Posts for 'Book' Category

A former professor at the University of Montana had one of his works honored as the 2010 One Book Montana Selection.  Richard Hugo's "Selected Poems" features works from his first six poetry collections.

Hugo taught creative writing at UM for nearly 18 years.  "The poetry of Richard Hugo is one of the most profound and moving human documents that our period of American literature has produced," national Poet Laureate James Dickey said.

Humanities Montana coordinates One Book Montana and encourages all Montanans to read and discuss Hugo's poetry during the summer and fall.

It will host a moderated discussion on the Humanities Roundtable this summer and will devote several events to Hugo's work at the 2010 Montana Festival of the Book, slated for Oct. 29-30.

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A former professor at the University of Montana had one of his works honored as the 2010 One Book Montana Selection.  Richard Hugo's "Selected Poems" features works from his first six poetry collections.

Hugo taught creative writing at UM for nearly 18 years.  "The poetry of Richard Hugo is one of the most profound and moving human documents that our period of American literature has produced," national Poet Laureate James Dickey said.

Humanities Montana coordinates One Book Montana and encourages all Montanans to read and discuss Hugo's poetry during the summer and fall.

It will host a moderated discussion on the Humanities Roundtable this summer and will devote several events to Hugo's work at the 2010 Montana Festival of the Book, slated for Oct. 29-30.

Read the complete story

Since the advent of National Poetry Month in 1996, April does for poetry what July does for bottle rockets. Bay Area poetry enters the month this year on a high note, with D.A. Powell, Randall Mann, Brenda Hillman, Brian Teare, Joshua Clover and Rachel Loden getting great reviews and winning major awards.

A buzz also surrounds four recent books affiliated with the Bay Area, and the occasion of National Poetry Month makes this a propitious moment to look at them.

Sixteen Rivers Press is one of the best Bay Area literary projects. Modeled after Alice James Books cooperative in Maine, Sixteen Rivers has been publishing excellent books by Bay Area poets for 10 years.

The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press; 142 pages; $20 paperback) is a viscerally pleasing anthology that celebrates a successful first decade.

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I met Adam at Oslo. A big bear of a person with the gentlest nature and a lovable personality, he remains one of my closest friends. Yet time and again I have tried to understand him, understand the mind that seems to work overtime.

The art of reproducing the images on canvas and words remains a perennial obsession. I have read his other poetry books and marvelled at this superlative mind. To me, it always seems that he has been able to grasp the aura and time, a steady stream of images that is unstoppable, sometimes virulent yet simple in afterthoughts.

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It is often said that the divide between poetry and mathematics lies in the disjunct between the rational and the romantic.

These two disparities came together during the launch of The Shape of Content,.

A book comprised of drama, short fiction, critical essays and poetry that are all, in some way, relevant to science and mathematics.

Published by A.K. Peters and edited by Chandler Davis, Marjorie Wikler Senechal and Jan Zwicky, the book serves as a vehicle to showcase work done in workshops held at the Banff Center, exclusively for those who are interested in writing creatively about science and math.

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Practically, one crucifies oneself and entertains drawing rooms and lounges.” This sentence by T S Eliot on the reception of his extraordinary, agonised poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a thrilling moment in the long-awaited second volume of his letters.

It rings like a line from one of his earlier poems, in which suffering figures suddenly see themselves in the absurd light of polite society. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” rued Eliot’s alter ego J Alfred Prufrock in 1917. Eight years later, he might have added: “and headed notepaper”.

The first volume of Eliot’s letters, which covered the period from early youth up to both “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, appeared 21 years ago. It was edited, as he requested, by his second wife, Valerie Eliot, formerly his secretary at Faber & Faber.

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KUREEPPUZHA SREEKUMAR is a poet who has carried Malayalam poetry forward by fashioning an idiom to suit the present by judiciously drawing material from the folk traditions. For 25 long years, he has been a familiar figure at poets’ gatherings, reciting his works in a stentorian voice. A man with strong secular convictions, he once declined a State award for the reason that it bore the name of a god.

The volume under review is a collection of nearly 200 poems he wrote over the past 35 years. Some of them are light verses which he calls “naked poetry.”Witnessing agony from poetry’s kangaroo pouch, Sreekumar seeks to give expression to it. What he pours out are not personal woes but the woes of the society. Borrowing his own lines, one can say his poetry burns and runs through the veins like lava.

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Poetry, Ezra Pound liked to say, should be at least as well written as prose. Irish novelist John Banville has dedicated his writing life to turning Pound's prescription on its head.

Banville made his name with his third book, Birchwood (1973), which treated his country's history as a bewildering black joke rather than something to be handled with patriotic reverence.

Younger Irish writers, such as Colm Tóibín, have attested to Birchwood's bracing effect, but Banville was already moving in a different direction from most of his peers in Ireland, and indeed in many other places, with the great stylists of the mid-20th century at his elbow.

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Invariably Indian poetry in English has received a mixed response from readers and critics alike. The basic question that used to be raised was: can (or how can) an Indian poet have the ‘feel’ of an alien language? Or is it only sometimes Indian and occasionally poetry?

Meeting questions such as these fair and square, Mita Biswas’s book traces the history of Indian poetry in English during the 180 years of its existence and provides us with a picture of its emergence as an academic discipline.

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Amid calls of making poetry book release ceremonies livelier by reciting or singing the poems, Shair Arz Hai, seventh book of Punjabi ghazals by Gurdip, was dedicated to the lovers of this delectable but sadly vanishing art form.

Gurdip, who hails from a village in Dehra Dun, has six books on Punjabi ghazals prior to this release. His prior published works include Naksh Peerhan De, Gurdip has also authored Rangeenia, Ranga Dee Mehfil, Do Bol Tere Joge, Dharkana Nu Khat and Aapne Pal.

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