A Walk On The Poet S Edge

Inspiration is like a wild horse galloping on a vast deserted island: you never know which way it will go or where it will breed. Inspiration runs free in the minds and the souls of the people it touches. The beauty of the Midwest, the love of a few, and some quiet times to reflect on experiences have opened a door leading to an undiscovered part of myself. For me, this has granted a new perspective on life. The magnitude of these creative insights come as suddenly as a spring thunderstorm and are expressed through poetry. Creativity charged by inspiration, likewise, becomes an unfettered wild animal.

This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.

The Zuni Mountains have over 360,000 acres of pristine wilderness. The volcanic area of the El Malpais National Monument is riddled with great, black lava flows, caves, and lava tubes. The El Morro National Monument has writings from ancient peoples flowing backward into time, early Spanish explorers, and later American explorers near a precious pool of deep water hidden beneath towering cliffs. Throughout Plateaus, mesas. cliffs, canyons, and small mountain peaks is the pygmy forest of pion and juniper trees interspersed with pines and towering Ponderosa pines with their red bark and straight trunks. The continental divide rises and falls as it winds its way north to the great Rocky Mountains. A polygot of peoples, Zuni, Pueblo, Navajo, Spanish, and the various ethnicities of Anglos make the Zuni Mountains home. Not all of the poems in this anthology are about the Zuni Mountains. The poets come from different places and different cultures, but the Zuni Mountains are in all the poems in this volume. Some of the poems capture the beauty of New Mexico sunlight that enlightens the human spirit in a way that sunlight in other places does not. Some are caught up by the mourning, laughter, sadness, comedy, tragedy, and endless stories that arise out of individuals living individual lives. Zuni Mountain country is not always an easy country. The trails through ancient volcanic flows frozen into black stone can challenge the most experienced hiker. You can be walking along a ridge and suddenly become aware that a mountain lion is watching you from a sandstone outcropping above your head. But it is a beautiful, wild place where horses can still find grass in green summer meadows and elk and antelope grace Mother Earth with the fluidity of movement and magnificence of the elks rack of horns. The poetry in this volume arises from the Zuni Mountains, and, as such, is as dynamic, interesting, and beautiful as the country from which it comes.

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

The 13th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Contents: * Each entry provides full career history and publication details * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.

This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.