New Directions Books – serie

The lyric poetry of Tu Fu ranks with the greatest in all world literature. Across the centuries—Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (731-770)—his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful.Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume. The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction, biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry.

Once again, the setting for many of the pieces is the Green Mountains of Vermont, where the poet and his family have lived for several years. A member of the editorial board of The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to numerous periodicals, he is the editor of the recent comprehensive paperbook anthology The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (1970).

The Blocked Heart is the fourth collection by the British poet Edwin Brock to be published in the United States. Reading his most recent verse, one becomes increasingly aware that the author’s pervasive wry melancholy is not so much a passive response to the stress of urban life as a compassionate, virile outburst against it. Here we find, in many ways, a maturing synthesis of his earlier work: the candid, often bitter introspection of Invisibility Is the Art of Survival (1972 ), the more meditative, though no less incisive subtlety of The Portraits The Poses (1973), and the acerbic satire of Paroxisms (1974), a volume which includes illustrations by the poet’s wife, Elizabeth. “[His is] the freshest voice from Britain in years,” writes Hayden Carruth. ’’Brock’s sense of the formal tradition is indubitably English, but otherwise unpredictable, because he uses it very personally, amiably, and with great natural tact. His poems look to me like a breakthrough.”

Readers of Michael McClure’s play Gorf may be reminded of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, even if dancing TV sets and the “Middle American” protagonists Mert and Gert bring the surreal effect down to native ground. On another level Gorf is a ritual of regeneration, or, if you like, a kind of spiritualized Hellzapoppin. The “murdered” Mert and Gert are reborn in the search for their child, the Shitfer, who disintegrated when “hurled through Time and Space” is resurrected as his discrete “pieces” find and recognize their unity. And presiding over all is Gorf himself––the flying purple phallus, the cosmic joke and life principle, “Our fantasies,” McClure explains, “when they are enacted, open infinite doors. A play may help us be what we truly are by showing us the possibilities of action.” And John Lion, who conceived and produced the widely acclaimed 1974 Magic Theater production of Gorf in San Francisco, adds in his introduction that “man’s capacity for renewal and rebirth is tied to his ability to remain in touch with his child self,” With this in mind, Gorf is both a play and play itself––satire and myth, married to frivolity and fable. This edition includes photographs by Ron Scherl from the original stage production.

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them."Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

Christmas Poems is a pleasing and diverse selection of classic holiday poems that goes all the way back to an eclogue of Virgil, moves along to a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Paul Dunbar, Rilke, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, and Bernadette Mayer.Beautifully designed, this New Directions gem (originally published in the 1940s and reissued in the 1970s) rings with the deep sentiments of the season and just the right splash of holiday cheer. Christmas Poems comes with French flaps and is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer.Christmas Poems was originally edited by Albert M. Hayes and New Directions founder and publisher James Laughlin as A Wreath of Christmas Poems, and published as part of the "Poets of the Year" series in 1942. The collection was updated and revised in 1972, and selections for this newly revised 2008 edition have been chosen by the editorial staff at New Directions.

It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark’s most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spark describes her childhood in 1930s Edinburgh in brief, dazzling anecdotes. In one she recalls a cherished schoolteacher, Christina Kay, who would later be used as the prototype for Miss Jean Brodie. Spark boldly details her disastrous first marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.) — himself thirty-two, she just nineteen — whom she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and left behind to return to England. In the midst of WWII, Spark took a bizarre position working in the disinformation campaign of the British Secret Service, eliciting information from German POWs to combat Nazi propaganda. She later moved to the Poetry Society of London, where she mingled with literati and other intellectuals, befriended by some (such as Graham Greene, an early supporter of her work) and sparring with others. We experience Spark’s joy with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, her trials with other writers’ envy, and her emergence as the most brilliant femme fatale of 20th-century English literature.