Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871407299
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
“Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving.”—Edward Mendelson Clive James’s renown as an internationally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection “steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats” (London Times). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks—as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. Despite the dizzying variety, James’s poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in “Numismatics”) to striking new coin, and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, “whose play of light pays tribute to the dark.”

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871407299
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving.”—Edward Mendelson Clive James’s renown as an internationally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection “steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats” (London Times). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks—as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. Despite the dizzying variety, James’s poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in “Numismatics”) to striking new coin, and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, “whose play of light pays tribute to the dark.”

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871407116
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving.”—Edward Mendelson Clive James’s renown as an internationally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection “steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats” (London Times). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks—as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. Despite the dizzying variety, James’s poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in “Numismatics”) to striking new coin, and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, “whose play of light pays tribute to the dark.”

The River in the Sky: A Poem

The River in the Sky: A Poem PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631494740
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In this deracinated age appears a miraculous epic that pays homage to Dante and Camus. “Few people read Poetry any more, but I still wish to write its seedlings down, if only for the lull of gathering: no less a harvest season for being the last time,” writes Clive James in his epic poem, The River in the Sky. What emerges from this lamentation is a soaring epic of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, all the more extraordinary given its appearance in an age when the heroic poem seems to have disappeared from contemporary literature. Among James’s many talents is his uncanny ability to juxtapose references to early twentieth-century poets with “offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), or allusions to the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony contrasted with references to “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis.” Whether recalling his Australian childhood or his father’s “clean white headstone” in a Hong Kong cemetery, James’s autobiographical epic ultimately helps us define the meaning of life.

Meeting Without Knowing It

Meeting Without Knowing It PDF Author: Alexander Bubb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019106842X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with heroism, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the 'mythopoeic' impulse in fin de siècle culture. My methodology consists in identifying these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives. Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets' bardic ambitions, heroic tropes and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late 19th century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin de siècle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancour to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, acrimony and denunciation only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.

Broken Ground

Broken Ground PDF Author: William Logan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Ezra Pound’s wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost’s letters, Philip Larkin’s train station, and Mrs. Custer’s volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twenty-five years have bedeviled American verse. Logan believes that poetry criticism must be both adventurous and forthright—and that no reader should settle for being told that every poet is a genius. Among the poets under review by the “preeminent poet-critic of his generation” and “most hated man in American poetry” are Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Glück, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, Frederick Seidel, Les Murray, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Johnny Cash, James Franco, and the former archbishop of Canterbury. Logan’s criticism stands on the broken ground of poetry, soaked in history and soiled by it. These essays and reviews work in the deep undercurrents of our poetry, judging the weak and the strong but finding in weakness and strength what endures.

Collected Poems: 1958-2015

Collected Poems: 1958-2015 PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492489
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
The “technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems” (Spectator) of Clive James are collected in this decades-spanning volume. The poetry of Clive James has been delighting readers and winning awards for decades. His recent poems looking back over his extraordinarily rich life have brought him an even wider readership; some, such as “Japanese Maple” (first published in The New Yorker), became global news events upon their publication. In this first collected volume of poetry, James makes his own selection from over fifty years’ work in verse: from his early satires to his late poems of valediction, he proves himself to be as well-suited to the intense demands of the short lyric as to those of the comic excursion. Collected Poems places James’s effortless fluency, his breath-taking thematic range, and his emotional power on full display—and will burnish his reputation as one of the most accomplished of our contemporary poets.

Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language

Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631490281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Legendary poet and critic Clive James provides an unforgettably eloquent book on how to read and appreciate modern poetry. Since its initial publication, Poetry Notebook has become a must-read for any lover of poetry. Somewhat of an iconoclast, Clive James gets to the heart of truths about poetry not always addressed, “some hard” but always “firmly committed to celebration” (Martin Amis). He presents a distillation of all he’s learned about the art form that matters to him most. James examines the poems and legacies of a panorama of twentieth-century poets, from Hart Crane to Ezra Pound (a “mad old amateur fascist with a panscopic grab bag”), from Ted Hughes to Anne Sexton. Whether demanding that poetry be heard beyond the world of letters or opining on his five favorite poets (Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur, and Larkin), his “generosity of attention, his willingness to trawl through pages of verse in search of the hair-raising line, is his most appealing quality as a critic” (Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal).

Religion and Power

Religion and Power PDF Author: David Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317067878
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
There are few more contentious issues than the relation of faith to power or the suggestion that religion is irrational compared with politics and peculiarly prone to violence. The former claim is associated with Juergen Habermas and the latter with Richard Dawkins. In this book David Martin argues, against Habermas, that religion and politics share a common mythic basis and that it is misleading to contrast the rationality of politics with the irrationality of religion. In contrast to Richard Dawkins (and New Atheists generally), Martin argues that the approach taken is brazenly unscientific and that the proclivity to violence is a shared feature of religion, nationalism and political ideology alike rooted in the demands of power and social solidarity. The book concludes by considering the changing ecology of faith and power at both centre and periphery in monuments, places and spaces.

The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English

The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English PDF Author: Jeremy Noel-Tod
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199640254
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 727

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Book Description
This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.

Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays PDF Author: Clive James
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347117
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
Clive James presents the “prequel” to his celebrated Cultural Amnesia—forty-nine essays that form a cultural education in one brilliant volume. Six years after the much-heralded publication of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents his “prequel”—forty-nine essays that he has selected as the best of his half-century career. Originally appearing as As of This Writing, Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in one of the most accessible and cohesive volumes available. Divided into four sections—“Poetry,” “Fiction and Literature,” “Culture and Criticism,” and “Visual Images”—James comments on poets like W. H. Auden and Phillip Larkin, novelists like D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler (not to mention Judith Krantz!), and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich. Throughout, James delights his readers with his manic energy and critical aplomb. This volume, featuring a new introduction, is a one-volume cultural education that few recent books can rival.