April is National Poetry Month. Since its inception in 1996, National Poetry Month has evolved into one of the largest cultural events celebrating imagination, language, emotion and contemplation. On a gorgeous spring day, we invite you to celebrate the beauty of poetry with us and carry on the joy of reading poetry all year long.

Below are some of the books of poetry published by Bucknell University Press since 2000:

 

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog 

This is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989.  It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history – the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency.

 

Strategically I do my best

1

strategically I do my best

the wheels crunch and

the cannon barrel shifts into the breach

 

2

the pelvis gets its familiar snap

knees easily fold their openness

even a slight slackness lets experienced lips smack

 

3

my days of fighting you are over.

I only want you preserved

As the one who remembers us

 

4

among the smoke and the slogan-shouting mouths

the accusations the violence the death in between

you belong nowhere you are the irrelevant wolverine

 

Catastrophic Bliss by Myronn Hardy

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.

 

Beginning and End of the Snow / Début et Fin de la Neige by Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Emily Grosholz

Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while teaching at Williams College evokes the dance of atoms in the philosophical poem of Lucretius as well as the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. In the second, Bonnefoy uses the luminous woods of Haute Provence as the setting for a parable of losing one’s way.

 

Cipango by Tomás Harris, translated by Daniel Shapiro

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.

 

Poems and Elegies by Olga Sedakova, translate by Slava I. Yastremski AND Michael M. Naydan

An intensely philosophical and religious poet, Olga Sedakova writes of nature, music, and the inner, spiritual life. As one of the preservers of traditional Russian culture, she stands in stark contrast to the rampant commercialization in contemporary Russian life, instead tracing her poetic roots back to the early avant-garde movements of pre-revolutionary Russia. For that stance, she endured years of censorship and silencing during the Soviet regime her poems distributed by hand in mimeographed copies or by word of mouth. This volume introduces to an English-speaking audience an extensive selection of poems by one of Russia’s most distinguished lyric poets writing today.

 

Blues Baby: Early Poems by Harryette Mullen

Blues Baby: Early Poems brings together Harryette Mullen’s first book, Tree Tall Woman, with previously uncollected poems from the beginning of her career. Her early poems draw inspiration from the feminist and Black Arts movements, as well as her connections to diverse communities of writers and artists. The movement of this volume is loosely autobiographical – from childhood narratives to poems about sexuality to indirect evocations of the poet’s art. Many of the poems address the subject of family and community, often emphasizing the strength of women and female friendship; some evoke culturally specific traditions and locations; others of a satiric nature offer cultural critiques. Harryette Mullen’s poetics works within various traditions, including the confessional and the performative mode of the Black Arts poets, and throughout her free-verse lyrics are written with insight, humor, and musicality, and will appeal to a diverse readership.

 

Swimming With Dolphins by Adrian Oktenberg

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 Disappearing Poet Blues by Marc Hudson

The poems in Marc Hudson’s The Disappearing Poet Blues are driven by a moral anguish: how do we live, they ask, in strict circumstances; what is the worth of a profoundly limited human life; how can one be both a good father and a good artist? Emblematic of the poet’s exile and endurance are the severe landscapes of the Okanogan in Washington State and the Colville Indian Reservation, where Hudsons brain-injured son, Ian, was born and lived his first year. Later poems reflect the familys move to Indiana, where the less austere contours of the Midwest suggest a mellowing of grief. The poems of the second section metaphorically wrestle with many of the same concerns: Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon Christian poet, tells of the burdens of song; an Irish monk on his volcanic outpost longs for his homecoming in Christ. Hudsons The Disappearing Poet Blues has an ethical music and weight; but ragged and uncertain and human as it is, it also sings the blues.

 

Alluvial by Katherine Soniat

The sediment, or alluvium, deposited in a riverbed perpetually shifts and settles in response to water’s flux; in turn, its submerged contours shape the watercourse, creating shallows and rapids, treacherous holes and long placid runs, sculpting the restless shoreline.

Set in the watery landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay (the world’s largest estuary) and in Louisiana (land of braided tributaries), Katherine Soniat’sAlluvial charts the course of individual and collective histories influenced by the rich alluvium of culture and geography, ecology and autobiography. Lives large and small, recorded and unrecorded-those of Captain John Smith, Frederick Douglass, a community of Ursuline nuns, a home full of exiled children of tubercular parents, the poet’s mother, nameless others-merge into the past’s archetypal sediment, only to rise again in these beautiful poems to dance in memory’s drift and to filter a future always infused with the past.

 

The Fiddler’s Trance by Floyd Skloot

Poet, essayist, and novelist Floyd Skloot continues his exploration of human resilience in The Fiddler’s Trance, his third collection. Patterns of historical and personal experience in these poems illuminate the mysterious interaction of illness, loss, and creative endeavor. We can never be certain that our vital force or physical integrity will endure: Skloot’s poems consider the phenomenon of sudden change in our lives. When all we understood about ourselves and our world is called into question, we must find a new way of seeing. Mixing formal and free verse; moving freely between past and present, self and others, private and public life, the poems of The Fiddler’s Trance are concerned with the power of art to express hope honestly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is almost the end of the year, a time to reflect on what we have achieved. In 2016, Bucknell University Press books were reviewed extensively in many different scholarly journals. Please take a look at these 10 notable reviews and maybe you can find your holiday present from our book list. Happy holidays to our readers, authors, editors, and friends.

 

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment by Brian Michael Norton

“Norton’s choice of texts attests to his willingness to examine a range of material both formally and thematically. From Sterne and Diderot, to Rousseau, Godwin, and Hayes, he follows the patterns of challenge that the fictions—in comic and satric form, in dialogue and narrative—insist on.”

-Ann Van Sant, University of California, Irvine, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, No. 3

 

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America by Jerónimo Arellano

“Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America makes a valuable contribution to a crowded area of research by approaching magical realism through affect studies, the history of the emotions, and new materialist studies (Jane Bennett, Bill Brown). Jerónimo Arellano’s opposing perspectives elicit surprising new insights about works that have been analyzed extensively, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). (…). Indeed, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America has critical ambitions that far surpass those of a new study on magical realism; it is more aptly characterized as a sketch toward a new transatlantic literary and cultural history of wonder in modernity from the discovery and invasion of the New World to the present. (…) Impeccably researched in all areas of expertise, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America is a sophisticated study that models the kinds of innovative readings that new emotions based and object-oriented theories may facilitate in Latin American literary and cultural studies.”

Monika Kaup, Modern Language Quarterly 77.4 (December 2016)

 

Medbh McGuckian by Borbála Faragó

“Following the brief of the Contemporary Irish Writers series in which it is published, that is to “provide a general discussion of interpretative strategies and issues for understanding this work”, Medbh McGuckian works within the inherent limitations of such a project to produce a thorough introduction to and detailed readings of poems, collections, an overview of the poetic career and an extensive bibliography which will orient the uninitiated McGuckian reader very well indeed.”

Kenneth Keating, Irish Studies Review, 24:4, 492-494 (2016)

Queen Anne and the Arts edited by Cedric D. Reverand, II

“These, the artists and the Queen, were equal, if perhaps silent or unknowing partners in the same enterprise- to celebrate the glories of Britannia through multiple infusions of shared values and belief systems. In other words, this collection of essays helps us see the constructs that Anne and her artistic community shared in the representation of the finest of British creativity to the world at large.”

Professor Beverly Schneller, Belmont University, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 30.2 (2016)

 

Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context edited by Jack DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis

“[…]ending the book with an essay on caricature might be a brilliantly ironic move by the editors to admit that any project that attempts to cover the full breadth of Sheridan runs

up against ‘theatrical politics’ (281), and underneath a suspect subject who dazzles but remains unknowable. Sheridan is a fascinating figure, and hopefully this book will encourage more

critics and teachers to incorporate him into their accounts of the period. In answer to the question of whether a new book on him is worthwhile, the evidence of this one suggests a

resounding ‘Yes’.”

– James Kelly, University of Exeter, The BARS Review, No. 47 (Spring 2016)

 

Shakespeare and the Spanish ‘Comedia’: Translation, Interpretation, Performance. Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer edited by Bárbara Mujica

“As the range of its material suggests, the collection in honour of Susan L. Fischer deals with a large body of materials that are not often studied together. Scholars will find much that is new in the chapters, whether it be editorial practice, visual arts, music, criticism, performance or translation. The volume should also be judged by the standard of how well it disseminates current research and methodologies in the analysis of Shakespeare and the Spanish Golden-Age drama. On that measure, it succeeds fairly well….Undoubtedly, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the field, though perhaps a section devoted to comparative studies of Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia proper might have been included in order to be fully consistent with the title of the collection and so as not to fall short of critical expectations.”

José Manuel González, Universidad de Alicante, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCIII, Number 3, 2016

 

The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte edited by Michael Griffin

“Two editions of Laurence Whyte’s Original Poems on Various Subjects, Serious, Moral and Diverting appeared in this little-known poet’s lifetime, in 1740 and 1742; they are now collected in a carefully annotated volume with an introduction by Michael Griffin. Griffin acknowledges that few readers will recognize the name. All the more exciting to discover a missing link in eighteenth-century Ireland’s literary and musical history, and a writer who, in throwing new light on Oliver Goldsmith, also invites us to think more deeply about the English literary tradition and Irish talent.”

Norma Clarke, The Times Literary Supplement (Dec 7 2016)

 

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

“This study makes an outstanding contribution to the on-going reassessment of the function of language in Robert Burns’s literary works….Broadhead offers a critically nuanced account of the poet’s multilingualism and linguistic experimentalism, and one that emphasises Burns’s role in initiating not only an ‘imaginative reconceptualization of […] the language of Scottish literature’ (72-3), but also a ‘radical revaluation of poetic language’ that subsequently influenced the linguistic thinking of Shelley and Wordsworth (171). In the process, Broadhead succeeds both in offering a new perspective on the linguistic complexity of Burns’s literary endeavours and in illuminating the centrality of language in the poet’s cultural and literary legacies.”

Christopher Donaldson, Lancaster University, The BARS Review, No. 48 (Autumn 2016)

 

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.”

Jenny Davidson, SEL 56, 3 (Summer 2016): 671–725

 

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims by Adriana Méndez Rodenas

“Méndez Rodenas’s reading of these women travelers complements the imperial and postcolonial criticism about travel writing, and opens new routes for understanding female travel writing in more complex and dynamic aspects. The book is written with sophistication and offers a comprehensive bibliographic state of the question in women’s travel, establishing a fruitful dialogue with it across areas and disciplines, between European and Latin American studies.”

– Leila Gomez, University of Colorado at Boulder, Modern Language Notes Volume 130/ No. 2