Kirjahaku

Describing W.S. Merwin as a moral poet, H.L. Hix identifies the characteristics that have set Merwin's voice apart and suggests that an underlying vision of human interconnectedness and affinity with nature permeates his poetry. Hix surveys Merwin's oeuvre to show that despite a reputation for difficulty and obscurity, his verse is clear and direct. Through close readings of Merwin's verse, Hix traces the emergence of the poet's dominant thematic concerns. Beginning with the interest in myth that permeates ""A Mask for Janus"", Merwin's focus turns to apocalypse, ecology and society, until he arrives at one theme that incorporates all the others: the theme of place. The author demonstrates that whether writing the angry protest poems of ""The Lice"" or the intimate family reminiscences of ""Opening the Hand"", Merwin maintains that our isolation fom each other and our isolation from the natural world are parallel and interrelated.

An ambitious novelist made clear and accessible; William H. Gass writes in his essays about ""the world within the word"" and ""the soul inside the sentence,"" yet readers often find it difficult to get far enough into Gass's words and sentences to find the world or soul they contain. In this guide to the American writer and philosopher's novels, short stories, novellas, and essays, H. L. Hix clarifies the obscurities that have served to limit access to Gass's corpus and explores how the parallels between his fiction and nonfiction illumine their related themes. Hix offers readings of Gass's works, from the early books, Omensetter's Luck and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, to his later The Tunnel and Cartesian Sonata. Hix identifies the continuous presence of psychological, metaphysical, and ethical themes, including the lingering effect on adults of childhood hurts, the results of being ""trapped"" in language, and the consequences of hatred. While agreeing with critics who label Gass's novels and stories metafiction, he contends that to stop the exploration there would be to miss a complete appreciation of the novelist. Hix demonstrates instead how Gass's writings both break and follow tradition - as metafiction belonging to the company of works by John Barth but also as moral fiction belonging in the long American tradition that includes The Scarlet Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird.

In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be?The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry.