Lyric Harmony

Sista Love was a chart-topping girl group that had it all—fame, fortune and failure. Harmony, Melody, and Lyric haven’t seen each other since their group broke up three years ago, but when tragedy strikes, the sisters have no choice but to face each other again. Harmony retreated from the limelight and lives a modest life in the suburbs with her new husband, an ex–child star and recovering drug addict. Harmony wants nothing more than to be a wife and mother, but when news of her mother’s sudden death forces Harmony and her sisters back together, she will have to confront a painful past that she tried desperately to leave behind. Melody abandoned her sisters for a solo career and is now a wealthy mega-star who tours the world, buys whatever her heart desires, and lives in the spotlight. The world loves her and her fans worship her. She usually stops at nothing to get what she wants. Just as she gets set to kick off her 1 Night Stand Tour, news of her mother’s death derails her plans and forces her to confront the one thing all of her money can’t erase—her sisters and her past. Lyric has been reduced to a D-list celebrity trying to make it back to the top. She lives for the rush of the nightlife and would do anything for attention. When she gets word of her mother’s death, Lyric’s painful past and an unwanted reunion with her sisters send her spiraling out of control. Will the Love sisters let their past hurt, lies, and deceit destroy them, or will they manage to put it all behind them and be a family once and for all?

In this book, Elizabeth S. Dodd traces the contours of a lyric theology through the lens of English lyric tradition. She addresses the dominance of narrative and drama in contemporary theological aesthetics by drawing on recent developments in lyric theory. Informed by the work of critics such as Jonathan Culler, Dodd explores the significance of lyric for theological discourse. Lyric is presented here as a short, musical, expressive and personal form that is also fragmentary, embodied, socially located and performative. The main chapters address key moments in English lyric tradition. This selective approach aims to expand the theological gaze beyond the monochromatic features of the traditional canon. It covers Anglo-Saxon hymns, medieval lullaby carols, early-modern sonnets and the prophetic poetry of Romanticism, but also Grime and hip hop, performance poetry, social media poetry and Geoffrey Hill.

Lyric traces the history of the term from its classical origins through the early modern, Romantic and Victorian periods and up to the twentieth century and demonstrates the influence of various definitions of lyric on poetic practice, literature, music and other popular cultural forms.

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues. The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.

Originally published in 1915, this innovative essay gained the Lord Rector's Prize in Edinburgh University in 1912, and was selected by Mr Wyndham, when Lord Rector of the University in that year. This is a fascinating and highly readable book and will be of great value to anyone with an interest in the writings of Maclean and Renaissance poetry.

In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, twenty-one international scholars discuss the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) from the 5th century BCE to the 12th century CE.