HWS CollegesPress
Deborah Tall’s final collection Afterings, is a remarkable volume by a poet and nonfiction writer at the peak of her powers. Eavan Boland has called it "an essential collection," and Mary Ruefle says the poems have "not what is to be expected – hints of cessation – but an overwhelming sense of blossoming."
Deborah Tall edited Seneca Review for twenty-five years, until 2006. Her previous book of poems Summons was chosen by Charles Simic for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn Morton A. Prize. From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place was reprinted recently by Syracuse University Press. Her final book of nonfiction, A Family of Strangers, a book length lyric essay, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in biography/autobiography in 2006.
Drinks at the Stand-Up Tragedy Club by Jim Crenner
"Jim Crenner's is a poetry that sees through civilization and time while employing all the graces and grace notes available to both. . . . Here are the detailed days of our lives and our larger culture. Here is an educated wit applied to a learned self-awareness. Here are mythological characters reborn alongside our versions of their lives. Here, too, one will come upon an amazing reincarnation of an erotic Emily Dickinson. Try doing that. Whoever opens this collection will keep the light on late." - Marvin Bell
Click Here to Buy Drinks at the Stand-Up Tragedy Club!
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER, Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor, $15. Click here to order.
The poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor has been acclaimed for decades by such poets as Randall Jarrell, Richard Howard, and Adrienne Rich. Now fifteen poets and critics join those luminaries in celebrating her distinct and dazzling poems in this collection of essays edited by Jean Valentine. A beacon for Southern writers, feminists, and those who hunger for a linguistically rich and musical poetry, Eleanor Ross Taylor is, as Adrienne Rich has said, one of the poetic "lighthouse keepers" of the century.
"Eleanor Taylor is a national treasure, a major figure among the generations of American poets, one who deserves our full appreciation and gratitude. The Lighthouse Keeper, a gathering of gifted poets and critics celebrating her art, each viewing it from a different angle, adds directly to our pleasure and understanding of her extraordinary accomplishment. She has given us a lifetime's wealth of wonderful poems, and it is an honor for me enthusiastically to recommend this "first bright book of homage," The Lighthouse Keeper, to serious readers everywhere."-George Garrett
For decades, Elanor Ross Taylor's remarkable poems have followed the mind's passionate and peculiar motion, extending a classical Modernist tradition to the underground life of women, loosing raw nerves, dangerous loyalty, bitter love, and trust in disruption, hesitation, silence. These essays recognize Taylor's habit of thinking and speaking-her vividly strange, brilliantly complex, elegant and colloquial collages-as necessary to our measure of contemporary poetry. This is an essential book for and about an essential poet.-Joyce Peseroff
Born in 1920 in North Carolina, Eleanor Ross Taylor has lived for many years in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has published five volumes of poems: Wilderness of Ladies, 1960; Welcome Eumenides, 1972; New and Selected Poems, 1983; Days Going / Days Coming Back, 1992; and Late Leisure, 1999. Her awards include the 1998 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
THE FIFTIES and THE SIXTIES
A complete reprinting of The Fifties and The Sixties, that dramatic and influential magazine edited by Robert Bly and William Duffy. This rich and combative compendium of contemporary literary history -- poems, parodies, translations, essays, reviews, and regular columns like "Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum" and "The Award of the Blue Toad" -- had been out of print for over a decade until reprinted by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. Shot from the original editions, the entire ten issues have been reprinted in unmodified facsimile form. If you missed the fireworks the first time around, don't miss them this time! Available for $5.95 each, or purchase the entire set of 10 volumes, specially priced at $40. Click here to order.
Highlights:
#1, 1958. "The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned." Poems by Gary Snyder, W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Hall, Henri Michaux, Gunnar Ekelof. Essays on Louis Simpson and "Five Decades of Modern American Poetry."
#2, 1959. "The only remedy is to break everything." (La Forgue) Poems by James Wright, Robert Bly, Juan Ramon Jiménez. Essays on Robert Creeley, and "The Possibility of New Poetry."
#3, 1959. "Only what is really oneself is able to heal." (Jung) Poems by Louis Simpson, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Paul Celan. Essays on Lorca, René Char, and Donald Hall.
#4, 1960. "Poetry either leaps into the unknown, or it is nothing." (Octavio Paz) Poems by Lorca, Machado, John Logan, Richard Hugo. Essays on W.S. Merwin, and "On Current Poetry in America."
#5, 1961. An anthology of fourteen 19th- and 20th-century French poets. Essays on John Logan, and Bly on French poetry.
#6, 1962. Some Poems Touching on Recent American History: Wright, Neruda, Bly. Poems by Blas de Otero and Eugenio Montale. Essays on Gary Snyder and "On the Necessary Aestheticism of Modern Poetry."
#7, 1964. "No one would write poems if the problem of poetry consisted in making oneself understood." (Montale) Poems by Neruda, Vallejo, Russell Edson, Bill Knott. Essays on Neruda and James Dickey.
#8, 1966. "We lack the power to imagine what we know." (Shelley) 14 German poets. James Wright, George Hitchcock, Donald Hall, John Knoepfle. Robert Bly: "The Dead World and the Live World."
#9, 1967. "The lemon tree in my garden is a bigger influence on my work than all the poets together." (Hernández) Homage to Miguel Hernández: poems and commentaries by Lorca, Neruda, Alberti, Aleixandre. Poems by Gary Snyder, Louis Simpson. "The Collapse of James Dickey," by Robert Bly.
#10, 1968. "The power that awakes the mind of the reformer to contend against the tyrannies of the world is first seen as the star of love or beauty." (Yeats) Poems by Saint Geraud, Paul Zweig, Galway Kinnell, Michael Benedikt. "A Statement" by LeRoi Jones. Essay on Norwegian Poetry.
DIFFERENT FLESHES: A NOVEL/POEM, by Albert Goldbarth. Hardbound, $7.95. Click here to order.
ISBN: 0-934888-01-9.
Albert Goldbarth's innovative book examines Paris of the '20's through the comings and goings of one of the most striking characters of that brilliant time, Vander Clyde/Barbette, the lonesome youngster from Round Rock, Texas, and the brilliant entertainer celebrated by Cocteau, Janet Flanner and others. A combination of history, reportage, imagination, energetic prose and marvelous poetry, Different Fleshes is a daring achievement.
". . . a crazily associative narrative of remarkable inventiveness and energy"-Library Journal
"Different Fleshes comes closest to recounting a historical narrative but . . . takes as much pleasure in pursuing a sheer wealth of suggestive tangents and backwaters in the material, merely because they are there . . . [This] habit of discovery is Goldbarth's own 'secret mark'; he is an encyclopedist of the imagination . . . ."-American Poetry Review
TO KEEP MOVING -- ESSAYS 1959-1969, by Donald Hall. Paperbound, $5.95. Click here to order.
ISBN: 0-934888-02-7
The essays collected in this book range from Hall's influential introduction to the 1961 Penguin Anthology, Contemporary American Poets, to considerations of both past and present English and American poets. "Typically the modern artist... has acted as if restlessness were a conviction, and has destroyed his own past in order to create a future. He has said to himself, like the policeman to the vagrant, 'Keep moving.'" Full of provocative ideas and ruminations in Hall's inimitable style.
In Place: Poems by Toni Flores, edited by Deborah Tall. Paperbound, $10. Click here to order.
ISBN 0-934888-16-7
In Place is a collection of poems by the late Toni Flores, an anthropologist with a special interest in folklore, folk art, and traditional life, particularly as experienced by women. Her poetry was often occasioned by her fieldwork, though in later years her poems turned increasingly inward. Flores's scholarly work was published widely in her lifetime and included research on humanistic anthropology, field poetry, ethnicity and gender, the birthing movement, ethnic cooking, Mexican folk artist Teodora Blanco, and nineteenth-century feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was the influential poetry editor of Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, and taught from 1971 until her death in 1997 at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she was treasured by generations of students.
"When an anthropologist of her kind finds she has to come out with poetry, we should listen carefully because such a person is super-excellently informed about how the world is . . . Such a poet has her ear to the ground of the planet itself. She is making nothing up." -From the Introduction by Edith Turner
"Those who did not know Toni Flores in life can gain a keen sense of her from the lines of her poems. An unobtrusive style, yet with quiet music ("all the sweet secretions"), description that can become depth, depth of joy arriving ("I am drunk on bread . . . ") and of life ending ("My own death uncurls inside me . . . "). One has a sense of someone who lived and wrote with uncompromising clarity, as if there were no other way."-Dell Hymes, University of Virginia
A blacksmith once told me
that iron is stupid.
It cannot tell the hammer
from the anvil
but takes it blows
from both sides at once.
-"What the Blacksmith Said," by Toni Flores