Mark Halliday: Living Name, Gebunden

Klappentext

"Living Name is a collection of essays on American poetry written by an expert practitioner of the art. Noted poet and critic Mark Halliday turns his attention to the work of poets who interest him because they create convincing voices of people dealing with everyday realities. Instead of trying to survey the vast variety of modern poetry, Halliday concentrates on a dozen American poets, ranging from Walt Whitman to contemporary writers such as Claire Bateman, including two essays each on Kenneth Fearing, Tony Hoagland, Kenneth Koch, and Dean Young. Each essay includes thorough close readings of individual poems, reflecting Halliday's commitment to the idea that a poem as a work of art needs to be appreciated as a unified whole. The style of the essays is judicious and meditative but not overly scholarly or academic; they are meant to appeal to readers who are not necessarily professors. A long essay at the beginning, "Poetry and the Rescue of Particulars," incorporates an examination of poems by great British and Irish poets of the past, as it develops a central argument that lyric poetry is fundamentally elegiac, stemming from a basic dissatisfaction with more readily available responses to loss. The impulse to write a poem, Halliday believes, often stems from the notion that representing in poetry a piece of human experience keeps it in the world, as a trace of the vanishing moment is retained and endowed with some form of transcendental lasting reality. Throughout Living Name, Halliday enacts the three commitments that have driven his criticism for many years: to listen for convincing individual voices in poetry; to try often to study whole poems, not merely passages; and to look for intelligent efforts to illuminate truths of human experience"--