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on The Island of Last Truth, a novel by Flavia Company (Europa Editions)
Born in Buenos Aires in 1963, Flavia Company lives in Barcelona, teaches writing at the Ateneo Barcelonés, and writes in Catalan. Her twelfth novel, The Island of Last Truth, is the only one available in English translation (by Laura McGloughlin). It is narrated by Phoebe Westore, a professor of English in New York, who is…
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Eighteen Poets Recommend New & Recent Collections
Welcome to the Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, eighteen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: Joshua Weiner on Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press) Evie Shockley on The Vital…
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on Robert Duncan, The Ambassador From Venus, a biography by Lisa Jarnot
Writing about Shelley, Virginia Woolf said that a worthy biography "is the record of the things that change rather than of the things that happen." The biographer is responsible for showing us how we alter over time, and clarifying how and why those alterations matter. She continued, “A self that goes on changing is a…
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on The Arrière-pays and Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose 1991-2011 by Yves Bonnefoy
“I have often experienced a feeling of anxiety at crossroads,” begins Yves Bonnefoy’s enraptured meditation on art, The Arrière-pays. “At such moments it seems to me that here, or close by, a couple of steps away on the path I didn’t take and which is already receding – that just over there a more elevated…
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on The Cardboard House by Martín Adán, and Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
Martín Adán, the famously reclusive Peruvian poet and writer, was once approached by an Argentine doctoral student for an interview. He met with Celia Pachero but abruptly ended the dialogue after a few questions. Later he responded in his fashion by producing a poem addressed to her, “Written Blindly,” with these lines: If you want…
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on The Game of Boxes, poems by Catherine Barnett
The poems in Catherine Barnett’s two collections look unflinchingly at and come to terms with specific griefs and situations. Her signature gesture is the returning gaze. Her first book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004), elegizes two nieces who died in 2000 when their Alaska Airlines flight crashed into the…
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on The Life of Objects, a novel by Susanna Moore
Last May I attended a “discussion” at Harvard between the pseudo-historian Erik Larson and Marvin Kalb. Larson had published In the Garden of Beasts in 2011, a non-fiction work about William Dodd, America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, and his daughter Martha who had affairs with several prominent Third Reich figures including the first head…
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What Happened to Sophie Wilder, a novel by Christopher R. Beha
The witty Martial is known for saying, “No one is more confidant than a bad poet.” But a young writer virtually has no choice but to take her talent seriously even before she knows if she has one. Her faith requires brashness – even while she is probably not as emotionally flexible as she thinks…
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Three Recent Titles on Gertrude Stein, Latin-American Poetry, and Jazz Photography
A dispiriting thought: Titles arrive in such numbers and speed amid such emphasis on the just-published in social media that many unique books remain unknown to, barely noticed or forgotten by their potentially receptive audiences. Here are three titles from 2011 that I was unable to cover when they were first issued. * * *…
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on Life Is Short and Desire Endless, a novel by Patrick Lapeyre, translated by Adriana Hunter
It’s been said that the English laugh at money, the French laugh at sex, and the Germans laugh at indigestion. Long desires teach long vexations and the submission to comic candor. Americans laugh at liberty and taking liberties (the danger, satisfaction, or illusion of). The Chinese laugh at dynasty and destiny. At least their poets…
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on Madness, Rack, and Honey, lectures by Mary Ruefle
In her lecture “Someone Reading A Book Is A Sign Of Order In The World,” Mary Ruefle recalls reading a Hardy novel during high school English period. “And there came the inevitable Wessexian moment,” she says, “a letter, the letter, the one that would make everything okay, being slipped under a closed door got wedged…
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on My Poets by Maureen N. McLane
When an interviewer asked the poet and critic Maureen McLane if her “critical eye” plays a part in her poetry, she replied, “I’m uncomfortable with the notion -- especially prevalent in American discourse -- that there is a kind of division of labor, the critical eye being part of the intellectual zone, the poetic eye…
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on Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker
In September, 1960, at a colloquium in Normandy devoted to his writings, Raymond Queneau (photo, below) decided to convene a small group to engage in a systematic study of experimental literature. Two months later at a Paris restaurant, the Oulipo was launched with co-founder François Le Lionnais. (OuLiPo is an acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature…
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on Night of the Republic, poems by Alan Shapiro
The poet’s dread – or one of the dreads – is that life may escape words. It’s a useful anxiety, a spur to productivity. But we may be better off abandoning the worry when the writing begins. Here are some reasons why. First, life does elude words; it is a fugitive from the frontier justice…
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on Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah
“The need to explain a personal and collective biography of the Palestinian poet and his/her poetry, while a necessity not particular to a Palestinian, is itself a quandary,” writes Fady Joudah in the introduction to his translations of selected poems by Ghassan Zaqtan. He continues, “One is tempted to register those personal details of loss,…