Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book
Book Description
In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a 19th-century virtuoso violinist.
Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393249352
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 189
Get Book
Book Description
Detailing the volatile relationship between the black violinist George Bridgetower and Beethoven, this is a "masterful collection" (Los Angeles Times). The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. A New Yorker's A Year's Reading; Booklist Editors Choice Award.
Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867781
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Get Book
Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”
Author: V. Theile
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137010495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book
Book Description
Bringing together scholars who have critically followed New Formalism's journey through time, space, and learning environment, this collection of essays both solidifies and consolidates New Formalism as a burgeoning field of literary criticism and explicates its potential as a varied but viable methodology of contemporary critical theory.
Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786823268
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Get Book
Book Description
Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.
Author: Ruth Padel
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 030795952X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Get Book
Book Description
This remarkable book brings us an intimate and moving interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin, by Ruth Padel, an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendant of the famous scientist. Charles Darwin, born in 1809, lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into solitary walks, newt collecting, and shooting. His five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, when he was in his twenties, changed his life. Afterward, he began publishing his findings and working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of animal species, including human beings, and he made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma. Padel’s poems sparkle with nuance and feeling as she shows us the marriage that ensued, and the rich, creative atmosphere the Darwins provided for their ten children. Charles and Emma were happy in each other, but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her deep Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature’s way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest; for Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife. These marvelous poems—enriched by helpful marginal notes and by Padel’s ability to move among multiple viewpoints, always keeping Darwin at the center—bring to life the great scientist as well as the private man and tender father. This is a biography in rare form, with an unquantifiable depth of family intimacy and warmth.
Author: Aparajita Nanda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317683188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book
Book Description
As new comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity open up, scholars are identifying and exploring fresh topics and questions in an effort to reconceptualize ethnic studies and draw attention to nation–based approaches that may have previously been ignored. This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation’s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.
Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285952
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Get Book
Book Description
Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award Finalist for the 2017 NAACP Image Award Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume. Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).
Author: DK
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0744091586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 848
Get Book
Book Description
An accessible guide to the most important poems ever written— from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Waste Land—and the poets behind them Discover the key themes and ideas behind the most important poems ever written, and the poetic geniuses who wrote them. The perfect introduction to poetry, The Poetry Book takes you on a fascinating journey through time to explore more than 90 of the world’s greatest poetic works. Discover poems in all their many guises and from all over the world, from the epics of the ancient world through Japanese haikus and Renaissance sonnets to modernist masterpieces such as The Waste Land, and the key works of the last 50 years—from And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou to Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Using the Big Ideas series' trademark combination of clear explanation, witty infographics, and inspirational quotes, The Poetry Book unlocks the key ideas, themes, imagery, and structural techniques behind even the most complex of poems, in clear and simple terms, setting each work in its historical, social, cultural, and literary context. Delve into the works of Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Eliot, and Neruda with in-depth literary analysis and fascinating biographies. Find out what odes, ballads, and allegories are. Trace recurring motifs, explore imagery, and find out how rhyme and rhythm work. From Beowulf to Seamus Heaney's Bogland, The Poetry Book is essential reading for readers of poetry and aspiring poets alike.
Author: Janet Schmalfeldt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190656123
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Get Book
Book Description
With their insistence that form is a dialectical process in the music of Beethoven, Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus emerge as the guardians of a long-standing critical tradition in which Hegelian concepts have been brought to bear on the question of musical form. Janet Schmalfeldt's ground-breaking account of the development of this Beethoven-Hegelian tradition restores to the term "form" some of its philosophical associations in the early nineteenth century, when profound cultural changes were yielding new relationships between composers and their listeners, and when music itself-in particular, instrumental music-became a topic for renewed philosophical investigation. Precedents for Adorno's and Dahlhaus's concept of form as process arise in the Athenäum Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel and in the Encyclopaedia Logic of Hegel. The metaphor common to all these sources is the notion of becoming; it is the idea of form coming into being that this study explores in respect to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. A critical assessment of Dahlhaus's preoccupation with the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata serves as the author's starting point for the translation of philosophical ideas into music-analytical terms-ones that encourage listening "both forward and backward," as Adorno has recommended. Thanks to the ever-growing familiarity of late eighteenth-century audiences with formal conventions, composers could increasingly trust that performers and listeners would be responsive to striking formal transformations. The author's analytic method strives to capture the dynamic, quasi-narrative nature of such transformations, rather than only their end results. This experiential approach to the perception of form invites listeners and especially performers to participate in the interpretation of processes by which, for example, a brooding introduction-like opening must inevitably become the essential main theme in Schubert's Sonata, Op. 42, or in which tremendous formal expansions in movements by Mendelssohn offer a dazzling opportunity for multiple retrospective reinterpretations. Above all, In the Process of Becoming proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.
