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Overview
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series. Poets on Poetry collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.An eclectic array of essays, reviews, and memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic
Memory Piano is the latest contribution to the Poets on Poetry series from the brilliant and prolific Charles Simic. The astute critical eye and engaging voice that have characterized his earlier essay collections are evident throughout this volume. Simic not only examines other writers' work but also explores the outer and inner reaches of the human condition.
Included here are penetrating essays on April Bernard, Robinson Jeffers, Donald Justice, Pablo Neruda, Gerald Stern, and Charles Wright, among others, in addition to Simic's musings on Eastern European poetry and politics and a memoir piece, "The Singing Simics."
Synopsis
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series. Poets on Poetry collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
An eclectic array of essays, reviews, and memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic
Memory Piano is the latest contribution to the Poets on Poetry series from the brilliant and prolific Charles Simic. The astute critical eye and engaging voice that have characterized his earlier essay collections are evident throughout this volume. Simic not only examines other writers' work but also explores the outer and inner reaches of the human condition.
Included here are penetrating essays on April Bernard, Robinson Jeffers, Donald Justice, Pablo Neruda, Gerald Stern, and Charles Wright, among others, in addition to Simic's musings on Eastern European poetry and politics and a memoir piece, "The Singing Simics."
Publishers Weekly
Though "memory piano" sounds like a phrase from Simic's own poetry, it comes from the title of one of the essay-reviews from the New York Review of Books that form the bulk of this collection of mainly critical pieces on poetry in both America and the former eastern bloc. Simic's background as an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet puts him in a rare position to appreciate both the virtuosity of English-language poets such as Robinson Jeffers, W.S. Merwin and Donald Justice and the tragic exiles of Marina Tsvetaeva and W.G. Sebald. While Simic is an academic (professor of English at the University of New Hampshire), he sticks to the lesson he cites from the Paris Review's eclectic retrospective anthology: "keep the literary scholars out and stick to the original writing." Throughout, his biographic summaries smoothly shift to insightful, approachable literary characterizations and well-chosen excerpts from the books under consideration. Interspersed among these are briefer personal essays and memoir vignettes with idiosyncratic charm. Less original is an account of a Deep South trip just before George W. Bush's re-election, in which a feeling of disconnection from the religiously parochial Red States is palpable. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.