Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction – serie

John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

"In Wyatt Prunty's poetry, familiar things and places, old things and new things, lost things, lost faces are recovered and illumined by a language both skewed and precise".--Walker Percy. (Poetry)

This second collection by award-winning poet Philip Dacey runs the gamut from existential mysteries to domestic dramas. Dacey writes in both traditional and free verse forms, and organizes these selections into four sections whose focus gradually shifts from the inexplicable phenomena of "apple-doors" to the cultural otherworldliness of a foreign country, in "Spanish artifacts". The third section, "nipples rise to spirit", traces a child's growth to middle age, with particular reference to sex and family, while "the presence of Presence" redefines the religious experience.

Winner of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for the Best Book in Poetry, Texas Institute of LettersJohn Briuth treats the world with extraordinary wit and subtle humar-rare enough qualities in much twentieth-century poetry. Bricuth writes with gusto on a variety of subjects, from the act of writing poetry to the lives of Glenn Miller and Laurel and Hardy. His rare command of verse forms and wide range of tone make his work a distinctive addition to contemporary American poetry.

Poems deal with the past, parenthood, mortality, nature, loneliness, violence, beauty, neighbors, and sleep

In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

In Wyatt Prunty's new collection of poems, people either keep their balance or, doubting it, tip and fall. A small girl struggles to ride her bike among older children already 'stable as little gyros.' Ice-skating with friends, a boy suddenly drops from sight, and drowns. The poet of Paterson stands at the edge of his Jersey waterfall and knows that 'good balance is belief.' Poising and counterpoising themselves in settings at once fixed and erosive, the people in these poems move through 'one long revisionary river that curls back against itself, as if the only way to move ahead was by deflecting back.'

The author of "Eelgrass" and "The Kentucky Stories" now offers a collection of "mysterious and beautiful" (Lee Smith) stories, "as subtle, syntactically graceful, and beautiful as any I've seen" (Toby Olson).

"Mr. Dixon wields a stubbornly plain-spoken style; he loves all sorts of tricky narrative effects. And he loves even more the tribulations of the fantasizing mind, ticklish in their comedy, alarming in their immediacy".--"New York Times Book Review".

"Home" is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries. In "The Raft", a ten-year-old boy struggles with the shock of his father's leap from a ninth-floor window of the failed family business. A middle-aged woman invites her widowed mother to move in with her - and then the two of them must fight it out to see which one of them has made the greater "sacrifice". A high school senior, more interested in boys than in fruit flies, uses her genetics project - "Sex-Linked Traits" - to probe the foibles of her own high-strung family. In "Uncle Maggot", a little girl, unwilling to say goodbye at her father's coffin, shocks the mourners with a very odd performance.Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".

Through his collections of poems Timothy Steele has earned the reputation as a highly regarded poet who continue to work in meter. This volume brings together 35 new poems that extend the scope and deepen the spirit of his previous work. While always faithful to the richness and complexity of experience, the poems in The Color Wheel aim to be clear and accessible. They blend imaginistic detail and reflection and bring to contemporary subjects what Steele calls "the preservative virtues of formal care".

A collection of 18 short stories by a "very skillful storyteller (whose) grasp of the life of ordinary American city dwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination" ("Times Literary Supplement").

The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies."

Collected poetry from the 1995 National Book Award finalist.

Providence -- a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants -- provides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is o novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a so-so job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and oddballs, April and Margery do their best to be normal. They practice their penmanship, babysit, go to o prom, and try to be up to date. But how even to look normal in a world where you are always running up against uncontrollable mood swings, mysterious infirmities, unexplained sorrows? Over a period of thirty-five years, they sniff out neighborhood scandals, get an "earful" of what the others are up to, and rest secure behind their sets of double curtains in the knowledge that everything human and frail is on the outside, everything blameless and perfect on the inside.If the Airs of Providence are sometimes rough, they are always funny. They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation -- or perhaps just a poor relation -- to the air of "Danny Boy".

Robert Phillips is a prominent figure in what has been called America's neglected "transition generation"-poets born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Spinach Days is his sixth full-length collection, following his critically acclaimed Breakdown Lane (Johns Hopkins, 1994), named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. In content and in its various use of forms, Spinach Days is Phillips' most innovative book yet. There are long narratives and short lyrics, villanelles and somonkas, haiku and found poems, free verse and eclogues, on subjects ranging from St. Francis to the Holocaust, from Jung's concept of the anima to a particular bit of American folklore on the gangster John Dillinger. Throughout, the poet's memory is the cohesive force, mixing events of childhood with adulthood, rural life with big-city life, love with loss, and humorous events with tragic ones. Phillips reveals himself to be a master of closure, and he writes as one who delights in the liveliness of language and wordplay.

In Time to Go, the author of the highly acclaimed 14 Stories, Long Made Short, and All Gone has written a dazzling book of eighteen interlocking pieces. Part short story collection, part novel, Time to Go moves from despair to hope, from the passing of things -- time, relationships, businesses, chances -- to the coming of marriage, stability, family, a new life. It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough -- and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.

The stories in Drowned Moon are set in Southeast Texas, where the Old and the Lost Rivers meet and empty into the bay. This unique geographic location, with its unpredictable waters, its sinking swamps, its bayous and sloughs, provides a haunting landscape for Glenn Blake's characters.

The Lords of Misrule, X. J. Kennedy's seventh volume of poetry, exhibits his characteristic blend of wit, intellectual curiosity, and formal mastery. The sixty poems collected here explore a wide range of subjects: a scathing curse on a sneak-thief, a wry ballad of Henry James and his not-quite lover Constance Fenimore Woolson, an elegy for Allen Ginsberg, incisive views of contemporary Egypt, a serio-comic meditation on the relic of St. Teresa of Avila which Spain's General Franco kept at his bedside, and a response to the events of September 11. Like the controlled frenzy of medieval Christmas festivities presided over by the appointed Lords of Misrule, Kennedy's poems possess a chaotic humor and frenetic energy held within tight metrical bounds. In his latest collection, Kennedy confirms his reputation as one of America's most accomplished and engaging poets.

Stephen Dixon's stories and novels have an original, immediately recognizable sound and feel -a weird blend of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra. Readers of his previous work will find in 14 Stories that same wry, inventive, knife-edged humor that has come to characterize his distinctive style. With an adroit use of language and a keen eye for the quirky, offbeat side of human nature, Dixon creates a world as viewed through a fish-eye lens-slightly distorted and off-center, yet recognizable and often familiar. 14 Stories is part comedy, part tragedy, part social comment and part spoof. But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

Wyatt Prunty's poems have been described as "quiet, reflective, and of unexpected depth" (Howard Nemerov), "both artful and truthful" (Donald Justice), "a triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion" (Anthony Hecht), and "illuminated by a language both skewed and precise" (Walker Percy). As a poet, Prunty-who is also the founder and director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference-has been praised for "his powerful imagination in the specifics of ordinary details, suggesting persuasively that the near at hand is as unexplored and full of wonder as the far ends of the universe" ( Publishers Weekly) and called "one of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the post-World War II generation" ( Southern Review).An elegant overview of his career until now, Unarmed and DANGEROUS: New and Selected Poems features selections from Wyatt Prunty's five previous books- The Times Between (1982); What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986); Balance as Belief (1989); Run of the House (1993); and Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press-as well as new poems that demonstrate the poet's wide-ranging and sympathetic imagination. Prunty's new work includes moving evocations of childhood ("A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953"), richly detailed poems about ordinary people and situations ("The Downtown Bus"), and even a probing meditation on the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk" ("Annals of Jack"). Together, the poems gathered in this volume afford a clear portrait of a major American poet whose distinctive voice and vision have earned him the admiration and respect of such contemporaries as Richard Wilbur, X. J. Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it" ( The Commercial Appeal).

Robert Phillips is a prominent figure in what has been called America's neglected "transition generation"-poets born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Spinach Days is his sixth full-length collection, following his critically acclaimed Breakdown Lane (Johns Hopkins, 1994), named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. In content and in its various use of forms, Spinach Days is Phillips' most innovative book yet. There are long narratives and short lyrics, villanelles and somonkas, haiku and found poems, free verse and eclogues, on subjects ranging from St. Francis to the Holocaust, from Jung's concept of the anima to a particular bit of American folklore on the gangster John Dillinger. Throughout, the poet's memory is the cohesive force, mixing events of childhood with adulthood, rural life with big-city life, love with loss, and humorous events with tragic ones. Phillips reveals himself to be a master of closure, and he writes as one who delights in the liveliness of language and wordplay.

Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers. So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain.Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, "Her Book"Steve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, "Zorro"Glenn Blake from Drowned Moon, "Marsh"Jennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, "Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon Johnson"Richard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, "Bodysurfing"Avery Chenoweth from Wingtips, "Powerman"Guy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg"Tristan Davies from Cake, "Counterfactuals"Stephen Dixon from Time to Go, "Time to Go"Judith Grossman from How Aliens Think, "Rovera"Josephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, "On the Island"Greg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, "Hemingway's Cats"Jerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, "Basepaths"Michael Martone from Safety Patrol, "Safety Patrol"Jack Matthews from Crazy Women, "Haunted by Name Our Ignorant Lips"Jean McGarry from Dream Date, "The Last Time"Robert Nichols from In the Air, "Six Ways of Looking at Farming"Joe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, "West Baltimore"Frances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, "History"Robley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, "Hard Times"

Accessible and wry, at times comic, and often mournful, Daniel Anderson's poetry is relentlessly attentive to the splendors of the natural world. But the poems collected here-previously published in such leading literary journals as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, and Southwest Review-are not relegated simply to the realm of pastoral meditation. They give voice to the sorrowful and sometimes unfortunate things we say and think. They chronicle, with both precision and care, the many ways in which jubilation and lament frequently reverse themselves. Above all else, each poem crystallizes in its wake a freshly minted moment, one that articulates an experience that reaches beyond the poet's own time and place. Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snow" in Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.

Accessible and wry, at times comic, and often mournful, Daniel Anderson's poetry is relentlessly attentive to the splendors of the natural world. But the poems collected here-previously published in such leading literary journals as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, and Southwest Review-are not relegated simply to the realm of pastoral meditation. They give voice to the sorrowful and sometimes unfortunate things we say and think. They chronicle, with both precision and care, the many ways in which jubilation and lament frequently reverse themselves. Above all else, each poem crystallizes in its wake a freshly minted moment, one that articulates an experience that reaches beyond the poet's own time and place. Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snow" in Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.

For more than half a century, readers and listeners have taken special pleasure in the poetry of X. J. Kennedy. In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus is an ample gathering of his best work: memorable songs, startling lyrics, poems that tell poignant stories, character studies that vie with those of Edwin Arlington Robinson. A master of verbal music, Kennedy has long been praised for his wit and humor; as this collection reveals, many of his poems also reach surprising depths and heights. Donald Hall comments, "many of Kennedy's poems are wit itself. His wit is his way of understanding. No one else writing is capable of the effects in which Kennedy specializes." This book skims the cream from several slim volumes and six past collections including the prize-winning Nude Descending a Staircase, Cross Ties, and The Lords of Misrule. It restores to print over fifty poems unavailable for decades and adds more than two dozen new poems collected for the first time. Kennedy has long occupied a unique place in American poetry; In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus now offers the first comprehensive collection to span his entire career.

Wyatt Prunty's eighth collection, The Lover's Guide to Trapping, opens with a Homeric mole who tunnels the yard then disappears, a nervous alpha dog convinced she gets less food than her sister because she eats faster, and a house wren whose loud expectation is that she be let in. And there are others who populate the pages of this book, one stray cat, one ghost, but many who are human-soldiers, prisoners, wide-eyed children, matriarchs, Verdi in despair over having cast a plump Violetta who cannot play her role as a consumptive. All of those described here are vulnerable, some of them searingly so, and all are acutely aware of just how angular their worlds can be, whether accompanied by terror or hilarity.

"I was born in a land of bayous, raised between rivers," writes Glenn Blake in his latest collection of short stories. "There is a place in Southeast Texas where two rivers meet and become one. There is a long bridge over these waters, and as you drive across, you can look to the south and see where the Old River and the Lost River become the Old and the Lost. You can look out as far as you can see and watch this wide water become the bay." The stories in Return Fire are set in the swamps, bayous, and sloughs of Southeast Texas, a region that is subsiding-sinking inches every year beneath the encroaching tides. The characters who inhabit Blake's Southern landscape struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams. They are the walking wounded-cautious, crippled, capable of any act. Magnolias, water, mescal, stars, and fire return again and again in these seven sparse-yet tightly written-vignettes.

Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB); Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb. The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world is to be read into and wondered over. The signs in this new work from the prize-winning American poet of formal brilliance and darkly comic sensibility are as stark as the one on a cage at the zoo that says ENDANGERED SPECIES, as surprising as those that announce the return of irony, and as enigmatic as a single word carved on a tombstone. Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.