Poetry - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Azores

Tue, 26 Feb 2008

Azores (2008)
Poems

By David Yezzi

Like a voyage to the Portuguese islands of the title, the poems in Azores arrive at their striking and hard-won destinations over the often-treacherous waters of experience—a man mourns the fact that he cannot not mourn, a father warns his daughter about harsh contingency, an unnamed visitor violently disrupts a quiet domestic scene. The ever-present and uncomfortable realities of envy, lust, and mortality haunt the book from poem to poem. Yezzi does not shy away from frank assessments of desire and human failing, the persistent difficulties of which are relieved periodically by a cautious optimism and even joy. Whether the poem’s backdrop is volcanic islands in the Mid-Atlantic or Manhattan Island at sunset, Yezzi examines the forces of change in the natural world, as w hether mundane or startlingly intimate. By turns plainspoken, caustic, evocative, and wry, these poems are, in matters of form, well-wrought and musical and, in matters of the heart, clear-eyed and always richly human.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Azores.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Dear Regime

Sat, 01 Dec 2007

Dear Regime (2007)
Letters to the Islamic Republic

By Roger Sedarat

In his provocative, brave, and sometimes brutal first book of poems, Roger Sedarat directly addresses the possibility of political change in a nation that some in America consider part of “the axis of evil.” Iranian on his father’s side, Sedarat explores the effects of the Islamic Revolution of 1979—including censorship, execution, and pending war—on the country as well as on his understanding of his own origins. Written in a style that is as sure-footed as it is experimental, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic confronts the past and current injustices of the Iranian government while retaining a sense of respect and admiration for the country itself. Woven into this collection are the author’s vivid descriptions of the landscape as well as the people of Iran. Throughout, Sedarat exhibits a keen appreciation for the literary tradition of Iran, and in making it new, attempts to preserve the culture of a country he still claims as his own.

Thigh
With honesty of homemade butter,
paddle-churned cream (eshta in Arabic,
ecstasy foaming to the brim), a woman
river-bathes, sheet of oil-black hair breaking
in rapids, cut lemon scintillating
olive skin free of tree-stumped chador, skirts
within skirts, peal of her bell-body rung
muffled in Iran heat—a splash of white.
The rhythm of pumice scraping her feet,
sandbar against warm current, frothy cape
a bee-bubbled hive, honeyed trace curling
to her bare knees, thick transparent lather.
At a Tehran bazaar endless gold-stores
could never return me anywhere pure.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Dear+Regime.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV

Sun, 01 Apr 2007

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV (2007)
With Variant Readings and Annotations

Edited by Allan Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring and Paul D. L. Turner

In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents. Ranging across eras and cultures, the books here reveal his late thoughts about history, myth, legend, faith, love, and desire. He had never been more popular, and the founding of the Browning Society in 1881 expanded both his audience and his sense of his place in English letters.

The first title in Volume XV is Dramatic Idylls, Second Series (1880). Taking his subjects from classical history, colonial India, Arabian legend, medieval sorcery, Jewish folk tales, and Greek myth, Browning startles the reader with the rapidity of his thought and the inventiveness of his art.

In Jocoseria (1883) Browning's subjects range across time and space from Hebraic legend to the England of the Romantics. Such variety helped attract new readers: Jocoseria was immediately successful, and a second edition was printed in the same year as the first.

Although Browning's next volume, Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), was so popular that three editions were printed in less than two years, this artful string of anecdotes and lyrics has attracted little favorable criticism. The materials—Persian legends and Arabic backgrounds—chimed with the wildly popular Orientalism of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, Whistler's Peacock Room, and Alma-Tadema's paintings. But the thought was pure Browning in his most optimistic vein, and not at all in tune with the growing pessimism of the day.

As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XV.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Devils & Islands

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Devils & Islands (2007)
Poems

By Turner Cassity

As he approaches eighty, Turner Cassity may finally be out of control. His hatchet has never fallen more lethally, meaning if you have the stomach for him he is more enjoyable than ever. Under the blade come Martha Graham, Johann Sebastian Bach, musicologists, tree huggers, Frank Gehry, folk music, folk art of all times and all places, folk. . . . There are, however, his unpredictable sympathies: Edith Wilson, skyscrapers, Pontius Pilate, Pilate’s legionnaires. He obviously has a soft spot for Pop Culture, although he cannot avoid seeing it de haut en bas.

As usual, he is all over the place geographically. One feels he would slash his wrists before he would write a poem about any city on the traditional Grand Tour. Manaus, Campeche, Trieste, Budapest (as destroyed by Godzilla)—these are his places. He has a disturbing willingness to write on both sides of an issue, resembling in this Bernard Shaw. You have to read very carefully to see whether he tips his hand.

One looks forward to Mr. Cassity’s posthumous poems, when he is beyond the reach of libel. For now, at least, we have Devils & Islands.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Devils+%26+Islands.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Blank Verse

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Blank Verse (2007)
A Guide to Its History and Use

By Robert B. Shaw

Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others. A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. Blank Verse is the first book since 1895 to offer a detailed study of the meter’s technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. Robert B. Shaw gives ample space and emphasis to the achievements of modern and postmodern poets working in the form, an area neglected until now by scholarship.

With its compact but inclusive survey of more than four centuries of poetry, Blank Verse is filled with practical advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it. Enriched with numerous examples, Shaw’s discussions of verse technique are lively and accessible, inviting not only to apprentice poets but to all readers of poetry.

Shaw’s approach should reassure those who find prosody intimidating, while encouraging specialists to think more broadly about how traditional poetic forms can be taught, learned, practiced, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. Besides filling a conspicuous gap in literary history, Blank Verse points the way ahead for poets interested in exploring blank verse and its multitude of uses.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Blank+Verse.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Armillary Sphere

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

The Armillary Sphere (2006)
Poems

By Ann Hudson

Taking the warp of dream, sometimes nightmare, and weaving it with the ordinary world, the poems of The Armillary Sphere, Ann Hudson's award-winning debut collection, do not simplify the mystery but deepen it. Just as the interlocking rings of the armillary sphere of the title represent the great circles of the heavens, so do the poems herein demonstrate out of the beautiful, the extraordinary, and the cast off, a fresh scaffolding, a new way to see out from the center of our selves, a new measure of our relationship to the things of this world and the next.

Chosen from hundreds of manuscripts as this year's winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Ann Hudson's The Armillary Sphere possesses, in the words of final judge Mary Kinzie,

“… a brightness of spirit and quickness of thought that are conveyed with extraordinary care as she frames moments of experience. Her style is unobtrusive—no fireworks of phrasing obscure the thing felt and seen. So simple a device as taking an intransitive verb transitively can shed strong light on the moment: “A fine sheen /of sweat glistens the cocktail glasses,”—and Hudson studies emotions with a brave restraint that resists cliché, while deftly joining together intuitions that bring contradictory or opposing charge.… Both circular and digressive, Hudson's portrayal of beings of all ages poised on their varying thresholds brings a novelist's sense of details unfolding into their future under the control of a fine poet's pure and condensed language of likeness.”

Insomnia

If you were awake too, I'd tell you
the whole story, how I dreamt
we never saw the child, how easily

we forgot. Instead I shuffle
to the porch to watch
traffic pass the house

and an occasional bat dive
under the streetlamps, ruthless
after its dark targets.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Armillary+Sphere.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

A Trick of Sunlight

Tue, 30 May 2006

A Trick of Sunlight (2006)
Poems

By Dick Davis

In his new collection of poems, Dick Davis, the acclaimed author of Belonging, addresses themes that he has long worked with—travel, the experience of being a stranger, the clash of cultures, the vagaries of love, the pleasures and epiphanies of meaning that art allows us. But A Trick of Sunlight introduces a new theme that revolves around the idea of happiness—is it possible, must it be illusory, is its fleetingness an essential part of its nature so that disillusion is inevitable?

Many of the poems are shaded by the poet’s awareness of growing older, and by the ways that this both shuts down many of life’s possibilities and frees us from their demands. The levity of some verses here is something of a departure for Davis, but his insights can be mordant too, revealing darknesses as often as they invoke frivolity.

As Davis’s readers have come to expect, the poems in A Trick of Sunlight. aim at the aesthetic satisfactions that accompany accurate observations expressed with wit, intelligence, and grace. But they achieve as well an immediacy and rawness of vision that seem to belie his careful craft.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/A+Trick+of+Sunlight.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Toward the Winter Solstice

Tue, 14 Mar 2006

Toward the Winter Solstice (2006)
New Poems

By Timothy Steele

Since the appearance of Timothy Steele’s first collection of poems in 1979, growing numbers of readers and critics have recognized him as one of the best and most significant poets of his generation. Widely credited with anticipating and encouraging the revival of poetry in traditional form, Steele has produced a body of work praised for its technical accomplishment, its intellectual breadth, and its emotional energy.

Toward the Winter Solstice, Steele’s first collection of new poems in twelve years, features his characteristic grace, wit, and power, while extending his range. In addition to the relatively short lyrical, descriptive, and contemplative poems he has always written so well, this collection offers several middle-length pieces that read almost like compressed novels.

Addressing a variety of topics and themes, Toward the Winter Solstice explores the relationship between the world of nature and the world of ideas. In one way or another, the poems attempt to link the external material universe with that sense of inward self-awareness central to our experience of life. Throughout, Steele writes with a clarity that not only illuminates his subjects but also acknowledges and preserves their ultimate mystery and complexity.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Toward+the+Winter+Solstice.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Hometown for an Hour

Sun, 15 Jan 2006

Hometown for an Hour (2006)
Poems

By Jennifer Rose

In her second collection of poems, Jennifer Rose writes primarily of places and displacement. Using the postcard's conventions of brevity, immediacy, and, in some instances, humor, these poems are greetings from destinations as disparate as Cape Cod, Kentuckiana, and Croatia. Rich in imagery, deftly crafted, and imbued with a lightness of voice, these poems are also postmarked from poetry's more familiar provinces of love, nature, and loss.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Hometown+for+an+Hour.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Selected Poems

Thu, 15 Dec 2005

Selected Poems (2005)

By Lee Gerlach

Lee Gerlach’s Selected Poems is a rigorous culling from the life's work of a remarkable and prolific poet. Written over a period of fifty years, the poetry of Lee Gerlach is a full spectrum of human expression, vision, and experience. It reflects a wisdom and maturity of character that has been constant during the entire span of Gerlach’s writing career. This selection, chosen by the poet, is the retrospective of a true twentieth-century American original.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0804010811.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.