty pages of previously uncollected new work, Hamill brings the poetics of "engaged Buddhism" face-to-face with a sweeping erudition and technical virtuosity drawn from eastern and western traditions.Informed by personal experience as various as building his own home in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest, teaching for thirteen years in prison writing workshops in Alaska, Washington, and California, teaching in artists-in-education programmes across America, or his decades-long commitment to working on behalf of domestic-violence programs, non-violence and conscientious objection, his poetry is deeply felt and plain-spoken, at once scholarly and accessible.