Bucknell University Press’s eighteenth-century publications were recently recognized and recommended in the current issue of Studies in English Literature. In the review by Jenny Davidson, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, she thanks Bucknell University Press for “continuing to do a deep service to our field by publishing monographs and reissuing them in paperback wherever possible.”

Here are the publications mentioned in Professor Davidson’s review:

Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish literature, 1603-1832 by Rivka Swenson.

“(This book) fills a significant gap in the critical literature and touches on moments both familiar and relatively obscure in the history of Anglo-Scottish literary interactions over the long eighteenth century.”

Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter.

“A fascinating and illuminating book.”

Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele

“I found DeGabriele’s readings of novels stimulating and often persuasive.”

The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell.

“I think (this volume) represents essentially the best-case scenario for the edited collection of literary criticism that is organized not for a series or as primarily a teaching tool but as the best way of compiling a field’s state of knowledge on an emerging topic… (it) remains an indispensable resource for scholars working on a host of topics related to the it-narrative and the animated objects of eighteenth-century literature.”

Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600-1800 by Chris Mounsey

“An important and thought-provoking collection.”

Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature and Emotion, 1760-1848, edited by Nancy E. Johnson

“(The editor) has assembled an intriguing volume of essays whose authors consider the role of emotion in eighteenth-century English legal theory.”

Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Samara Anne Cahill.

“A number of brilliant essays here.”

Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 by Katheleen Lubey

“(Its) stated goal of bringing ‘the history of sexuality into contact with the history of reading’(p12) has already proved generative for other scholars.”

 

Other BU Press publications that are mentioned by Professor Davidson include:

Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture by Timothy Erwin.

Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Paul Kelleher.

The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason

Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack Jr., edited by Jesse G. Swan

Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Shaun Regan.

Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Erin M. Goss.

The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790-1814: The Struggle for History’ Authority by Morgan Rooney

The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity by Alex Broadhead.

Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and miscellaneous Documents, edited by Nobert Schürer

 

by Tong Tong, 2016-2017 Cynthia Fell Intern

June is here and with it brought National Pen Pal Day on the 1^st. While with the rise of technology having a pen-pal might seem to be a thing of the past, it is something I still partake in with a few close friends and family members. In the age of texting and emailing, receiving a letter feels that much more special and personal. There is just something about seeing someone’s handwriting and knowing that they took to the time out of their day to write to you that is irreplaceable.

Letters have always been significant, not just to the people sending and receiving them, but to historians as well. They are valuable records that act as time capsules. Throughout the centuries they have been used to analyze and discover the personality of some of history’s most notable figures and improve our comprehension of what it was like to be alive during various eras. Through letters we have been able to form the face behind some of the greatest writers and give context to their writing. This can be seen in some of the books in our collection. From the Forbidden Garden: Letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to Antonio Beneyto edited by Carlota Caulfield (2003) is an assemblage of letters written by the Latin poet that paint a portrait of Pizarnik’s self-discovery and her artistic nature. They consist of detailed drawings and doodles she sent to her correspondent. Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, Volume 1 edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt and Mark L. Kamrath (2013) include 179 letters written by Brown that showcase his personal life and the revolutionary era he lived in. His pen-pals included Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin.  Gender, Authenticity, and the Missive Letter in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Anne de La Tour, Rousseau’s Real-Life Julie by Mary McAlpin (2006) examines the relationship between pen-pals Marie-Anne de La Tour and the famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau. McAlpin studies what these letters reveal about the character of the philosopher and de La Tour. If it weren’t for their letters, we wouldn’t have as deep an understanding of these writers outside of their writings.

So in honor of National Pen Pal Day, try sending a letter to a friend or family member. Or use one of the many sites you can find online to set you up with a pen pal from around the world.  I guarantee it will brighten their day. And who knows, maybe years from now your letter will end up crossing the path of someone hoping to understand more about living in the 21^st century.

For the past year at the Bucknell Press, three days a week I would enter the hobbit hole in the basement of Taylor Hall and be welcomed by rooms of books. Truly, the perfect place to work for any book lover. Not only to work among these shelves filled with texts, but to see a section of the history of the Press through its published works, ranging back to the early 1970s.

When I first arrived at the Press, a yearlong project I was given was to scan all the books missing from the MLA bibliography from the past decade so they could be added to it. Exciting, I know. But as I looked through the shelves, it quickly became fascinating. I loved discovering the works reviewed, edited, discussed, and published here. From Monkey Farm by Donald Dewsbury to Editing Lives by Jesse G. Swan, each day at work brought new finds.

Another project started through the Press was the creation of The Humanities Review, an academic journal for students. Part of the Bucknell Press internship is to create a project, and, as it was still early in the first semester I hadn’t considered what I would do. But one day, the director of the Press came to me with the idea to start a journal. To offer students a place to send in critical essays which would be reviewed by a board of their peers and hopefully published in an issue. As one aspect I’ve quite enjoyed at the Press is the board meetings where members decide which works to publish, to be able to help lead that process and to evaluate essays and publish them, is exciting.  The process of evaluation, understanding what works and doesn’t, how this or that should be changed or added or taken out in the context of writing and words themselves, has always been a fascination of mine. It’s why I choose to work in publishing and wish to be an editor.

Part of my Press duties, as well, has been to write for the blog. Each month I got to choose a topic and look through the Press’s published books to find what fits within the theme. One of my favorites was definitely Monkey Day, both because who isn’t a fan of monkeys and it stood out as an oddity in the Press collection, but each month allowed another exploration into a topic where I, more often than not, didn’t know much of the history. And, again, I got to explore the past of the Bucknell Press while learning something new.

With a mother as a writer, I’ve grown up with an interest in publishing, although more the editorial rather than actual writing-a-book side. The past two summers I’ve interned for large companies in New York, working in genre fiction, and while I love those opportunities and will continue to go after them, neither had the intimacy of the smaller press that I’ve come to prefer. Walking into the office and personally knowing each of your colleagues is a treat hard to come by at a massive publisher.

Plus, throughout this year, my interest in academic publishing has grown tenfold. My first love will always be fiction because I love a good story, but I never looked at works of scholarship beyond using sources for my class essays. But now, understanding the process behind them, from both the authors and the publisher, I have a high appreciation for the texts as a whole, rather than a quote, and it definitely puts me in mind to read through a few on my own.

After my own lovely experience here at the Bucknell University Press, I wish next year’s student the same luck and happy internship.

“Our books and our pens are the most powerful weapon” – Malala Yousafzai

 

Celebrating authors, publishers, illustrators, books, and reading, World Book Day, also known as World Book and Copyright Day, is the largest worldwide celebration of books. Begun in 1995 by UNESCO, the event was created to promote reading, publishing, and copyright, and it is truly the perfect celebration for Bucknell Press and anyone who likes a good book.

Celebrated in most of the world on April 23, the date was originally connected to books by booksellers in Catalonia, Spain in 1923. Valencian writer Vicente Clavel Andrés chose it to honor author Miguel de Cervantes who died on an April 23. However, several other authors, such as William Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, died or were born on that date.

On this day, make sure to take the time to spend with a good book and to consider the cultural and social value books and publishing create so that you can take the value of books and literacy with you throughout your life. Still today, books are burned and schools are attacked. With literacy essential in empowerment and books necessary for freedom of expression as well as the spread of information, recognize the power that a book can hold.

Globally, cities have taken this to heart. Since 2000, World Book Capital City, inspired by World Book and Copyright day, occurs where a city is chosen to uphold the ideals of World Book Day until the following year’s celebration and a new city is chosen to promote reading in its population. For 2015, it was Incheon, South Korea and this 2016 it changes to Wrocław, Poland. With the event celebrated in over 100 countries and by millions of people, almost all regions of the world have been touched by this event and the love for books.

And check out this page to see what events UNESCO has for you.

 

 

Message from UNESCO’s Director-General for 2015:

World Book and Copyright Day is an opportunity to recognise the power of books to change our lives for the better and to support books and those who produce them.

As global symbols of social progress, books – learning and reading — have become targets for those who denigrate culture and education, who reject dialogue and tolerance. In recent months, we have seen attacks on children at school and the public burning of books. In this context, our duty is clear – we must redouble efforts to promote the book, the pen, the computer, along with all forms of reading and writing, in order to fight illiteracy and poverty, to build sustainable societies, to strengthen the foundations of peace.

UNESCO is leading the fight against illiteracy, to be included as a crucial ingredient of the Sustainable Development Goals to follow 2015. Literacy is the door to knowledge, essential to individual self-esteem and empowerment. Books, in all forms, play an essential role here. With 175 million adolescents in the world -– mostly girls and young women — unable to read a single sentence, UNESCO is committed to harnessing information and communication technologies, especially mobile technology, to support literacy and to reach the unreached with quality learning.

Books are invaluable platforms for freedom of expression and the free flow of information – these are essential for all societies today. The future of the book as a cultural object is inseparable from the role of culture in promoting more inclusive and sustainable pathways to development. Through its Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, UNESCO is seeking to promote reading among young people and marginalised groups. We are working with the International Publishers Association, the International Booksellers’ Federation and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions to support careers in publishing, bookshops, libraries and schools.

This is the spirit guiding Incheon, Republic of Korea, which has been designated World Book Capital 2015, in recognition of its programme to promote reading among people and underprivileged sections of the population. This designation takes effect on World Book and Copyright Day and will be celebrated with participants from the previous title-holder, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

With Incheon and the entire international community, let us join together to celebrate books as the embodiment of creativity, the desire to share ideas and knowledge, to inspire understanding, dialogue and tolerance. This is UNESCO’s message on World Book and Copyright Day.

Irina Bokova

Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s question “Where do we find ourselves?” the winner of this year’s Bucknell University Press Book Collection Contest, junior math major Tom Bonan, learned through his years of reading that “[his] best hope at familiarity is in that solitary world of the book.”

Each year, the Press and the Library & IT ask students to enter a contest to reflect on their lives, their learning, and their personal interests through their book collections. With bookstores closing and electronic media becoming more and more popular, we want to encourage the appreciation of a printed book, as well as recognize the importance of the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library and the University Press, for every great university and institution of learning has, at its center, a great library and a great press.

For Tom, while always a voracious reader, his true journey into literature and the start of his collection began his sophomore year of high school when he “began to keep a journal of what [he] had been reading, jotting down the title, author, and the date [he] finished each book, as well as a few sentences of [his] thoughts of the book at the time.” And it is this period where Tom “genuinely believe[s] was the most important development in [his] life as a thinker, taking in as much of the world as [he] could.”

As Tom writes, “when thinking about my experience with literature, I am drawn to the analogy that life is like being a traveller lost in a forest. The world is rife with things that make you believe that there is a way out, but great works of literature have the opposite effect— the goal is to make you feel comfortable immersing yourself in that overwhelming entity. The point is not to overcome the forest, but to become familiar with it.”

Throughout his essay, as Tom considers Emerson’s question, he looks to French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s statement “Everything in the world exists to end up in a book,” and he asks “How real is the world of literature? We have to look no further than to one of the plays of Pirandello, where, if we are to believe him, fictional characters are more real than we are because they have found a home in the enduring world of art.”

But then, Tom is forced to question the possible decline of the novel even as he believes “literature has the power to stave off any possible decline. The kind of thinking that is cultivated in literature cannot just disappear without profound discomfort. One can read The Brothers Karamazov and become shocked at how quickly the individual is cast away when culpability really rests in the arms of society. Or one can investigate Plato’s Republic and see that while we may deeply believe in our rule of law, we have a poor understanding of what justice truly is. These works illuminate the profound disconnect between how we perceive the world and the way it genuinely operates.”

As Tom writes, “the deeper one looks inside a book, the more outward they are actually looking into the world…This is ultimately the role reading has taken on for me. They constitute a crucial part of this ongoing, organic process of engagement with the world. I keep track and catalogue the books I read because they are indicative of some sort of stage or ongoing process in my development as a person and as a thinker. This is the main reason that I buy most of the books I read—there is a certain part of me that is held inside these objects that impacts me in a very intimate way. Being surrounded by books—especially by ones that have made a real impression on me—is incredibly comforting. The analogy of the forest isn’t just some poetic statement; it’s a real, engrained process that I myself have gone through.”

Contest runners-up are freshmen Sara Glass and Sasha Carpenter, with collections of religious texts and novels of triumph through suffering, respectively.

After starting her collection several years ago, Sara began slowly and without even realizing it because as her “quest for direction started becoming a larger part of [her] life, [her] collection of religious books became a larger part of [her] library.” With 189 books so far in this specific collection, there’s no sign of it ending anytime soon. Her fascination with the occult and spiritual texts only grows especially as she has yet “to find a Torah, Quran, or any books focused on those two religions. The closest [she has] found is Jewish children’s workbooks and autobiographies, but nothing describing the beliefs and practices of the Jewish and Muslim faiths” which to Sara makes an interesting statement about “social trends and attitudes towards religion.”

With a mind to collecting from thrift shops and used collections, her texts contain plenty of history and unique pieces not found in your everyday bookstore.

For Sara, “another curiosity in my collection, and arguably the most unique, is The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing. My copy of this book is an uncorrected proof. It came before the book was published, has an unofficial paper cover with details such as estimated publication date and number of pages, each page is hand-numbered, and there are numbers in place of the images that would be put in the final published version. I find this to be an absolutely amazing find. This book is certainly rare, if not one of a kind, and as a book enthusiast I find it so interesting to see the step that comes between the author’s first copy and the final published version.”

Sasha, like the others, explores the world and the meaning that can be found in it through literature, although her preference is to discover it through “the degradation of man, the ruin of woman and the dwarfing of childhood” since “if [she] choose[s] to live contentedly and ignore the suffering of others, [she has] learned nothing.”

From Les Miserable to A Thousand Splendid Suns, Sasha “must ask [her]self if [she is] willing to lay aside [her] desires for the sake of another, less fortunate than [her].” Adopted from Russia, Sasha especially connects to these darker themes, knowing how lucky she is to have escaped “a dense weight of oppression.” She takes to heart these stories and the struggles relayed, and understands “it is what [she] choose[s] to do with this knowledge that matters.”

While tango had previously been discussed globally almost exclusively in terms of the United States, Europe, or Japan, Global Tangos takes the reader into other parts of the world, many of which may be a surprise for the reader. Author Melissa Fitch examines in-depth some of the very serious ways in which tango has been used in the Muslim world, including Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and she also has an extended section dealing with the Jewish dimension of the dance, both historical, in terms of founding composers and musicians in Argentina, but also in Europe during World War II, when prisoners in concentration camps or Jews living in ghettos composed Yiddish tangos expressing their sense of pain. Fitch discusses how, in fact, Jews imprisoned in the concentration camps were escorted to the gas chambers to an inmate orchestra playing what was referred to as the “death tango.”

 

According to Fitch, “One surprise was when I went to Lebanon. …to find the Lebanon tango dancers dancing in a bar destroyed in the civil war and then again in 2005 when Rafim Hariri was killed in a car bomb …So what you have is this shell that no longer exists and yet you’ve got these tango dancers coming together to dance in the bar and pool area, which survived, each week. And I thought this was so completely unexpected. The biggest surprise for me had to do with the Middle East and Asia because people tend to be Eurocentric. The fact that…one of the most important Chinese pop singers in recent history, Leslie Cheung, after the experience of going to Buenos Aires, incorporated queer tango into his concerts. And this was in 1997-98, in his concert in Asia, at one point dancing a tango with another man. He would put on red high heels and dance with another man.”

 

Even the cover image of Fitch’s book pushes boundaries as it undermines every tango cliché. Instead of a male-female couple wearing black, the woman in a sexualized position that reveals her body and often her subservience to the male, the faces showing a standard serious demeanor—images that have graced the covers of countless books on the topic–we see a photo of a queer tango couple, both female- identified, one of whom is clearly transgender. This image underscores one of the most important dimensions of the book, the discussion of global queer tango activism and communities as well as the LGBTQ presence in myriad cultural manifestations related to the dance, says Fitch.

The activist aspect of this community has “enabled people to band together in protest, in solidarity, such as the … solidarity dance that took place in Buenos Aires when there were local businesses that were trying to take over a public space for their business, and the community, the global community too, stepped in and did a dance-in in the square.”

Tango, too, has healing power. In one of Fitch’s chapters, she discovers “it all comes down to the embrace. That is, studies have shown how healing it is. Something about the dance, you’re forced to be in the moment …being here in the moment now and everything else falls away because you’re exactly connected to your partner and sometimes you can feel their heartbeat and it is enormously healing.”

An early review, done by Gustavo Fares and published in Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana (44.2 [2015]) said that “her study leads her to conclude that issues related to cultural appropriation do not disappear as a result of ‘globalization, transnationalism and the digital revolution’ (201), but rather new problems emerge while others become exacerbated. Participation in the global communities is closely related to access to education, time and capital and as such, it remains an elite endeavor.”

Even so, as Fitch says, “there are a number of Facebook groups that are connected to this queer tango phenomenon….and where before people would have been isolated in pockets of the world, now there is a connection in a virtual world and in the real world it ends in the tango embrace on the dance floor. This has created a global community where if you are a dancer you can go to practically any city in the world where you have a line of connection with the local community. And even if you don’t speak the language, the beauty of dance is that once you’re on the dance floor you are speaking the same language.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about Global Tangos is that this unusual compendium of cultural manifestations and diverse theoretical underpinnings from both the humanities and the social sciences are all woven together into an exceptionally readable, lively, thought-provoking, sometimes poignant and often humorous book. Each chapter is followed by a short, personal vignette that underscores an aspect of the main body. These take place in Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Venice, Beijing and Beirut. Readers have found this to be a delightful (and insightful) dimension of the book.

Global Tangos catches the reader off guard by the sheer originality of the work and by the author’s ability to make discoveries in unexamined places, in terms of the material examined, the theoretical concepts utilized, and the heretofore understudied geographical areas of the world that are included. Fitch’s work surprises Latin Americanists by exploring things previously unimagined with regard to the global impact of Latin American popular culture. She takes risks, and her voracious curiosity about the way that Latin America is understood in the global imaginary is evident in every part of her book. As Ray Batchelor, from the Queer Tango Project, states, “Global Tangos is a superb book. I admire it greatly, and I recommend it…[it] embodies scholarship at a high level. Fitch exacts truths from her rich, well-chosen body of evidence by the judicious application of theory, insight and intelligence.”

 

“Introduction to Poetry”

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

 

April showers may bring flowers, but it also brings National Poetry Month.

Begun in 1996 and inspired by the success of Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), every year the Academy of American Poets organizes the celebration to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the U.S. – and this celebration has fared much better than expected, spreading to Canada in 1998, and then in 1999 with UNESCO declaring March 21^st World Poetry Day to, as they said, “give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.”

Immediately in 1996, National Poetry Month took off with President Bill Clinton declaring that “National Poetry Month offers us a welcome opportunity to celebrate not only the unsurpassed body of literature produced by our poets in the past, but also the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today’s American poetry….Their creativity and wealth of language enrich our culture and inspire a new generation of Americans to learn the power of reading and writing at its best.”

Each year the celebration has grown. In 1998, the Academy of American Poets and the American Poetry & Literacy Project distributed 100,000 free poetry books from New York to California, while the White House held a gala featuring Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, and Rita Dove. In 2001, Langston Hughes won his own stamp from the United States Postal Service after the Academy held a vote during that year’s celebration. The Empire State building decided to join in on April 5, 2005 by illuminating with blue lights, and in 2006 Poem-a-Day was launched where Poets.org publishes a new poem each day in April. And starting in 2012, the Academy launched Dear Poet, a project for students to read and write poems, some of which get to be published on their website.

Here at Bucknell University, the school holds its own celebration with participation of National Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 19. The Stadler Center will distribute postcards featuring poems by students, faculty, and staff, and then hold an outdoor reading on the Langone Center lawn.

The Bucknell Press, too, has long held an appreciation for poetry and, from 1999-2003, published many works in The Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry. Included in the series are: Touch: Poems by Karl Patten (1999), The Ten Lights of God by Afaa Michael Weaver (2000), Alpha Ruins by Charles Borkhuis (2000), The Ten Lights of God by Afaa Michael Weaver (2001), The Fiddler’s Trance by Floyd Skloot (2001), Alluvial by Katherine Soniat (2001), The Disappearing Poet Blues by Marc Hudson (2002), Swimming With Dolphins by Adrian Oktenberg (2002), Blues Baby: Early Poems by Harryette Mullen (2002), Poems and Elegies by Olga Sedakova translated by Slava Yastremski (2003), Poems and Elegies by Olga Sedakova and translated by Slava Yastremski and Michael M. Nayden.

This month, in honor of National Poetry Month, we would love to feature some of our past poetry books. Catastrophic Bliss by Myronn Hardy contemplates longing and is a winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for Poetry. The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies translated by Michael M. Naydan celebrates the Lemko-Ukrainian poet by gathering together his best works. Cipango by Tomás Harris and translated by Daniel Shapiro comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America through poetry while Swimming with Dolphins by  Adrian Oktenberg recasts creation. The Ten Lights of God by Afaa Michael Weaver explores the metaphysics of human consciousness and Irish Poems: From Cromwell to the Famine collected and edited by Joan Keefe presents long-lost Irish poems in new form.

 

 

 

Catastrophic Bliss

By Myronn Hardy

2012
The Griot Project Book Series

Winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for Poetry

 

Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy’s third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.

 

The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies

By Bohdan Ihor Antonych

TRANSLATED BY: MICHAEL M. NAYDAN

2010

This volume gathers together translations of the best works from all six of the extraordinary extant collections by Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s (1909-37): A Greeting to Life (1931), The Grand Harmony (1932-33), Three Rings (1934), The Book of the Lion (1936), The Green Gospel (1938), and Rotations (1938), as well as poetry published separately. It includes a translator’s note and a biographical sketch on the poet by Michael M. Naydan and a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world’s leading experts on Antonych’s poetry and an Assistant Professor at Warsaw University.

While Antonych is not a household name in the discourse on Modernism that includes such great Slavic poets as Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, as well as their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, in the opinion of many literary critics, he unquestionably should be. Critics have also compared him to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. Only a small amount of Antonych’s works has been available in English to date. In 1977 émigré Ukrainian poet Bohdan Boychuk with the American poets Mark Rudman and Paul Nemser translated and published a small, but well-received, book of Antonych’s selected poems, A Square of Angels. The current edition of ninety-six poems complements that earlier volume with nearly two-thirds of the translations appearing in English for the first time and honors Antonych on the hundred-year anniversary of his birth.

 

Cipango

By Tomás Harris 

TRANSLATED BY: DANIEL SHAPIRO

2010

Chilean poet Tomás Harris’s Cipango–written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author’s best work to date–employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he’d reached the Far East (“Cipango,” or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America–manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there–and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author’s vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration.

Cipango is characterized by strange and obsessive imagery–strips of mud, will-o’-the-wisps, vacant lots, blue rats–juxtapositions of contemporary and archaic diction and of incongruous settings that range over time and place; the use of an understated irony; and a dark, incantatory voice. The speakers in various poems address personages such as Columbus, Marco Polo, and the Great Khan, and refer to a breadth of sources including Columbus’s diaries, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nerval’s Aurelia, the Holocaust, Billie Holiday, and the film Goldfinger. The book’s content and formal elements combine to produce a work of almost epic scope, one with universal appeal.

 

Swimming With Dolphins

By Adrian Oktenberg

2002

The Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry

When Aphrodite rises from the sea to touch her fingertip to Sappho’s hand in “The Creation” – the first poem in Swimming with Dolphins – the world begins. From this startling and inventive recasting of creation, Adrian Oktenberg sets the tone for her second collection. An intelligent sensuality pulses through these poems of love and loss – marvelously present in the fullness of pleasure, equally present in moments of crushing grief. The poet refuses to make small any suffering, whether it is personal, as in matters of erotic or familial love, or historical and political, as in her poems on the Argentine “disappeared” and the McCarthyite period in the United States. She finds that “after plain, plenitude comes.” “Swimming with Dolphins,” the major long poem which is the centerpiece of the books, is a bold exploration of erotic possibilities between women and, at the same time, a lush evocation of the natural world. In profound ways, this book opens our senses and affirms the regenerative power of life and love, even in the face of personal or historical catastrophe.

 

The Ten Lights of God

Afaa Michael Weaver

2000
The Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry

The Ten Lights of God is a series of eighty-one poems in which Afaa Michael Weaver explores the metaphysics of human consciousness. Influenced by the Language poetry of writers such as Keith Waldrop, Anne Marie Waldrop, and Peter Gale Nelson, the poet weaves the energy of his concern for the lives of African/black men into a tapestry of the Jewish kabbalah with its notion of the body and the life of God being comprised of ten sefirot or lights. The vatic reach of these poems is contexualized in notions of the human interior as its own universe, seeking life and death themselves as the bridges to the unknowable. Weaver seeks to travel the interior of lyricism itself, the nakedness of human consciousness and its own nervous arrangement, which we know as language.

 

Irish Poems: From Cromwell to the Famine

A Miscellany

Joan Keefe

1977

When Irish as a literary and vernacular language died out almost completely after the famine of the 1840s, the existence of a large body of poetry was forgotten, buried in obscure and indecipherable manuscripts. It is certain that a considerable portion was lost, although some poems that had passed into oral tradition, often anonymously, were preserved in folksong. Folklore was also the medium through which fragmentary legends, concerning the poems themselves, lingered. Half a century later a new generation of scholars rediscovered the neglected literature and their labors of transcribing and translating lead to an accessible material that became one of the mainsprings of the two major cultural movements of modern Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish Language Revival.

Joan Keefe here presents her new versions of poems that come from the time when the great tradition of Irish poetry, as it had been known for a thousand years, was being brought to an end.