Poetic Labyrinth

Jeannie E. Roberts' pandemic inspired collection of poems As If Labyrinth is an intentioned meditation of spirit and striving through a time of darkness. "The light surrounds the margins with hope." Reminiscent of Mary Oliver's closeness with the natural world, Roberts writes poetic transmutations through the white pine, rose quartz, oak, soaring eagle- her botanical contemplations bloom in the cosmos. In these chaotic times, these poems are a healing balm, a snowy walk in the muffled woods, a song sparrow's brave crescendo. "Hope repeats/in predictable variations of marvel" and these poems guide us to a "more unified manifestation/where humanity shines as an integrated whole." -Kai Coggin, Author of Periscope Heart, Wingspan, and Incandescent In the dedication for this fine collection, Jeannie E. Roberts quotes Rumi, Love is the bridge between you and everything. In poem after poem, Roberts is on that bridge. Whether honoring the natural world, remembering those she has lost, or thanking front-line workers, Roberts affirms what we must cherish during this pandemic time. Often incorporating scientific knowledge, exhibiting skill with both formal and free verse, these poems move us with powerful images. In the epigraph to "Saving Painted Turtles," Roberts quotes Fred Rogers, Look for the helpers. With these poems, Jeannie E. Roberts is one of them. -Penny Harter, Author of A Prayer the Body Makes; Still-Water Days (Kelsay Books) In these intricate, wide-eyed poems, As If Labyrinth by Jeannie E. Roberts, the poet takes the reader on an odyssey of awakenings and transitions, with a voice that is at once lyrical, wonderous and impacting. She renders intricate cautionary tales of juxtaposed worlds, "Insects are caught midst the gossamer strands." Roberts has a keen sense of the tenuous boundaries in the natural world, and how something like a 'perilous world pandemic' can make us see the essential yearnings of what it is to be human in a chaotic world. This poet's potions are made of bewitching cadences and imagery that prods us to see the beauty and magic in the most ordinary happenings. By turns lyrical and exacting, this voice can make a hymn of air moving in a room, "breezes swayed your cotton dress /in the ancient city." These carefully observed poems reveal the tender ways our bodies exist in the world, and deftly guide us through a garden sanctuary of reckoning. The possibilities of joy and beauty transcend the difficult challenges of our lives at war with a virus. As If Labyrinth is a rich and indelible collection, to be savored and retraced as a healing salve in a precarious world. The poet confirms, "I have faith in signs."-this book is an elegant beam of light in darkness. -Cynthia Atkins, Author of Still-Life With God

This book brings gathered essays (revised and expanded) by Ana Maria Haddad Baptista, published in several books and magazines about Marco Lucchesi's set of works. Marco Lucchesi was born in Rio de Janeiro (RJ), in 1963, and currently presides the Academia Brasileira de Letras (ABL). He occupies the chair number 15. Poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, professor and translator, he is bachelor in History from Universidade Federal Fluminense. He obtained the Master and Doctor degrees in Science of Literature from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and post-doctorate degree in Renaissance Philosophy at the University of Cologne, Germany. He travels, with wisdom, through more than twenty languages. Just to exemplify some of his publications, he is the author of the novels like O bibliotecário do Imperador (The emperor's librarian), O Dom do Crime (The gift of crime) and Adeus, Pirandello (Goodbye,Pirandello). Domínios da insônia (Domains of Insomnia) gather, in large part, his poetic legacy. As a translator, among so many books that we could metion, he translated into Portuguese works by the Italians Primo Levi and Umberto Eco, by the Persian Rûmî, by the Russian Khlebnikov, by the Czech Rainer Maria Rilke, by the Pakistani Mohammed Iqbãl. Full Professor of Comparative Literature at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Doctor Honoris Causa from Tibiscus and Aurel Vlaicu Universities in Romania. He has lectured at several universities around the world. His books have been translated into more than ten languages.

Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

In literature, labyrinths can represent many things: complication and difficulty, interconnectedness, creativity, and even literature itself. This new title discusses the role of the labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Great Expectations, Ulysses, and many others. The Labyrinth unravels this theme for literature students through 19 critical essays.

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist "As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."—Rain Taxi Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate. Excerpts: Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping. Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh. American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us. Ambiguity is the world’s condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a “picture of reality” it is truer than any other. This doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to write poems no one understands. The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses. What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

Early/Incomplete Work of Ace Finlay. Drawing courtesy of Syko. Contains Original Bloodstone Draft& Many More Pieces. Works span from between 2006 and 2014.

Labyrinth: One classic film, fifty-five sonnets retells the cult classic film in the form of Shakespearean sonnets.