David R. Slavitt

David R. Slavitt does not believe in literary criticism so much as in 'remarks', and in this witty and unusual work, he remarks on the life of the poet: how it was - and how it is - to be an American writer in our time. Combining personal reminiscence with deft literary analysis, incisive biographical sketches, and, sometimes, literary gossip, the essays in ""Re Verse"" give new perspectives on the famous, including Harold Bloom, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, and Stephen Spender, and recover the charms of the nearly forgotten, such as Dudley Fitts, Winfield Townley Scott, Merrill Moore, and John Hall Wheelock. Slavitt writes with self-deprecating humor of his own literary education and uses his impressive experience and erudition to illuminate the whims of poetic influence, passion, and reputation. With a refreshing honesty and considerable poise, he gives readers an enlightening view of the vast and ever-changing literary universe.

Taking its inspiration from Sanders' own autobiography ""Memoirs of a Professional Cad"" (1960), this book is part witty, bawdy, and irreverent memoir, part moving meditation on the price of fame; like most of David Slavitt's work, it defies easy categorization. In George Sanders, ""Zsa Zsa, and Me"", Slavitt looks back to his career as a film critic in the glamorous - at least superficially - world of 1950s Hollywood, when he traveled in circles that included the talented British actor George Sanders (1906-1972) and his then-wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was talented at, well, being famous. Sanders, who seemed to maintain an ironic detachment from roles that were often beneath him, nonetheless couldn't bear the decline of his later years and committed suicide at the age of sixty-five. Darkly humorous to the end, his note read, 'Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck'. Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, remains in the headlines (with her dubiously named husband Frederic Prinz von Anhalt) at age ninety-two. Although he punctuates his story with witty asides - the author's encounter with Marilyn Monroe is particularly memorable - Slavitt turns a critic's eye toward questions of talent and art, while also tackling the difficult and universal questions of aging, relationships, and mortality.

In The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems, veteran poet David R. Slavitt touches on topics from the mundane to the mysterious with his signature wit and intelligence. In Stupid, for instance, he transforms a simple head cold into an appreciation for the richness of consciousness, and in Waking, the very effort of rising from bed becomes something like a miracle: ""I heave myself up to a sitting position, pause / a moment, and am amazed by what I have done...."" Slavitt explores the range of the human condition with such ease and insight that readers cannot help but ponder what life is -- and what it could be. What if -- like the mythic sea creature in ""The Dogfish"" -- humans could return to the womb when frightened? In the collection's title poem, Slavitt gives a voice to the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which claims, persuasively, to possess a value to humans that is seldom noticed or appreciated. Slavitt has a unique ability to examine an idea -- be it virtue or vice, dark or blithe -- and offer perspective and wisdom about the conundrums of our existence.

Originally published in 1961, this shrewd, smartly written novel follows two American men traveling in Europe. Though both have struck out for the same continent, each man's methods of and motives for travel lead him to have a very different experience. Underlying it all is the premise that ""Europe"" can be a refiner's fire, deeply affecting a person's character. ""Europe"" represents a crucial step in Stern's development as a writer and stands as a witty, sharp point of entry into his writings.

Distinguished poet and translator David R. Slavitt here provides a translation of and meditation upon the Book of Lamentations, the biblical account of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 B.C.,on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av-Tish'a b'Av. (Six centuries later the Romans destroyed the second Temple on the same day.) Most of the Jewish population was deported to Babylon, and the ensuing period came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. According to tradition, the Book of Lamentations was written in response to this political, social, and religious crisis. The five poems composing the book express Israel's sorrow, brokenness, and bewilderment before God. Tish'a b'Av is the day on which observant Jews fast and pray. And mourn. As Slavitt observes in his meditation:" It is forbidden on Tish'a b'Av even to study the Torah, except for the Book of Job and the Book of Lamentations. This is the day on which we grieve for every terrible thing that happens in this world. It is the worst day of the year."Slavitt's meditation provides a context for reading the scriptural text. Cast in the same style as the Hebrew poetry, his meditation recounts how sorrow and catastrophe have characterized so much of the history of the Jewish people, from their enslavement in Egypt to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. Few translations of this remarkable book of the Bible attempt to reproduce in English, as Slavitt does here, the Hebrew acrostics. In the original, each verse begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequential order; Slavitt elegantly reproduces this effect using the first 22 letters of the English alphabet. More than a structural or mnemonic device, Slavitt argues, the acrostics are "a serious assertion that the language itself is speaking, that the speech is inspired, and that there is, beyond all the disaster and pain the book recounts, an intricacy and an orderly coherence."

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David R. Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac- this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.The title story (complete with footnotes á la The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) braids together the tidy conventions of fiction and the brutal reality of New York as a writing teacher ponders s student's sexually explicit story that may- or may not- be autobiographical. In The Impostor a writer's brother exploits the legerdemain of fiction in a series of ever-bolder impersonations.Several of the stories are presented by emotionally wounded narrators, disillusioned men looking for a hint of grace in a world where expectations are frequently doomed to disappointment. In such a world only one thing is certain we will hurt- and be hurt by- the ones we love. And in the vacuum left when traditions that might have been redemptive have lost their meaning, ""punishment gets to be a habit, a way of life, or at least something to hold onto."" The stories pivot on nuance, on the half-realized insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant gesture that turns round and grows into a medium-to-large awkwardness.""We find what the divorced father futilely awaiting his daughter's visit in Hurricane Charlie calls ""dabblers in distress"": lonely, decent people trying to discover where love- and life- went. In Simple Justice a man striving for some definitive family memory compares the process to archaeology: ""The shards that remain are pathetically small and almost grudging."" Thus through the faltering memory of an elderly cousin in ""conflations"" a man becomes a kind of incarnation of his own father and for a moment finds himself at the ""vanishing point"" where a lost past meets an unknowable future; in The long Island Train a simple anecdote becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the most apparently transparent human intentions. Yet it is often these shard of tradition and memory that seem to hold our only promise of transcendence. The protagonist of Grandfather, for example, through his reluctant participation in his grandson's bris, finds a moment of reconciliation with a past that has broken loose of its moorings.Even the most experimental of these pieces- Instructions, a list of admonitions ranging from the quotidian to the cosmic- shows a deep humanity and a maturity of vision that steers adeptly between humor and despair. These stories will linger in the reader's memory long after the book is closed.

PS3569.L3, David R. Slavitt's sixtieth book, is a collection of poems, translations, imitations, parodies, jeux de mots, and jeux d'esprit, work that ranges from grief-stricken brooding to exuberant clowning around. The odd title, for instance, is nothing more or less than the author's Library of Congress identification, which he adopts now that it has adopted him. Few contemporary poets display his range of sensibility and response to the various occasions of chaotic existence in our time, and Slavitt offers us his reactions to those stresses and cultural shocks that have not so much engaged his attention as ambushed it. He writes poetry that ascends to Pindar and Meleager, or descends some traditional prosodic scale even to the point where it risks gibberish, or basks in it, and he makes no apology for this.

In this volume David R. Slavitt brings together eight poems that deal largely with the mind's relation to history, personal history, and the history of myth and of empires. In addressing these two seemingly independent modes of thinking and remembering, Slavitt reveals that they are in fact closely related, and that they are both part of our poetic consciousness.""Gesualdo"" is a historical poem concerning suffering, desire, and art. In, ""Cleaning,"" a man goes through a closetful of accumulated and forgotten artifacts that lead to a meditative discourse on the process of memory and how our past are collections of such fragments. In ""History of My Ear,"" the silences of the world as ""between a lightning bold and a thunderclap,"" become the places in which we learn to live as we grow older. ""Monster Dance"" considers the odd bedtime rituals we perform for our children.In ""Grove Isle,"" reminiscent of the meditative poems of Wallace Stevens and other poets who stress the primacy of the imagination, Slavitt describes the harmonies and discords between the perceiving eye and nature, between the mind the that world. The setting is a beach resort where the accoutrements of civilisation and the purity of nature clash with and reflect one another.In ""The Wound,"" the spear of Achilles becomes the focal point around which Slavitt turns a discussion of the source, nature, and evolution of human suffering, Achilles and a host of other historical characters become emblematic of our present-day condition and its sense of helplessness, and injustice.""Vlad"" and ""The Gate of Horn"" are tended historical piece that, like ""Gesualdo"" and ""The Wound,"" have as their central thrust the humanization of historical figures and the consequent elevation of human emotions to epic proportions. ""Vlad"" takes its title from the historical figure Vlad the Impaler, who was transformed in the European imagination into the figure of Dracula. Here Slavitt presents strange and beautiful insights into the mind of a creature that sees into both the world of men and the world of raw nature. In ""The Gate of Horn,"" Slavitt considers that romantic and visionary authors of the Golden Age of Spain and their creations.Eight Longer Poems is an engrossing collection from one of our most skilled and versatile poets.

In his newest volume of verse, David R. Slavitt offers some of his finest poetry to date. Equinox is a collection of twenty-five poems on various subjects. They are occasional, the that most of them are the result of specific moments of experience, whether of an art work, as in ""Canaletto's Ruin,"" or a moment of natural beauty, as in ""The Field of Light"":The road, past Worcester and sundown, unwound in hollows' evergreen shadows, velvet billows: the firm earth melted under the wheels. But then, at a turn onto high ground, I entered into a field of light. Light was its crop, a yield of gold that oozed up like the sweat of plums.Throughout the collection, Slavitt explores the tensions between lawful order and murderous chaos, the desire to preserve things against inevitable decline, even the conflict between honest desire and the parody of it, as manifested in ""Refinement"": ""Ours are plenty's penalties, gout, girth, / atherosclerosis, kidney stones, / and ennui..."" And he offers meditations on the relations between generations, as in ""Circus Costumes,"" in which he recalls his grandfather, and ""Letter to a Grandchild.""In the title poem, Slavitt presents a moving and controlled portrayal of the difficulties of coming to terms with death, especially the violent death, of a loved one:A balance shifts, and we can feel the night heavy in the scale, darkness and cold will weigh with us from now on . . .Wise and profound, frequently warm and occasionally bitter, these are the poems of a master craftsman.

This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that indicates the poet has moved into a new and most exciting period.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.