Salt Companions to Poetry – serie

The Salt Companion to Carter Revard is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays on the poetry and scholarship of one of Native America’s most loved and respected poets. Carter Revard, Osage poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, grew up among Osage and Ponca relations on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. His complex, elegantly crafted poetry ranges from lyrical evocations of his rural childhood and traditional lifeways to reflections on academic life in Oxford and St. Louis, global politics, and postmodern science; from narrative poems about family bootleggers and AIM activists, tornados and rainbows, to adaptations of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. In precise and gorgeous language, Revard weaves the varied songs of his multiple heritages and experiences into a symphony of celebration of the large and small miracles of the universe.Revard’s blending of Western literary and Native oral traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The thirteen critical essays gathered in this volume, written by leading scholars of Native American literature, explore Revard’s poetry from multiple perspectives, offering biographical and cultural contexts, thematic considerations, and close readings of individual poems. Two essays break exciting new ground by examining interrelationships between Revard’s medieval scholarship and American Indian storytelling traditions. Like Revard’s poems and scholarship, the essays are both erudite and warmly personal, filled with good stories that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Maggie O’Sullivan has been a significant force in the alternative British poetry scene since the 1970s. Her international reputation has continued to grow and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost feminist avant-garde writers working in Britain today. This new volume of essays and interviews locates O’Sullivan in the wider context of contemporary British poetry and draws to light the wide-ranging influences which inform her work and her own influence upon a new generation of feminist avant-garde writing. Tackling textual, visual and sound elements in her work her poetry is complex, challenging and rewarding. O’Sullivan is also a compelling performer of her work. Thematically she is capable of tackling animal vegetable and mineral ideas in her writing, drawing on mythological and even shamanistic components that are provocative and sensual.This volume contains contributions from Charles Bernstein, Mandy Bloomfield, Ken Edwards, Romana Huk, Peter Manson, Nicky Marsh, Peter Middleton, Maggie O'Sullivan, Redell Olsen, Marjorie Perloff, Will Rowe, Robert Sheppard, Scott Thurston and Nerys Williams.

Griffiths has one of the finest ears – for song, for varieties and cadences of speech – of any poet writing today. His compacted lyrics flash with intelligence and humour. They are shaped by anger, empathy and childish delight. But they are also charged with the excitement of contemporary form: swift, filmic montage and free use of the page space. His poems dig, probe, reveal, expose the language as it is lived, with a range possibly unequalled in any British poet. Their sharp diagnoses of social domination and the ideas that sustain and mask it are a wake-up call. But there is nothing dry about them: they savour language, ask you to dance with it, show you the pain in it, enlarge the world with it. Griffiths was a key member of the British Poetry Revival, both as an activist in the Poetry Society and in the small press scene, and as a writer of inventive, formally innovative poetry. He continues to explore the shapes of contemporary experience, and to denounce agencies of unfreedom. By now he is the author of a large body of work, which this book seeks to make available to ordinary readers. The essays collected here offer guides to reading, commentaries on forms and sources, and a range of insights into how the poems work. There is also a bibliography, an interview, photographs and visuals, all of which help to give a vivid sense of Griffiths’s world.

Diane Glancy is one of the outstanding Native American authors of modern times. Working in multiple genres – poetry, novel, theatre and nonfiction – she has created a vast, ceaselessly provocative oeuvre (more than 35 volumes) and an instantly recognizable voice. Her subject matter is astonishingly diverse, encompassing everything from the Cherokee Trail of Tears to the New Testament character of Dorcas, from the lives of small-town Midwestern women to the joys of classic automobiles, from grade school maskmaking to the recuperation of personal heritage in the archives.The essays in this groundbreaking volume represent the first attempt to systematically survey this challenging writer. Ten outstanding scholars approach her work, mapping out controversies and providing readers of Glancy with various contexts and comparisons through which to understand her ideas. These chapters take a variety of ideological and methodological positions (feminist, Christian, postcolonial, literary-nationalist and more), the better to draw out the complexities of a writer whose work never lets the reader come to easy conclusions. Also included are an original interview with Glancy herself, a survey of previous criticism and a bibliography of her writings. This volume will therefore serve equally well as an introduction to Glancy for newcomers and as an in-depth survey for people already familiar with her work.The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy is part of a unique series of companion volumes to Native American poets. Previous subjects include Carter Revard and Jim Barnes.

The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein presents scholarship on one of the U.S.’s best living innovative poets. Scholars explore major themes in his work, and poets present pieces inspired by his poetry. The book is intended for both scholars looking for informed critical insight into Bernstein’s work as well as for students to examine his work. The scholarship covers many of his major pieces and genres, like sound, stage, and poetry. The authors write about his main themes and influences and give insight into some of the major poetry ideas currently being debated in the U.S., such as the nature and future of experimental poetry, the influences on contemporary poetry, the politics of poetry, and wide variety of techniques currently being used. This book is valuable to individuals interested in poetry and libraries trying to stay abreast of the most important recent literary criticism/currents.

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy comprises ten essays by leading scholars and writers on the work of modernist poet Mina Loy. Loy (1882-1966) formed part of the new generation of poets who revolutionised writing in the early twentieth century. She had personal and artistic links to Italian Futurism and Parisian Surrealism, as well as to individuals such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Working with reference to, but also often against the ideas of these fellow writers, her experimental, witty and inconoclastic poems were both distinctive and arresting. Since the republication of her poems in 1996-7, Loy has gained in stature and importance both in the UK and the US: her writing is now seen as central to literary innovations in the 1910s and 1920s, and she is often a set author on undergraduate and MA courses. Apart from the collection of essays Mina Loy: Woman and Poet published twelve years ago, there is currently no single book on Loy’s work in print. The Companion will be an invaluable new resource for students and readers of modernism. It provides new perspectives and cutting-edge research on Loy’s work and is distinctive in its consideration of her prosodic and linguistic experiments alongside a discussion of the literary and historical contexts in which she worked.The contributors include influential and emerging experts in modernist studies. They are Peter Nicholls, Tim Armstrong, Geoff Gilbert, David Ayers, Andrew Robertson, John Wilkinson, Suzanne Hobson, Rachel Potter, Alan Marshall, Rowan Harris and Sandeep Parmar.