Kirjahaku

River that must turn full after I stop dying Song, my song, raise grief to music Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick So sick of wrangling: thus weeping, Sounds of light, stay in her keeping And my son’s face – this much for honor — from “ ‘A’-11” At long last, here is the whole of Louis Zukofsky’s epic masterpiece “A” back in print with misprints corrected and a new, fresh introduction by the noted scholar Barry Ahearn. No other poem in the English language is filled with as much daily love, light, intellect, and music. As William Carlos Williams once wrote of Zukofsky’s poetry, “I hear a new music of verse stretching out into the future.”

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others. Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the"Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

The work of Louis Zukofsky has been gaining exposure as a new generation of poets and scholars "rediscover" the American avant-garde tradition. Concurrently, interest in Guillaume Apollinaire's work has grown in recent years as English departments re-explore international modernism. In this extended essay, one of the American literary giants of the 20th Century provides deep readings of the French modernist's entire oeuvre and provides insight into his own formative aesthetic. Two sections of the essay were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932; the complete book is available here for the first time in English. The book builds its arguments with extensive quotations from Apollinaire's poems in their orignal French; this bilingual edition is the latest offering in what Publisher's Weekly has hailed as "an essential series."

A Test of Poetry (1932) is a comparative study of poetry from Homer to the twentieth century. By giving several translations of the same passage from Homer, an elegy of Ovid and lines from Herrick which read like an adaptation of Ovid, or a fifteenth century poem about a cock and a recent poem about chickens, and so on, a means for judging the values of poetic writing is established. The book also has a comparative chronological chart, including a summary of critical views.